recap

Show Notes

In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and Benedikt Deicke give a recap of MicroConf Europe 2017. They go through the speakers and give you their key takeaways and highlights.

Items mentioned in this episode:

• FemtoConf
• SaaS Guidebook
• Stagecms.com
• Benedikt’s Twitter
• Hidden
• FE International
• Trustshoring
• Balsamiq
• Podcast Motor
• GrowthHackers
• MOO

Transcript

Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, we’re going to be talking about MicroConf Europe. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us Episode 367.

Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.

Benedikt: And I’m Benedikt.

Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Benedikt?

Benedikt: I’m good. We had a nice time at MicroConf Europe in Lisbon. Weather was definitely nicer than it is back home in Germany so I really enjoyed myself.

Mike: Awesome.

Benedikt: What about you?

Mike: I almost missed my flight home. Actually, I almost missed my flight to MicroConf just because I was running late and I ended up parking in the wrong parking garage, I thought I was going to the international terminal. For whatever reason, the flight to Lisbon didn’t fly out of the international terminal. I don’t know why but it’s just a weird thing that they did with it.

And because of the terminal that I was at, I think it was Terminal C in Boston, there’s no direct way to get to that terminal. You basically just have to walk completely across the parking garage and through the middle of it, and then there’s a place where really it’s only designed for cars to go so I had to walk through that. It was kind of a nightmare getting there. And of course, as I said—

Benedikt: It sounds like it.

Mike: Then I almost missed my flight home. They cancelled my ticket like five minutes before I got to the desk for whatever reason. They had to rebook it and I had to run through the entire airport. Long story short, I’m glad that I actually got home.

Benedikt: You got your fresh air of exercising this week?

Mike: I did. I could probably log that as a short run. They tell you how long it takes to get from one area of the airport to the other. It’s like 12-18 minutes or something like that. I ran the entire way.

Benedikt: That definitely counts as exercise.

Mike: Welcome to the show. You’re on this week in place of Rob because our schedules got all messed up and typically, Rob is on to do this with me for the recap but his travel schedule just got messed up. Maybe we’re just too optimistic for this. We thought we’d be able to get a recording and it turned out we can’t. I wanted to have you on because you were at MicroConf. You’ve been to MicroConf several times in the past. I think it’d be good to get your perspective about this MicroConf in relation to some of the previous ones and just kind of walk through some of the different takeaways of the speakers.

Benedikt: Sure. Let’s get to it.

Mike: To give people a background actually about you a little bit first, you’re the co-founder of FemtoConf and you also have a SaaS Guidebook that you’re working on which teaches people how to build a SaaS which you can find at saasguidebook.com. I think a lot of that is based on your experience building Stage CMS. Is that correct?

Benedikt: True. That’s totally true, and also working with freelancing clients. That’s basically a topic that comes up more than once.

Mike: What else do you have going on these days?

Benedikt: The main thing right now is basically FemtoConf, the conference I’m running together with Christoph Engelhardt, who’s famous for doing MicroConf Europe recaps. Unfortunately, he wasn’t at the conference this year because he got a [00:03:15]. Shout out to him.

Mike: Congratulations, Christoph.

Benedikt: We’re basically doing a smaller version of MicroConf, hence the name, in March. We’re currently in the midst of organizing that. Tickets are on sale.

Mike: There’s only a handful of tickets left, right?

Benedikt: Yeah. That’s basically five or six tickets plus sponsorship tickets. If you don’t get a regular ticket, maybe consider getting a sponsorship ticket. We really appreciate that. That’s my main focus at the moment.

Mike: Awesome. When is that?

Benedikt: First weekend of March. I think it’s March 2-4. It’s in Darmstadt, Germany, very close to Frankfurt airport. There’s actually a bus going there, 30-minute bus ride and you’re right in front of the hotel.

Mike: Cool. I’ll be speaking there. Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently will be there as well. Then you’ll also have Claire Suellentrop. Who’s the last speaker?

Benedikt: Aleth Gueguen was an attendee last year. She offered to talk about the new privacy law coming up in Europe. I’m both interested and kind of scared about that one. But I’m expecting it to be a great conference.

Mike: Awesome. Let’s talk right in and give people a recap and talk about some of the different takeaways from the different speakers. The first one was Craig Hewitt. He kicked us off. Craig is from Podcast Motor. He talked about the four biggest risks to launching a SaaS application and how to overcome each one.

What I really liked about his talk was at the end, he gave this SaaS risk checklist which basically listed off a bunch of different risk areas where a SaaS or even honestly, like a product in general, might run into. Things like the product market fit, product quality, the team itself, risks associated with making sales, market size, capitalization, and then competition and the business model itself.

I really liked the way he created that story arc where he presented it like these are the risks associated with building a SaaS and then he extrapolated that and gave people a broader sense, like these are all the risks that you are going to run into when running your product or building up your business and they may impact you in different ways based on the decisions that you make.

Benedikt: That was a really interesting talk. I always like Craig’s style of giving talks where he basically has stories and then pulls out lessons learned from that. That’s always quite good.

Mike: He’s in the middle of building out their own SaaS product called Castos which is for podcasters. He’s in the middle of identifying some of these risks and trying to overcome them. It just made a lot of sense for him to talk directly to the audience about that just because as I said, one, he’s in the middle of it, and two, it’s always nice to start off the conference with a story that’s relatable, one that resonates with most people and it gives them kind of a basic understanding of what’s going on in other people’s businesses and be able to relate that back to them.

Honestly, the whole atmosphere of the conference is typically defined by that first talk. I think Craig did a really, really great job with setting the tone for the rest of the conference.

Benedikt: Definitely. I totally agree. Next up was Paul Kenny and he talked about sales tactics for small businesses. His main thing was basically telling everyone to record their sales calls and then afterwards listening to them because when you listen to your own call, you identify parts of your conversation with a potential customer where your future’s hazy or it sounds wrong, then you could basically take down notes and improve on that.

That was his main point. But he also gave a great basic structure on how to do sales calls. That was a five-step process starting with the preparation even before the call, so taking down notes of who you are going to talk to, what businesses they are in, what potential problems they might have, stuff like that.

When you actually call them, he tells you that you should present your credentials, tell your customer or your potential customer who you are, what company you’re calling from, so they get a basic idea. Next, show them that you actually came prepared and why they should talk to you. Also, send them a benefit of what’s in there for them when they actually continue the call with you.

When they agree to continue the conversation, make sure you profile them. Do a lot of open-ended questions, learn a lot about them, what their actual problems are, what different solutions they might be looking at.

One thing I really like was get an idea about their personality, how they would approach buying something and then adjust your strategy of selling to them so that if they’re really careful and have a lot of objections, make sure you basically tackle all of them and give them a feeling of security. You adapt to their style of buying.

After that, when you actually build your case of why your product is the thing they should be buying, use whatever you learned in that first few minutes of talking to them and asking questions to personalize what you’re telling them about your product to their specific use cases and problems so they actually see it. Basically, you have the solution in their mind of what will it be like using your product.

Of course the last thing he really wanted to make a point about is inspiring action. You shouldn’t end your call saying, “Did you like that? Okay, cool. Talk to you some time.” But actually, ask for a sale, ask for a demo or some sort of next action, whatever may apply in the specific sales call you’re doing.

Mike: I think one of the things I noticed was there was kind of a general undertone in his talk that really, what you’re trying to do as a salesperson, we really don’t have very many sales people talk at MicroConf but I think Paul does a really good job at teaching and education people about how to do sales, especially entrepreneurs. The underlying theme there was really to treat the people on the other end of the call like they’re a real person. Just interact with them, show that you actually care about who they are. He pointed out that if you are faking it, it’s very obvious to the other side.

You may not think so, but it is very clear when somebody is just faking interest in the stuff that you’re discussing whether it’s about your kids or a sports game or something along those lines. You have to treat them like a human being. People respond in kind to that sort of thing.

Benedikt: I think you managed that as a side note to basically not think about the call as a sales call but as a call to help the people or the potential customer with the problems they’re having. I think that helps setting your mindset or bringing your mindset into the right direction.

Mike: I think one of the reasons why Paul resonates so well with the audience was just because he’s not, I’ll say, the prototypical salesperson that you would expect. He’s actually a sales coach. He coaches people on how to be better at sales. He spends a lot of time listening to calls and identifying structure of conversations and providing guidance and education to people about how they can do sales better.

I really like the point that he made which is you don’t have to be that extreme extrovert in order to be good at sales. Everybody across the entire spectrum can be good at sales, it’s just a matter of intentional self-improvement. Part of that is going back to your sales calls and listening to them and making sure that you’re looking for places where you can improve. If you’re not doing that, then you’re probably not getting any better at it over time.

Next up, we have Dave Collins. Dave has spoken at a couple of MicroConfs in the past. I think he’s been to eight or nine and he spoke at probably six or seven of them. He talked about how Google is smart in certain ways but extremely dumb in others. It really comes down to the search engine itself and the fact that the vast majority of what they are searching on is based on text. As you start drilling down into longer tail keywords, the text that you need to provide to Google in order to give them better context of what it is that you’re talking about, you need to get better and better at it and kind of walk through some of the different steps that you can take inside the Google search console and how to do some keyword search and how to use different tools to check some of those keywords.

It was a fascinating look at the technical core of what makes Google operate and how it makes some of the decisions that it makes when it’s crawling your website and giving you different rankings. The one thing that I really took away from his talk though was that when you’re building content for your website, you should be making it for people and not for the spiders.

Most people know about SEO in terms of looking at the keyword analysis and keyword stuffing kind of comes to mind which is when you have a keyword that you’re trying to get a page to rank for and you put that keyword into the page a lot in order to get Google to notice that keyword. Humans recognize that and the Google spiders are a little bit dumb when it comes to that but because the human factors there, if somebody comes into your website and they see too much of that, they’re going to say, “Oh, this isn’t for me,” and then they’ll leave and then they’ll go to the next result, and then Google notices that. It’s just fascinating to look at the underlying implementation of how Google does their search engine.

Benedikt: Another thing I really like about his talk was that SEO doesn’t necessarily need fancy tools. What I really liked was this example he had where you basically put in whatever keyword you’re optimizing for and then scroll down on the search results and look at what Google says as suggestions like people also search for this and this. Use that as a resource to find keywords you can optimize for. That was really helpful.

Mike: Our next speaker was Jane Austin. Jane’s the head of design and UX at MOO, moo.com. If you’ve ever ordered business cards, you’ve probably seen them at some of the different entrepreneurial meetups or conferences that you’ve gone to. She runs that design group over at moo.com. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what her talk was?

Benedikt: Her talk was basically about design thinking in large organizations. I feel like I wasn’t really able to apply all of what she told to my business because I’m just me and maybe a freelancer.

I really like two things about her talk. One was the way they structure their teams. They call it quad-style teams or something like that, basically forming them with product guy who’s doing the productization, shaping the product, and an experienced designer responsible for validating the needs and the value propositions and also doing the actual design work. Then someone from technology who’s actually implementing this stuff and creating a sustainable and scalable product.

Then they had an HR Delivery coach that basically takes care of the team and facilitates the delivery and keeps them happy. That was one thing I really liked, especially when I did consulting, that’s usually a good formula to build a great team that actually is able to deliver in a fast pace.

The other thing I really liked was what she called the 2 ½ Diamond approach. Apparently, the Double Diamond approach is a thing from design thinking. I didn’t really know. But it’s basically a three-step process. First, you are doing ethnographic research. It sounds a little bit similar to what Amy Hoy’s doing with Sales Safari where you basically don’t want to ask questions to your potential customer but just observe them in their natural environment and then figure all the problems they might have.

Then it’s following up to that. You basically start collecting problems that might be worth solving like building up a huge list of things you could possibly do. After you collected those, you basically curate them and define them and narrow down until you settle on one solution you actually want to build. That’s what she calls the Build the Right Thing phase.

After that, after you settled on one thing you want to build, test the Build the Right Thing phase, where you basically start exploring different ways to actually implement whatever you’re doing like doing prototypes and stuff. Once you have a huge list of ways to go, again narrow down on the one thing you want to do and how you want to do it and then as soon as you’re able to ship something small and then build up from there in small increments.

That was the two things I really liked, especially the 2 ½ Diamond approach. I think that’s really also applicable if you’re not like MOO. I think her example was from The Telegraph where she worked on mobile applications, stuff like that. I think that really applies to a small company and some bootstrappers as well.

Mike: I totally agree. If you’re not familiar with the Double Diamond approach, there’s essentially four phases of it but it can really be boiled down into two main stages. The first diamond is really stage one which is making sure that you’re doing the right thing. You discover and define what it is that you’re trying to do.

Stage two is making sure you’re doing things the right way. You’re developing and delivering whatever the solution is. And then the extra half that she had tacked onto it was shipping things in small increments to make sure that you’re closing up that feedback loop so you’re not spending three months, six months on something only to find out that you really weren’t doing the right thing. You may have thought you were, but you’re not.

Getting that external feedback coming into the process sooner rather than later, it makes things move faster and it guides you in the right direction quicker because then you don’t have as many deviations that you need to correct.

Benedikt: Next stop was your talk.

Mike: Yes. My talk was pretty close to what my starter edition talk was in MicroConf Vegas in the spring but I did change things up a little bit just because I knew that the audience was going to be a little bit different. But really, it boiled down to making sure that you are analyzing the data that you’re getting and asking the right questions to make sure that you’re not going in the wrong direction. Questioning the data sources; the thing that I had mentioned several times during the course of my talk was how do you know that you know what you know?

That just is a fancy way of saying how can you be sure that the information that you have is accurate and that you’re going to be basing your future decisions off of that? If it’s wrong, you could be making the wrong decision because you didn’t fully analyze that information to make sure that it’s correct to begin with. If you have faulty assumptions, you’re going to make decisions because of those faulty assumptions.

I also talked quite a bit about the growth of Bluetick and walked through exactly how I went through the validation process, different questions to ask, questions not to ask or to ask in a different way because of different pitfalls that I had run into. I picked probably the biggest one that I have found over the years that is the most helpful to ask is when somebody asks you for a feature and is questioning you whether that’s in a sales scenario or as part of the validation process.

The one thing that I ask them is, “Is that important to you?” Because a lot of times, they will say no and you have just saved yourself several weeks or months of effort building something that they just wanted to know about whether or not it was something you are thinking about or going to support.

Benedikt: That was a good one. I totally wrote that down because I’ve been there and I’ve done that. I really know that this is a helpful thing to do.

Mike: Next up was Peldi. Peldi opened up day two of the conference. He talked about how they scaled engineering at Balsamiq. He had a lot of different tools that he talked about during his talk, things like HackerOne which offers a bug bounty program so you can essentially create a sandbox where you specify how much you’re going to pay for people to identify bugs in your software. And then after a certain predefined time period, then they can come out and publish their findings on that particular bug if you haven’t fixed it by then.

But really, it’s a way to give you the ability to access sort of a hacker network that will look at your product and try to poke holes in it. And then when they find them, they’ll let you know as opposed to just putting your product out there and letting that happen on its own.

I did his suggestion about using this and making it private so that it was invites only because as you said, when you get to a certain scale, as people come in and if they see that you’re listed there publicly, they’re just going to start trying to hack your actual application. Make it private, wait until they come and say something to you and say, “Hey, by the way, did you know about this? This particular bug or vulnerability?” Then, you can invite them to it and cut down on the amount of people trying to hack your application all at once.

Benedikt: I really like that one. Also interesting was the fact they’re mostly using static websites, tools, marketing website and stuff, that was really nice to hear. Another tool that I got out of the talk was Convox which seems like you just put a configuration file into your code repository and it takes care of automating infrastructure setup. That seemed really useful. I really have to check that out sometime soon.

Mike: There’s a bunch of tools that are like that. I’m not familiar with Convox but there’s things like Puppet and Chef that really allow you to automate the underlying stuff behind your infrastructure. As long as everything is going through your source control, you can essentially redeploy your entire environment just using a set of scripts more or less, say the Shaft scripts or Chef scripts that deploy your servers and the applications inside those servers and configure everything where it’s supposed to go but I have not heard of Convox before.

Benedikt: I’m definitely going to check that out. Also, one thing I think you mentioned was don’t rely on unproven companies especially if it’s plumbing for your business. I think the example they had was Stormpath. They were using it for the new Balsamiq cloud setup as the authentication provider and user management. Apparently, they shut down shortly before they wanted to launch. We got lucky on the one but that really hones in the lesson of don’t rely on unproven companies because they might go out of business and be gone with all your user data or whatever it is in your case.

Next up was Mojca Mars. She talked about Facebook Advertising basically using social media as a sales funnel. She had a really good process, and a very actionable process about how to approach that. Basically, she recommends setting up a three-step funnel where you first do Facebook ads, targeting a cold audience that’s ideally based on a lookalike audience you generate by adding the Facebook pixel to your website and it would analyze the traffic going there and the users visiting your website and then extrapolate from there into a much broader audience of people that don’t already know you.

The first step is to advertise to those people and basically just provide some value linked into a blogpost you wrote about an interesting topic that might be related to them, whatever it is, just provide value. Don’t go for the hard sale right at once but show them that you care and that you are an expert in your space or whatever.

After that, they basically get tagged by Facebook using the Facebook Pixel. Then, you can retarget them and use a lead magnet like a checklist, a book, a course, whatever, to get them basically into the next step. Only as a third advertising campaign, actually ask for a sale. She really explained that funnel quite a bit.

Mike: I really liked her talk. I got a lot out of it in terms of the actual sales funnel that would work on Facebook because I’ve tried Facebook ads in the past. I’ll say I’ve had some limited success but it’s not something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out. One of the things that jumped out at me that makes a lot of sense in retrospect but I’ve not really thought too much about it was the fact that trying to push people too far too quickly through your sales funnel is not going to work.

She said that that’s actually one of the more common reasons why Facebook ads fail, it’s that you’re trying to push them through and you expect that it’s going to convert to a sale or directly into a lead right away and that’s not the case. It’s usually that you’re just trying to get them to your website. You’re just trying to get them to interact with the ad in any way, shape or form and then the retargeting efforts after that is really what helps to bring them into the sales funnel.

There’s going to be some level of drop off there between step one and step two but the retargeting is really what does it for you, it kind of filters out the people who are idly interested versus the ones who are actually interested. Those retargeting ads are what will bring them back and move them onto where you’re putting them into your lead funnel and asking them for email addresses, then push them to a point to ask for a sale.

Benedikt: Two other things that stuck with me was she said that video apparently works very well. Apparently it’s good enough to just take your phone and do a quick video. You don’t have to do like a fancy production or something. Just record yourself talking about some valuable topic and use that as the first ad in your funnel.

The other thing was apparently right now, long form posts work a lot better than short ones. When you add some description to the post, make it a long one.

Mike: It wasn’t just to make it a long one, it was give them an explicit reason as to why they should listen to you and the situations that you have run into. When you’re explaining the inside of the advertisement, you say, “Have you ever done this, and it didn’t work?” Or, “Have you tried this and it failed utterly?” As part of the rest of the content, you’re offering a story about the solution that you came across.

That’s why they buy into it. It’s because they see that and they’re able to put themselves in that position to say, “Yeah, that’s me.” That’s when they’ll click on it as opposed to as you said, the really short ones that are much more like an advertisement that you would find on a blogpost or something like that.

Benedikt: It kind of goes back to what Paul Kenny said in his talk like the structure of a sales call, it might actually work as a structure of the Facebook post as well. I kind of have to think about it but it sounds similar.

Mike: The next speaker was Andrus Purde. Andru was the director of marketing at Pipedrive. He helped them scale it up to something like 50,000 customers or something like that. It was some extremely high number. He was with them for a very long time. His talk was called From Hand to Hand Combat to a Bond Villain: The Evolution of a SaaS Marketer.

He talked about the different stages of how they evolved the sales and marketing team for Pipedrive and progressed from the point where stage one was really just hand to hand combat. It was kind of the analogy that they used for their marketing efforts and how they did things.

Stage one was just learning how to do things and then stage two was scaling those things up where they learn how to do Facebook ads or SEO, or content marketing and things like that. They took their toolsets and they scaled them up. By the time they got to stage three, they recognized, “Hey, we need teams behind these different efforts because we’re doubling down and they’re working well but we need more people and more resources behind them.”

Stage four was deploying those tools out in mass to large numbers of people and then being able to scale up those marketing efforts. It was really fascinating to look at how you grow a marketing team from virtually nothing to a full blown marketing team where you have different people in positions and responsibility for different parts of the sales pipeline or the marketing pipeline and how those things feed into one another based on the type of marketing that you’re doing and the different channels.

Benedikt: One thing he had in his slides was the Two Hedgehog Growth Model. I think it’s especially useful early on. He basically told us that you just do two things, get referrals and [00:27:19]. I really like that analogy.

Mike: If you’re not familiar with the Two Hedgehog Model, I’ve seen articles about this over on growthhackers.com. It’s just a way to basically say there are only a few different things that you should be focusing on in order to grow your startup. If you’re trying to do too many things, then it’s going to make things difficult.

If you focus on only two things and do them very well, for example if you’re making sure that your customers are giving you referrals and that people are able to find you for relevant keywords, then you essentially have your priority sorted in terms of being able to establish repeatable sales growth within the business.

But if you start trying to focus on three things or four things, or five things, you become too disjointed and you’re really not going to be able to focus enough on any of them in order to be able to make a difference. A lot of people spin their wheels when they get into those situations just because they’re not doubling down enough on something to make it work.

Benedikt: The last talk on Tuesday was Ed Freyfogle talking about building and serving a global SaaS customer base. He basically told us how they are doing it in their company. I think it’s called OpenCage or something like that. They mostly do geo calling services. What I really liked was that he basically laid out, “Hey, we do this, this, and this.”

I’ve got a lot of things out of it. Especially one thing I liked was how they present themselves on their About page where they basically hide the fact that they are just two people by not saying we’re a small team but just presenting the management team. It was a nice approach to do that.

Also, one technique he presented was to do interviews with people from local communities in different countries. In their case, they’re heavily relying on OpenStreetMap community and just started interviewing people from different countries about their activities and their OpenStreetMap community. That helped them get backlinks and be talked about and stuff like that.

Mike: I think the biggest thing that I took away from Ed’s talk was their focus on the little things, making the user experience better. For example, in certain data sets, they localize the data to where it’s being requested and who’s requesting it as opposed to just having, “Here’s the data,” and you have to interpret it in any way that you feel is appropriate. But the reality is that if you help the customer and present it to them in a way that’s helpful directly to their needs in their situation, then you’re better off.

That’s really just a matter of not just doing the right thing for the customer but going a little bit above and beyond what the customer would probably expect and what they’ll probably get from other vendors. Because their company is called opencagedata.com, it provides geolocation services based on longitude and latitude and tells you what the city and state is.

The specific example that he’d given was in certain countries, the format of the address is going to be different. It might be that you have the address and you have the numeric address and the street name. In other cases, it’s the other way around or in some countries, you may have a couple of different things all on one line. They do what’s necessary to provide all of that information, do all of that work for the customers so that the customer doesn’t have to figure it out for themselves because otherwise, they would.

Then things get weird where if you’re saying city and state, the example he showed was on Twitter, it said Berlin, Berlin. The reason for that is because Berlin is both a city but it’s also a state. It looks weird when you would see something on Twitter that says it was posted in Berlin, Berlin. It’s not natural. But if you look at it, it obviously looks wrong but the computer has no idea. They do the things that need to be done to make it look presentable.

Like I said, it’s the little things, the icing on the cake, that make it just simple and easy to use. Honestly, a bigger example most people would be really familiar with is Stripe. Stripe does those types of things to make your life easier. You don’t notice them until you’ve tried other things and they’re terrible and then you use something like Stripe and you’re like, “Wow. This is actually not a bad experience. It’s quite nice.” And the bar is not that high.

Benedikt: That’s true. I also like the example he had with offering libraries for your API, they’re an API business basically. Offering an API, you can integrate with them. He told us that offering libraries and programming languages is really like a traction channel for them. I don’t remember the name of the program he mentioned. But it apparently is some very niche language that is not widely popular but by just having a library out there makes it a go to choice for geo coding for that particular language. That was really a good trick.

Mike: Benedikt, you’ve been to a couple of MicroConfs in the past, what was your impression of this year as compared to previous years of MicroConf Europe?

Benedikt: I think the conference in general was pretty similar. Of course the location changed which was nice because I always enjoy visiting these cities and walking around the day before, doing some sight-seeing. In part of the hotel, I think I like the one in Barcelona a little bit better but in the end, I’d go to my room and lay in bed and sleep so it doesn’t really matter.

As always, the hallway track was probably the best thing about the conference. It’s always great to meet new people and also catch up with friends from previous years. That’s what I really like about MicroConf, just the community.

Mike: Awesome. I think it’s a recurring theme. We have new attendees this year, it just seemed like person after person kept telling me like, “Hey, this is a fantastic community. I love talking to these people.” It’s great to hear their stories and what they’re working on. Most of the people I have talked to are like, “I can’t wait to come back, it would be awesome to see where other people are at.” And then also be able to share where they had moved their business based on conversations with them and things that they learned in MicroConf that year.

Cool. Before we wrap things up, I do want to say a special thanks to all of our speakers. I really appreciate them taking the time out of their busy schedules to come talk and also to all of our sponsors. We’ll link them up in the shownotes. I think it’s really important to mention every single one of them and say that the conference would not be what it is without both our speakers and our sponsors, not to mention, all the attendees because the attendees are really what make the hallway track.

Rob, myself, and Zander cannot do that, make the entire hallway track without everybody else there. With that, I also want to say thanks to Zander. Zander is the one who’s in charge of all the logistics. I know he doesn’t want to detract from the experience that people are having with a thank you to him. But I think that everybody really appreciates all the hard work that he puts into it and it shows. It’s really a testament, what he does.

Benedikt: Absolutely. Zander’s amazing. Just at the registration where he basically pulls up your nametag even before you reach him, it’s amazing. I don’t know how he can remember all the many names. I’m super impressed by Zander’s work.

Mike: Excellent. Well, thanks for joining me, Benedikt. Like I said, I’ll link up to a couple of different things that you’re working on. If anyone’s interested, go to femtoconf.com. Definitely check that out if you are able to get a ticket at this point. If you have a question for us, you can call it 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 Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.