Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discuss MicroConf Europe 2014 and Dan and Ian’s DCBKK. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 210.
[00:09] Music
[00:16]Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you‚’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I‚’m Rob.
[00:25]Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:26]Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. So weird this week, Mike, I haven’t seen you in a while.
[00:31]Mike: Welcome back, you know. I feel like there should be fireworks and balloons and kazoos and stuff like that to welcome me back on the show.
[00:37]Rob: What it’s been four or five episodes at least since I’ve been on, and you and I hung out last week at MicroConf Europe but what else has gone on that folks might want to hear about?
[00:45]Mike: There were some interests shown on Twitter about this, but I mentioned that I had let go a couple of developers. It was Friday at the airport, it was like 9 o’ clock at night, I was at the end of my rope and I’d just had it. I was just like, all right. That’s it. Both of these guys are done. And I let go two developers. Somebody had commented a while back and it just kind of rings in my brain that said, nobody ever got fired too soon from a job. Nobody says, oh, you fired them too soon. It’s always, hey, why didn’t you do that sooner?
[01:15]Rob: That’s tough, man.
[01:16]Mike: One of them had been having ongoing issues just keeping his hours up, and I just kind of finally drew a line in the sand. And then the other one had only been brought on about six weeks before but he was brought on to finish off version 2.2 and basically I gave him a three-week time frame. Three weeks stretched into six, and after six I just said, okay. That’s it, we’re done.
[01:38]Rob: So what are you going to do? Are you going to hire more or are you going to step back into engineering?
[01:41]Mike: Well, a little bit of both. I’m probably not going to hire because my other developer was actually out on his honeymoon. I’m really happy with his progress on all the stuff that’s been going on with AuditShark. Had he been there, I wouldn’t have been in such a rush to get rid of these guys, but I was just like, well I’m going to be at MicroConf for another week. These guys are not going to make any meaningful progress over the next week or so, so I may as well just draw the line in the sand and be done with it.
[02:04]This other guy was on his honeymoon for two or three weeks and I couldn’t hand things off to him. So things just kind of sat there for a little bit. He just got back today so hopefully I’ll be able to send things his way and then I’ll be free to do other things. I’m working on some stuff now just because I didn’t know when he was getting back. But once I’ve got a couple other things done, I’ll be handing stuff over to him and hopefully he’ll be tabled to take it from there.
[02:27]Rob: Nice. I’ve spent the last five weeks on the road. I took the family, my two kids and the wife went to Thailand for almost a month. Then I spoke at the end of that at Dan and Ian Tropical NBA, their DCBKK event which was awesome. Then I flew to Prague, wife and family flew home to California. All told, in Thailand I was only involved in one high-speed motorcycle chase with the police, ending with them searching me for drugs, which they found none. And we only had one trip to the hospital for stitches in the four year old’s finger. But other than that just your standard run of the mill vacation.
[03:05]Mike: The high-speed chase that you’ve alluded to, you downplay that very well.
[03:10]Rob: Being on the road makes you appreciate high-speed internet and having access to a washer and dryer. Especially when there’s four of us and we have three changes of clothes each, so we all fit in a single backpack. But that was really the only things that I missed.
[03:24]The real kicker was this high-speed internet and not being able to predict how fast it would be at the next place. You have no idea how much you rely on this, like we rely on it for our TV, for our movies, for my podcasts. I had a tough time keeping up with the podcast because sometimes I’d go to download and it would take hours to download all the episodes. It’s good to be back in a place where that’s more reliable and definitely if I was going to stay somewhere longer, like once I got to Prague I was in an Airbnb for several days, and the internet there was fast. So it’s not a matter of being in the US or not, it’s a matter of being in hotels or not. The high-speed internet is critical.
[04:00]So the good news for me is Drip had its best single month of growth ever while I was gone, which is encouraging me to take more vacations internationally. Obviously the seeds of that growth were sown in the months prior to the travel, not actually while I was away. I can see the trial funnel and how it all plays out, so I know it was basically the 30 to 60 days prior to leaving. But it does make a nice punch line. People in Prague were asking how Drip was doing and I was able to say, it’s actually been doing really well while I’m on the road. It’s nice to be able to say that, it makes vacation a lot more enjoyable for me because if things are tanking and they’re going sideways and I’m on vacation, I stress about it the whole time. I keep thinking about how can I turn this around and what do I need to do? But if they’re doing well, I can be freed up mentally like, ah. I just want to do more of the same.
[04:46]When I get back I’m really amped up to work and continue to drive trials which is essentially what I did when my family left and went back to California. I had four days in Thailand at the end and I basically went to co-working space in Bangkok, just worked long hours, probably 12 to 14 hour days and it was really worth it. I got a ton done; I was super fired up because I had been off for so long. You get reinvigorated when you step away from work that long. You get new ideas; you just kind of want to get back to it after a certain point. That’s how I felt.
[05:20]Mike: I felt the same way just coming back from MicroConf because I had put in all this time on AuditShark before I left and then for several days I didn’t get any work done at all on it. Of course I come back and suddenly I’m ready to get a lot of work done and I’ve been very, very productive over the last several days. I think part of that is also being able to catch up on my sleep.
[05:39]Rob: Yeah, it’s always tough. And you’re hanging out till 1 or 2 in the morning with everybody.
[05:44]Mike: Yep.
[05:45]Rob: Yeah. What’s up with you on AuditShark?
[05:47]Mike: I’m looking at different ways I can scale up the sales side of AuditShark and decrease the length of the sales cycle. Those are two things that I’m kind of fighting with right now. One is the length of the sales cycle and the other one is just generating enough leads that I can talk to on a regular basis. I feel like Pipedrive is filling up with a bunch of different leads that are in there but keeping track of them and keeping on top of everything and also trying to fill the funnel with people as other ones are falling out – I guess I’ll say the broader picture is that if I’m putting 100 people a day into the sales funnel to try and follow up on – whether I’m actually contacting them or not is kind of a different story. But if I’m hitting them on day one, and I go to a second batch of people on day two, day three, day four, etc.
[06:34]By the end of the week I’ve got 500 people kind of in queue. Some of them are just going to not be a fit, so they fall out very quickly. But there are other ones where you’ve tried to reach them and they stay in your funnel because you haven’t gotten a no yet. So they stay there and you have to come back to them later on. That’s actually pretty challenging to make sure that you’re staying on top of all of them. I don’t feel like I have a great system for that. Somebody suggested just using a spreadsheet.
[07:00]Rob: Sometimes that‚’s the best solution. The 100 a day sounds like a pretty high volume though, that would be tough to manage in software. That’s a lot of leads or suspects or whatever you want to call them coming through.
[07:11]Mike: Suspects‚ I like that word.
[07:12]Rob: Yeah, I read that in a sales book.
[07:14]Mike: Victims, maybe.
[07:15]Rob: Similarly, I’m also wrapping stuff up. I’m basically formulating two game plans for Drip for the next seventy days. That basically takes me through mid-January. Because the next two months, there’s more holiday time, things are starting to wind down. I know I can still drive trials and grow a little bit but it’s not going to be at the levels that it has been. So I know these next two months are going to need a nice roadmap and it’s going to be doing some stuff internally, I think. I’m working on a product roadmap and marketing calendar. The product roadmap is basically what features are we going to build? What are the next steps, after coming back from MicroConf Europe?
[07:52]I have some ideas after talking to a bunch of people about what they’re looking for. I’ve got a good sense of where I want to take Drip next. Then in terms of a marketing calendar, I just want to know what’s going on every week. I’m really going to be buckling down on marketing because things are ready to – things have already started to scale up with Drip and I’m ready to hit it even harder.
[08:13]Mike: Cool. This week we’re going to be talking about what happened at MicroConf Europe. We kicked off the conference with Rachel Andrew, why don’t you talk about that a little bit.
[08:20]Rob: Yeah, we’re just going to touch on a couple of the talks that we got the biggest takeaways from. Really we only have time to go through a couple of the speakers and Rachel Andrew, she really set the tone for the conference. That was the goal, right? Typically your kick off speaker, you’re hoping that they’re doing something that’s interesting enough that people are going to be really engaged. That kind of sets the tone.
[08:40]If you’re interested in more details about the speaker talks, as usual we have a recap site, it’s called MicroConfEuropeRecap.com, and we’ll look it up in the show notes. Christoph Engelhardt was so kind as to take very detailed notes and he‚’s aggregated slides and all types of stuff. We don’t have videos of the talks, but that’s the next best thing.
[08:59]One thing I like about Rachel Andrew is she runs CMS, it’s called Perch, and she runs it with her husband. They don’t have any employees. It’s downloadable self-hosted web based CMS. So it’s really the traditional Micro ISV, micropreneur approach with no employees and it’s even downloadable software. So she has some really good experience, she’s an experienced speaker and she has a lot of takeaways that she lent to the crowd. One of my favorites is her quote, “The missing features at launch don‚’t matter to anyone but you.”
[09:33]While I don’t fully agree with that, because when I’ve launched specifically Drip, we had missing features, and it mattered to everybody. But I think that depending on your product and depending on your competition, what features they have, this can go one way or the other. But I do like the sentiment of this because it reminds you that you are always going to be bothered by the stuff your product lacks. But that you need to ship it before you get to that comfort zone or else you’ll never ship it.
[10:02]Mike: I think that when she was referring to that, she really meant that the things you feel are important, your customers don’t necessarily value as much. As long as you’re meeting the core requirements of whatever it is that they need, that’s the important piece. That’s why they’re buying it. It’s not as though you need to go out of your way to include everything in, the kitchen sink. The set-up core requirements that your customers have, that’s what they‚’re paying for. All the other things you think are necessary, they think are nice to haves but are not critical for them to buy it. I think that was a very fresh approach to that sort of thing. In some ways it’s kind of a minimum viable product sort of thing, but it was a nice breath of fresh air to hear it put that way.
[10:42]Rob: Another thing she said was that the happy majority of your customers will be silent. This is something that I have definitely noticed with products that I own, but I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. She basically said that a lot of features that you’ll hear requested over and over are really just being requested by three or four people who are kind of your loud minority. A lot of your happy customers, you’ll never hear from them. This is definitely helpful for folks who are just launching a product to give them some perspective on what to expect as you’re starting to deal with customers.
[11:20]Mike: The phrase I’ve always heard is “the squeaky wheels”. The people who complain a lot, there are going to be a few of them, and they’re going to complain a lot about certain things but unless you hear a lot of people complaining about the same things, you have to pay them a little less attention. You can certainly go down the road of implementing things that, one, people don’t use or don’t need or, two, are actually going to hurt your product rather than help it and make people a little confused about what your product does.
[11:46]Rob: Yeah, and you use the word complain. I don’t know that I would use the word complain as much as give feedback. Sometimes, the more irritating customers, they are complaining and they’re kind of a pain in the ass but a lot of the customers who are in the un-silent minority are the people who I think genuinely want the product to be better. I think the majority of those folks, while they may email you feature requests three times a week, I wouldn’t consider that a bad thing. I know it’s hard to deal with the onslaught of oncoming feature requests – of all people right now, I know this. I think I’ve received literally multiple feature requests per day for Drip. So it’s trying to get back to everybody and handle it well is a challenge but I think I’m pretty thankful in general for even the people who send us one or two per week. If they’re cool with realizing that we’re not going to build all of them, I think that’s where you’d end at the sticking point, right? Because if someone requests something and they’re nice about it and you can‚’t build it, sometimes that has to get done. Certain people are willing to accept that, certain people will get really indignant about it and they’ll say things like, well, you would get so many more customers if you had this. That’s pretty few and far between though.
[12:54]Mike: One of the things that she had mentioned in her talk was that the things you’re customers tell you that they’d love should be in your headlines. I thought that was not just an interesting take on it but a fascinating way to resonate with your audience. Because your audience is clearly going to think about your product differently than you are. In some ways it reminded me of other techniques I’ve heard from people going to Amazon.com reviews and pulling snippets of what people are saying about other products or about similar products and using that to help do SEO or to identify keywords that people are using to describe that type of product. It was just a very interesting way of taking your customers’ words and using them to your advantage on your website and in your SEO to help resonate with the rest of the user base that has already obviously bought into whatever you’re selling.
[13:40]Rob: Right. I love this one. I’m such a proponent of learning the way that your customers and potential customers are talking and thinking about your product, entering the conversation that’s already going on in they’re head. Most of the time when I sit down to write marketing or sales copy I will try to go and actually read emails or testimonials or somehow read something from my customers to start getting me in the mindset of how I should be talking about it. I think this is a really good tip.
[14:08]Another thing Rachel said was that you can learn a lot from the misuse of your features. So basically, you’ll launch a feature and you think everyone’s going to use it a certain way and then she gave an example of how some of her customers misused it. But what that really means is that they have another need, I’ve definitely seen this. At first, you think, ah, people are screwing things up! Right, they’re not using this correctly. But if you look at it from this other perspective it can actually lead to making your product better.
[14:34]Mike: I think a nice reminder that she threw out there for everyone was that your product is never done. Even if you’ve implemented a ton of things that were in line with your vision, there are always new requests that are going to come up, there’s always new ways to use your product. If your customers are coming up with new ways of using your product in their environment for new processes or new procedures as part of their daily workflows, you have to look at those and say, okay. Can I rework the product? Or can I reposition it in terms of the marketing to make it appeal to those types of people in a slightly different ways? The work’s never done. There’s never going to come a time where you can just sit back and say, oh, the work on this is completely done.
[15:14]Rob: Another popular speaker, who actually went last, was Lars Lofgren. He‚s in charge of Growth for KISSmetrics. He does a lot of work with their content marketing team; he runs a lot of split tests for them. He did an excellent session of teardowns at MicroConf Europe. His talk was titled “Unlocking the Four Gateways of Growth”. I really enjoyed this talk. My guess is it will be one of the top-rated talks.
[15:39]He had a great overview of depending on the phase that your product is in, what metrics to look at, how to build a better product, how to ask if it can grow, how to build a simple business model – he kind of went through the four phases, really good stuff. One of the first things he talked about was when choosing metrics – he said you have to have metrics that you’re measuring to figure out where you are and where you need to go, what you need to improve. He said when choosing metrics, always ask what is the biggest constraint right now.
[16:06]I feel like this is a really succinct way of basically saying, when you are early on in your product you just need data. Right? You either need one-on-one customer interviews when doing customer development, or if you want to split test market and copy you need traffic. You need some data to say which one’s going to perform better. Then when you get further on, maybe you’re starting to scale up, you don’t necessarily need as much data any more now. You need a lot of people coming and you need to optimize your funnel. I guess in a way, you do need data, but you just need that data further and further down the line of your funnel as it gets better. I really like this whole concept of thinking about what is the biggest constraint right now for your product growing? Figuring out how to measure that and then focusing on that for kind of a three month sprint.
[16:51]Mike: I think one of the things that does for you is that if you’re trying to fix all these different things all at once, it can be hard to fix any of them effectively. If you focus on the one biggest problem you have, and say you’re having problems getting people to click through and actually sign up for a trial. That’s your biggest problem at this point. Then by focusing on that and alleviating that headache as much as you possibly can, then you’ve essentially freed up people to move through the rest of the funnel.
[17:19]Then you get to see what’s going on. You don’t necessarily know whether or not there are other problems that are right after that or are six, seven, eight steps down the road. By focusing on that one biggest problem, you’re always focused on getting those people through the sales cycle. It trickles down.
[17:36]Rob: I also like that this makes you think about, depending on your stage, you need to look at different metrics. Because we’ve gotten questions in the past where someone says, well, I only get 100 unique visitors per month to my website, how can I run split tests? The answer is, you can’t. Because that’s not your biggest constraint right now, right? You need to choose a metric that is actually helpful. It’s more than likely that you need to actually go talk individually to customers and decide on what you need to build.
[18:01]But maybe your biggest constraint, if you only have 100 uniques per month is traffic. Then you can start trying to increase uniques and improve that. I’d recommend definitely checking Lars’ slides out up there on Christoph’s hub.
[18:15]Another thing I liked that Lars talked about is he had this section called Can You Grow? The takeaway I took from that is he said, pick one growth channel, one marketing channel, and focus on it for a three month sprint. Put everything you have into it and try to make it work. This is something that I have done many, many times. I’ve never systematized it like he was talking about, basically making it a sprint and making it official and documenting stuff.
[18:40]Mike: One thing I like that Lars talked about was whether or not you had a stable business model. I think that’s one of the things kind of neglected by most people because they’re so focused on trying to figure out, what should I charge? Not saying that what you should charge doesn’t factor into it, but they’re focused on all the details of trying to get people to pay for it and not necessarily focused on the big picture.
[19:02]He talked about a couple of different pricing models. One of them was for SaaS, and he basically said that for SaaS, you want a lifetime value of the customer to be essentially at least three times your cost of acquisition. You want to be able to recover that acquisition cost within twelve months. If you’re able to do that, you can establish a solid growth engine for that product and if your churn is above 2% then that’s something else you need to work on is to help drive that churn down below 2%. Obviously you get that by talking to customers, but I think that figuring out what your cost of acquisition is and measuring it against your lifetime value is really important. The one difficult thing is trying to figure out what your lifetime value is when you don’t have enough data to figure that out.
[19:46]I was talking to Jana, who runs HappyBootsTrapper.com, but she has a product called FirstOfficer.io and we were talking about how do you measure lifetime value of customers. Especially when you have people who are paying you on a monthly basis, versus others who are paying you on a yearly basis, and of course the question comes up – those people who are paying you on an annual basis, they only have one real opportunity to cancel. They’re given that opportunity to renew every year but that’s when they think about whether they want to renew this. Versus the people who are getting a bill every single month, where they look at it and say, well, do I want to keep paying this or do I want to cancel?
[20:19]There’s obviously difference between your lifetime value for the people who are paying you on an annual basis versus those paying you on a monthly basis. You can’t just arbitrarily aggregate them together, that’s not sound mathematics. We had a pretty extensive conversation about that. It’s just interesting how different people look at that particular problem.
[20:39]Rob: Right. I think it’s like trying to find the standard. The standard I’ve seen is that if someone does not have the option to cancel that month, then they should not be included in the churn calculation. You can break up into annual and monthly churn, or you can say on the month that they’re able to cancel, did they churn?
[20:53]To be honest, man, it’s really hard to get below a churn of 2%. It’s pretty rare that happens, but that’s what the really big companies when they really start to scale up, that’s what they have to hit. So I like that Lars brought that up and brought some real numbers. These are numbers that I have either found myself or have researched and always keep in my notebook; they’re my rules of thumb for things. It was nice to see them up there on the screen for everybody to see and kind of benchmark their own apps from that.
[21:25]So as I said, we had nine speakers at MicroConf Europe, we can’t talk about all their stuff. But I’d recommend you check out MicroConfEuropeRecap.com if you want to see some of the other talks about hiring a designer as a founder, how to build an app that you can sell, optimizing SaaS apps. There’s a lot of really good info there.
[21:24]I really wanted to talk, just for a few minutes, about Dan and Ian’s DCBKK event. DC is their membership website, their membership community called Dynamite Circle. BKK is the airport code for Bangkok, so it’s an annual conference that they host for digital nomads. I really consider the Tropical NBA as kind of a sister podcast of ours. To be honest, they have a lot of overlap, their audience and the folks who attended may have the most overlap with MicroConf attendees in terms of their interests and the conference in terms of its audience, size, and format. It was really cool to get an inside look at how another conference for similar audience and a similar size was run.
[22:25]The fun part was that a lot of the attendees listen to our podcast and it was really fun to touch base with them since we typically wouldn’t cross paths with them. They’re digital nomads, they’re traveling in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. It was fun when I first got up to speak and they did a show of hands of who listens to our show. It kind of felt like it was a hometown crowd.
[22:44]Mike: Really? What was the rough percentage?
[22:46]Rob: I think it was maybe 40%, 50%? It was a good chunk. That’s my memory. Someone can correct me in the comments if I’m wrong. I just remember thinking, wow, a lot of people have heard of what I’ve been up to or heard of the podcast. It was nice and I kicked off the conference and it was fun to do that.
[23:04]One thing I did in my talk was, I’ve talked about this stair step approach a bunch of times on the podcast but I’ve never really fleshed that out. I really fleshed it out and dove into what I think the specifics are on how to stair step your way up to recurring revenue. Meaning, starting with a smaller product that’s typically a one-time sale and has a single marketing channel and then stepping up to multiple of those until you can buy out your own time. You own all of your time, then stepping up to recurring revenue. That really resonated with the DCBKK crowd, it was cool. I overheard several conversations later referencing it and saying, yeah, my app is a step one business right now, I’m hoping to get to step two. That’s a really good feeling for a speaker to hear a concept that you’ve outlined be used by attendees so quickly.
[23:50]Mike: That’s awesome.
[23:52]Rob: I also talked about it again at MicroConf Europe about a week later, so that’s again in our recap if you want to hear more details about it.
[24:00]I think the last point I’ll touch on, the event was very well run and I was impressed with it. A lot of conferences I go to, now that we’ve run a conference, when I attend conferences I’m pretty picky about it. I can tell when people are screwing up. If you go to a venue after the conference and the music’s too loud, I’m thinking to myself, real key mistake, man! We‚’re not here to club, we’re here to hang out and talk. We learned that the first year when the music was too loud at one of our venues. I was impressed, you could tell Dan and Ian had run it before.
[24:31]As usual, the hallway track is one of my favorite parts. Breakfasts and dinners were probably my highlights. Actually, in the Tropical NBA episode 268, it’s titled ‚”Getting More Out of Conferences, breakfast is a big deal”. They talk a little bit about this. But one thing I did this year at both of these conferences, DCBKK and MicroConf Europe, was I was really intentional about seeking out certain people I wanted to connect with. I made sure that we had some one-on-one time. Typically I will see people, like Derek Sivers was at DCBBK, or Nathan Barry was at MicroConf Europe, and I would see them in passing and I might catch up with them at a group event. But I’ve realized that the time is not – it’s tough to have an in depth conversation at a group event like that because you just wind up, especially as the organizer and speaker, you get mobbed.
[25:20]There are a lot of people who want to talk to you, and that’s okay. But I realize that you kind of have to have one-on-one time to do it. So I think that if you are attending conferences, that perhaps my number one recommendation, aside from being prepared to ask interesting questions and not just make small talk, my other recommendation is to look out for people who you really want to connect with. Make sure that you are able to find some one-on-one time with them, hopefully over a meal where you can really catch up and deepen those relationships. Because in my opinion, that’s really what attending these events is about.
[25:53]Mike: Yeah, that comes down to scoping out who else is going to be there. Then schedule in that time, either before you get there or while you’re there. If you haven’t had a chance to connect with them before the event, definitely make sure that you get on their radar and say, hey, I’d really like to sit down and talk to you for a while. This is what I want to talk about. Maybe you don’t have a set agenda that you tell them about, but just get on their radar so they know you’re trying to make time for them so hopefully they’ll reciprocate and make time for you as well.
[26:20]Rob: So thanks for Dan and Ian for inviting me to speak and congratulations to them for running a top notch event. So Mike, we’ve run six conferences now, four in Vegas and two in Europe. You feel like we’re getting a little better at it?
[26:32]Mike: A little bit. You know, it’s interesting going back and forth between Europe and Vegas. There’s certain things that I think we took for granted the first couple years at MicroConf and Vegas because we went over to Europe, the crowd over there is different. Then we changed some things over there that I don’t think we initially realized in the beginning helped to make us successful here in the US. The biggest one for example that I saw in the US, we chose to do it on Monday and Tuesday primarily for cost reasons and we never changed that. We never experimented with it, and first thing we did when we went to Europe is had it on a weekend. It’s interesting that actually might have torpedoed things for us if we had done that in the US.
[27:16]Rob: Yeah, the quality of the attendee overall tends to be less on average because it’s more people who don’t have to take off work and they’re able to come. You’ll wind up with a lot more beginners, I guess is what I’m trying to say. A lot more people who are just thinking about doing things, but if you do it during the week, you tend to have more people really serious about it. If they not only have to pay for a ticket and pay to fly, but they have to take time off work, then they’re probably pretty committed to this idea.
[27:44]Mike: Yeah, so that was one of the things I noticed up front. It’s interesting to see different perspectives from around the world about what sorts of things people have to deal with and obviously there’s this core set of problems everyone has. But it’s interesting to see that people in different countries deal with them in different ways, there’s certain laws that affect some people and don’t with other people. It’s a very mixed bag with the periphery problems that people have to deal with.
[28:11]Rob: Right.
[28:12]Mike: If you have a question for us, you can call into our voicemail number at 1(888)801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We‚’re Out of Control by Moot , used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups, and visit StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
As an attendee at MicroConf EU I wanted to say that for me it was a game changer. Rob’s stair step approach has opened my eyes and I now have a definite path I am following. On top of that, some fellow attendees and I have started a MasterMind group and its keeping me moving in the right direction. Am feeling confident that I will have a good story to tell at Microconf EU 2015.
Given you were in the EU, do you guys have any advice for people on the new EU VAT/sales tax rules coming into force on the 1st of January?
This changes the ‘location of sale’ from the business’s country to the buyer’s. It only applies to B2C sales, but it applies to sales coming from outside the EU too – so EU countries are going to expect US sellers to sign up for VAT in the EU, or face various fines and penalties.
http://wordsthatchangetheworld.com/2014/eudigitalvat/ has a good summary. This change isn’t all that well known/understood even in the UK, so I imagine that people in the US/elsewhere have no idea of the potential risks about to happen to them.