 Hi to everybody, my name is Patrick Mackenzie better known as Patty 11 on the Internet's so Christoff mentioned that in his local time zone It's about midnight. I was born in the central time zone But my body is on JST Japan Standard Time where it is about 9 a.m. I think in the morning so my body is sending my brain signals like you have just pulled an all-nighter as a former Japanese salaryman I have substantial experience with all-nighters. They produce and this is true. You can like look up the research. They produce a physiological response in you which resembles being drunk. You have lowered inhibitions and you make poor decisions B2W engineering managers in the room remember that when you're telling the team to kill themselves late at night anyhow So in the spirit of really poor decisions, I thought I would bring my own intro music here And you might think looking at me. Oh, it's surely gonna be white and nerdy and you were right But weird Alice like licensing people didn't get back to me in time So instead I pulled something with a appropriate license for an open-source conference So with apologies to Jonathan Colton Code monkey Code monkey get up get coffee code monkey go to job Code monkey get have boring meeting with boring manager Rob Rob said code monkey very diligent, but his output stinks His code not functional or elegant. What do code monkey think code monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login Page himself code monkey not say it out loud code monkey not crazy Just proud code monkey needs to die in a fire That's not actually how the song ends But I think that code monkey is not really a person It's a mask we don an identity we choose for ourselves And something which is really really against our interests in the long run We heard in an earlier speech someone say that we tend to outsource the understanding of marketing and sales and management to the folks above us in our organizations and then they get most of the wealth that we create with our Skills in building ruby or what have you? And I think outsource is not exactly the right word there because outsource suggests that it was at least a considered action I think we end up add abdicating it. We think that marketing and sales is just the output of Bob Rob. Yeah, Rob Rob here that it's something that we could never learn to do and since we could never learn to do it We tend to devalue it. I think that's one of the biggest problems I see in the developer community. So I want to talk to you guys about how you can do marketing and sales in a way that Doesn't require you to contraven your values will allow you to do the best possible work and not Turn into the boring manager rob here and also maybe gain a little degree of respect for the Sales folks the marketing folks and management because they actually do bring a lot to the table So let's talk about killing your inner code monkey I'm going to talk a lot about money in the upcoming slides, but you should understand that when I'm talking about money I'm just really using it as a shortcut to save value You the reason we want to all optimize our careers is not just to make Piles of fat stacks of cash if you want to do that you can go to silicon valley. I hear they're hiring, but We want to achieve what really matters to us and for me For example, what really matters is that I have lots of time to spend with my family With my wonderful wife rudiko with our daughter lillian who just turned one year old time to spend with my community coming out across the world to talk in front of you guys and Time to learn things. So picked up a new language recently go. It's awesome Continuing to to become a better ruby a stand to hopefully Become better at all the other stuff that I do as the CEO of a company so here is the Fizz buzz proofs that I've actually coded ruby before Um My first business was called bingo card creator And this is the beating heart of bingo card creator back here because we didn't have array shuffle back then and the mists of prehistory This will shuffle an array Um bingo card creator was described by one of my friends as hello world with uh attached to a random number generator Which is totally true and uh, it sold 300 000 dollars basically based on that four line method So here's the quick arc of my career Back by the way back in the mists of prehistory I had a different job before I got into entrepreneurship. It was running a world of warcraft guild So I totally got that world of warcraft a reference earlier It's my only management experience Up until being CEO of the company So I did bingo card creator for a few years Uh, I was the sole developer and I had to figure out this marketing and sales thing because there was no one else To do it for me and I got pretty decent at marketing and selling software over the internet And it turns out that that is a fantastically Uh useful skill set if you're not applying it to bingo cards for elementary school teachers Uh, so other companies would come to me and say hey, you seem to know a little bit about that Why don't you help us out with it jules polsky memorably phrased it as you seem to be a guru level Expert in things like seo and email marketing. It's a shame you applied to a product which is totally bullshit Uh, so I ended up working as a consultant under this calzumius thing named after a dragon in an rpg campaign in high school because that's how I roll and Yeah, I did consulting for a few years got pretty decent at it And then ran a new SaaS business called appointment reminder, which was the biggest mistake in my professional career The reason why so I was never really, um enthusiastic about doing the business at all I should have done something that passed what we call the pelty test pelty being the gentleman behind balsamic When I told him I was going to do a point reminder He said, uh, do you really want to be optimizing the schedules of dentist offices for the next five years of your life? And I told him, oh god, no, but it's a great business, right? And he's like no no no if you're going to spend the next five years of your life on it Spend the next five years of your life doing something you'd actually enjoy And tragically I ignored pelty's advice. Here we are five years later. I actually have something I enjoy now Hey, uh, it's called starfighter. We might talk about that a little in a minute But let's talk a little bit less about me and more about Well you guys and somebody who I'd like you to to introduce you to This is my lawyer. His name is george grellis Um, I was originally going to replace this slide with like stock art of a business guy And then I realized I knew someone who actually looked like well stock art of a business guy You are much more like george than you think and I want to Talk about my first professional engagement with george recently as we were spinning up the company So I went to george and said Now me being a boring manager rob here who knows absolutely nothing about legal anything I say george. I have a wonderful idea We're going to hire me as an independent contractor of the new company. So I will be the independent contractor CEO And george says that's interesting Why do you want to do that? Now note the george could have said that is a really terrible idea you suck at this Which might be the engineering response to like boring manager rob saying hey I heard about this like new database that you should totally be using it's called no sequel um So yeah george said no I want to understand the business rationale for this You had some reason you wanted to do that. What was it and I said well My personal tax situation in japan is complicated. I think that decomplicates it. He's like, okay. I hear you That won't actually work What you have to do is set up a japanese kabushiki gaisa, which is a subsidiary of the american corporation You put yourself on the books as a w2 employee or the local equivalent in japan of the japanese kabushiki gaisa Then you have you own one third of the american corporation take distributions to it that minimizes your tax burden and Tax planning burden while actually being legal and won't get you investigated by the irs or thrown in jail And I was like wow george really knows his stuff And if I had proceeded on my well, that's great george But I'm uh, I'm going to totally ignore your advice and get thrown in jail george would have said no I'm the professional in the room. I know my stuff You trust me to do this for you And so you're going to trust my advice And I think george is very good at this. He exudes professionalism when he gets into a room. It's like i'm He has literally been doing what he does as a job for longer than I have been alive. It's like, I know Virtually everything there is to know about this subject. You brought me in because I am the best I will give you the best advice and you will implement the best advice And george very rarely has that problem that a lot of us had in our consulting days We're like we kill ourselves for two weeks or six months as the case may be like building something and management is like That's great. Throw it in the trash can but thanks for your effort and I may or may not pay your invoice Um lawyers are very good at getting their invoices paid So i'm going to talk a lot about business in this presentation But I think all the w2 employees in the room or local equivalents in whatever your country might be Should think of yourselves as businesses and you have a lot of functions in your life which resemble being a business for example You've all done enterprise sales before except you didn't know you were doing it at the time when you were having a job interview and you said Hey, um, I think we can agree on me swapping my services from me llc To build ruby on rails apps for your corporation and it will cost you x amount of year. That's enterprise sales. Really all it is Um, you probably quoted a salary that was a little lower than that But the total cost of ownership was 120k your total cost of ownership is one of the words that they like teach you when you get your CEO ring anyhow, um You've all done marketing before you just call that twitter github os s contribution, etc You've all done financial, uh planning like a cfo does except I thought you were just buying tickets to this event We're hoping that I give you a little bit of tactical advice, which will make this have a positive roi for you That's another ceo word positive roi for you so you can come back next year So the most important advice I've ever given anyone and I get put in all my presentations for reason is charge more Charge more charge more charge more charge more Most developers have huge mental hang ups over this And I know that just saying okay, this is a mental battle You need to understand that you're worth it to charge more is not really actionable advice So I want to break it down for you into like really easy concrete steps How you go about charging more in your services business for the SaaS software you happen to run or when you're doing your next negotiation So here it is Oh, oops, haha one slide off. Why do you want to charge more? Uh, well a make more money. That's always nice But you're going to find that as you charge more People bracket you into an entirely different class of whatever they should do then you were when you were the cheap option you'll find that They listened to your advice more that your projects actually get implemented that you're allowed to The creative decision-making to do your best possible work That you will even do better work because you'll be more motivated to do the better work and that Your better work actually gets implemented So back when I was a japanese salary man and making roughly 30 000 a year Probably 80 percent of my professional output got shelved the day I delivered it and never seen by anyone And this is me doing 100 hours a week of work on this stuff killing killing myself and then it never mattered to anyone Um when I was doing consulting engagements and my final rack rate was this is not to brag But this is just demonstrative of what happens after you understand value and positioning Um final rack rate rate was 30 000 a week And um when you're charging 30 000 a week they very rarely make you like work for three weeks and say okay Well, that's nice and then throw it immediately in the garbage bin which happened to me all the time when I was the cheap option So how do you charge more? Instead of saying a small number say a big number Okay, that might not have actually been like super actionable. So let's start with some stuff which is more actionable so One moment You generally want to have two rates and only two Your full rack rate, which is whatever you think you can get as the market clearing rate for your position So for me back in the last days of my consultancy that would have been 30 000 a week and then free you want nothing in between those two extremes Why I find that a lot of people create excuses for themselves on why they are not worth the full rate or why this particular deal Is worth giving a discount for You don't want to give discounts. Um that will corrupt your decision making process and it will corrupt your client's decision making process For example, my church has a website that was made in 1996 and it's exactly as good as you think it is And uh, they asked me hey patrick, you're in this web business. Can you make us a better website? I'm like, oh, of course I could do that for my church and then I thought oh, well I don't want to stick them with the big capitalist price number. I will stick them with some much smaller number And uh, that would have been a really poor decision if I had gone through with it. Here's why Let's say I offered to do it for 500 a week, which is like absurdly below cost That's probably the maximum they can afford in their budget It would inevitably get prioritized prioritized to the last thing that I did every day I'd feel insulted by doing it. I would probably not deliver my highest and best work My church would not get the uh, the best webpage they could possibly get for that amount of money and uh It would corrupt my own reasoning on why I was doing that engagement What you would want to do is do an engagement at your full rate for Whoever will pay your full rate and then if you want to donate money, just donate money And then that forces you to and to confront the fact that okay I'm really donating like 29,500 dollars of value uh for doing a web web page Web page for my church is that my like highest and best use of resources So I want you to negotiate only on scope and never on rate particularly for the service providers in the room So that means that when a client comes back to you and says oh your proposal had a number on it Let's say that number was I don't know 15,000 dollars. We only have 10,000 dollars in the budget You don't say and mostly most of the time you don't say, okay, uh, we just won't do the engagement then And you don't say okay. Oh, that's a it's a one third cut on my rate, but I need to pay rent this month. So I'll do it Never do that because you will never get that rate concession back with that client And it will complicate your business dealings with every other client in the future instead. What you say is okay If the budget is 10,000 dollars, I think we have a few options going forward one of them is simple What do you want me to cut? And that gives clients something that they want even more than money it gives them the feeling of agency We talked a little bit about agency earlier Sometimes they just the only thing they want out of that discussion is to feel like they're not getting terms dictated to So you say okay I'm the trusted provider of the service producing ruby on rails applications Which actually work but you are the trusted provider of knowledge about your business situation Tell me what in your business situation is most important to you that will get done within your budget and a little frilly stuff on the side that We just won't do that little frilly stuff on the side or Tell me a little bit about your internal decision-making process where that 10,000 dollar number come from How do you do budgeting? Is it something that could potentially be increased if we made the right business case to the right people at the company? If so, let me help you do that So, uh, you want to use internal anchors for pricing? What does an internal anchor mean? Well Let's say you had never heard about like My consultant consultant say for example, and I threw out the number. Yeah, my rack rate is 30,000 dollars a week You would say oh my god, that's expensive and you would immediately go, uh, uh, you know try Anchoring it which means just comparing that number to other numbers You've heard for developer services over the years like well I paid that guy 60 dollars an hour one time multiply by 40 is a hell of a lot less than 30,000 dollars. Oh my god. What are you even thinking? so I would never want clients to compare Compare numbers that I was quoting against numbers that other people had quoted to them for services that were frankly not comparable Instead I would give clients a few options of things like okay Um, let's say we have x y and z possible that we can do an engagement And here are my estimates on how many days that those will take If you wanted to get everything done that'll take about three weeks, which would be three times 30 is 90 if If x and y are really important to the business, but z maybe not so much Then we can get this done in two weeks, which is by the way what most of my clients choose to do And then that would be only 60 And then if we just want to dip our toes in the water and get started with working together We can do an initial assessment in one week, which would be 30 which sounds best for you And then they don't say 60,000 dollars is a hell of a lot more money than 60 times 80 They'll they'll say oh 60 thousand dollars is the middle of the road safe option and they'll take it So, um If you're doing like a SaaS business or something that's why virtually every SaaS Business is priced on like the three plan pricing grid you get to say okay Don't look at our competitors to determine what the service is worth We're going we're going to tell you if you're an enterprise It's worth 500 bucks a month if you're a small business It's worth. I don't know 90 99 dollars a month and the starter package is available at 49 dollars And then you're comparing 49 and 99 rather than say, okay I'm comparing the 99 dollars to well it includes one gigabyte of storage. What does one gigabyte cost on amazon? Oh my god, that's expensive You never want to have that going through your customers minds Also recurring revenue is the best best best kind of revenue There's fundamentally only a few ways to make more revenue in a business One is to sell the more customers one is to charge your customers more and the other one is Keeping your existing set of customers just sell to them at a higher frequency So for all of you folks who are pitching the most common deal in ruby on rails Consulting which is i'm going to make an application for you. It'll take x amount of time I deliver that Application and then we're done until we do another application. We want to start building things then like hey I've been in the software game for a while I'm your trusted advisor in software and I will tell you every software project in the history of ever Was not exactly what the customer wanted the date. They got it Your team is going to start using it in their daily workflow And we're going to discover things about how it isn't exactly optimal for you And what happens in every software engagement in the history of ever is the client comes back and says This isn't exactly right. Can you slot me in for another engagement to fix it? And I say yes, and that will cost exactly as much software did to produce the first time And I don't want to do that to you instead I want to pitch you on a retainer agreement where you agreed to buy one day of my Availability every month at a slight discount to my rates. So maybe 90 of what your day rate would Annualize up to day rate annualize. I'm sorry. I've lived in japan for the last 10 years. My english is not so great Whatever the fraction that would be at your day rate And you say it's use it or lose it if in a given month you want to have a small enhancement to something Maybe the app needs to send more emails. Maybe we need to work rework or workflow to Match what your team expects. We can do that If there's a hair on fire emergency like heart bleed or You know another security vulnerability found in rubion rails rather than like Being in total scramble mode to find the one rails guy who has availability that week when the entire internet is on fire I will totally jump on that hand grenade for you because you are one of my most priority clients if you have a recurring arrangement with me What why you do this is if you sell say three clients on a recurring arrangement like that You've got basically your first week of work booked every month As of the first day of that month Let's you not scramble in the feast or famine consulting lifecycle, but rather be able to say okay I know i'm going to be able to make my rent this month I'm knowing going to be able to pay the core business expenses So I can be a little bit aggressive this month on putting out proposals not to any client I think we'll say yes to them but only the best possible clients charging my best possible rate doing the work that I think going to be my best possible work and You can kind of walk up the sophistication of your business doing that because you have the freedom of security afforded to you by a bit of recurring revenue So let's talk a little bit about marketing and sales for developers And I know because I've been doing this shtick for basically my entire career Well after the world of warcraft thing That there's a lot of developers who are like marketing sales And I want to impress upon you that sales is really not you know some scummy thing that car dealers do do unsuspecting people who come into a car dealership There's this guy you can find him on the internet by googling for potato peeler guy And he does a performance and is that exactly that a performance He's sell this gentleman that his name is john. He passed away a few years ago But prior to that he sold potato peelers on the streets of new york city And he would just take a bunch of potatoes carrots in the case of this photo and peeled him in front of you with his Potato peelers and while he was peeling it. He was saying if you have a good sharp potato peeler You can cut your vegetables thinner. That means they'll soak up more juice This is a feature proposition to the customer. You'll be able to make The best french fries you've ever had in your life just like your grandmother made none of that mcdonald's garbage Which is hardening your arteries again feature feature and benefit here And it will only cost you five dollars for this potato peeler and I know what you're thinking Why would I pay five dollars for a potato peeler when I can go to the grocery store and get one for a dollar? He's predicting a customer It's a word Objection, thank you english He's predicting an objection and answering it and here's how he answers it. He says Well, this potato peeler is made in switzerland and no one ever went with switzerland because it was the cheap option They go with it for they go with swiss things because swiss means quality This will be the last potato peeler you ever buy in your life All you have to do is take care of it means rinse it off and then wipe off the water So that it doesn't rust even though it's stainless steel you always want to make sure to wipe it If you do you will be able to give this potato peeler to your children And he sold a lot of potato peelers Literally this gentleman was selling more than one million dollars of potato peelers a year five dollars a pop Just yeah And so that impressive to me not so much of the number but watch this performance on youtube There's several people who just captured him with an iphone over the years He very clearly loves potato peelers loves selling them to people and his eyes like vibrate with With hey, I'm not a sleazy sales guy. I really care about cooking I really care about giving this this nice little performance Which is itself a little bit of street art that you might enjoy And in return for that if you need a potato peeler I have the best potato peeler in new york city right here for five bucks Or 20 dollars for five of them. Um, which is a great option to upsell people anyhow Let's talk a little bit about market research And this is especially for those of you folks who are thinking of going into business for yourself But don't exactly have an offering in the market already That so the process basically looks like this and you can read it for yourself. I won't read it for you Instead give you an anecdote of how I did it for appointment reminder, which while being a business I shouldn't have been in I think I did a decent job of this appointment reminder made appointment reminding phone calls sms messages and emails to the clients of professional services businesses the Um, sorry, I've memorized that and said it about a thousand times over the last five years while hating it every time anyhow Uh, so I thought is anyone going to buy this if I make it Should I spend eight months building software and then show people the demo and ask them to buy? No, instead. I'll go to chicago where I'm from originally take out a few hundred bucks from the atm And go into every massage therapist and salon that I could find in a nice tony section of chicago where I thought I wouldn't get mugged And I would say hey, uh, are you the business owner? And if they said yes, I said do you take walk-ins? And if they said yes, I said, okay, I have a proposition for you Um, I'll pay for whatever 30 minutes of the service normally costs But instead of getting my haircut or getting a shoulder massage for 30 minutes I'd just like to talk to you about massage therapy for 30 minutes because I'm interested in the industry And I would talk and talk to them a little bit about okay Tell me what you do here for scheduling. Do you do scheduling on a computer? Do you have software for that? Do you do it in a book full of paper? What percent is your of your clients come in through appointments versus what percent come in as walk-ins? Do you have a no-show problem in your appointments? Do you call people regarding the no-show problem? What have your experiences been like that? And the thing that I heard from a lot of people is that oh, yeah, we have a no-show problem We don't call people the best quote I got from a massage therapist if my hands are on a telephone They're not in someone's back if they're not on someone's back. I'm not getting paid So no, I don't spend two hours every morning calling people And I said what if there were a computer that could do that for you Would you pay 30 dollars a month for it? And of the people I talked to that day, I got thrown out of exactly no places Only one person actually accepted money for the talk even though I was offering it up front They all said no, this is just a Opportunity to talk to someone about a subject that I'm passionate about that's why I run this business But uh, so at the end of that day 15 people said yes once you've built this I will buy it for 30 bucks a month. That sounds great. And then I promptly lost their email addresses, but It's not really like You know 15 times 30 not a motivational amount of money every month But knowing that okay, I was just able to talk to people and get them to agree to say yes It's one thing that you can do particularly if you're dealing with more sophisticated businesses Is to not just to get them to agree to say yes because like we heard in an earlier presentation You can get people to agree to all manner of crazy things if you look at them in the eye and say This is going to be great. You should totally do it. You have no choice Um because they do have a choice once the checkbook comes out If there are business ask them for a letter of intent Which is basically a non-binding variant of contract contract which says I'm going to go disappear in the code cave for six months And produce software which is going to do substantially x y and z and once I do that You promise to seriously consider consider buying it for the sum of a hundred thousand dollars for the first year And yes, you can totally put that number on it on an loi Which doesn't is backed by like zero lines of code if you can establish credibility with the customer that's six months from now You're going to have something that delivers on x y and z The most important bullet point on the slide is the last one If you can't get people to say yes, don't build something build something else that they will actually enthusiastically try to buy Let's talk about honing in on who your target customer is I apologize, but i'm getting over bronchitis. So i'm getting a little bit of dry mouth here Um all customers are not created equal There are people who are great candidates for selling your things to and by people I really mean businesses because you should be selling to businesses That's where most of the money is you'll be able to do your best work for them B2C is a wonderful business model if you're in silicon valley and funded so you can like Blow through 10 million dollars of other people's money while you're trying to figure out the model Unless you have 10 million dollars in your back pocket. I wouldn't suggest B2C in 2015 as a self-funded entrepreneur So you're selling to businesses But there's huge varieties of sophistication in businesses like everything from hair salons to Say multi-billion dollar enterprises You want to sell to the right selection of businesses in the right industry where you Know that you have an in that industry that you can Identify businesses like that in a scalable fashion that you can reach the person inside of that business Who's able to buy your thing? And that you can actually do work which matters for them on a topic which they know matters for them And that's really important Customers won't buy like the things that they need they buy the things that they know they need And if you have to cross across that need to knowledge of need gap That will cost you a whole heck of a lot of money in marketing and sales spend You'll spend years trying to teach the market to Understand your value proposition Which is wonderful if you have a few million dollars of investor funds to burn While doing that, but less wonderful if you need to pay rent next month when the software is released So let's talk about channels that work well and these channels work for anything you're selling Whether it's your time as w2 employee whether it's services agreements Or whether it's software as a service or some other software model One of the best things that works for me is speaking at events where my target customer type hangs out You say well, that's for your easy for you. Mr. Keynote speaker But how does that work for me? Joe blow the ruby on rails develop and dev who has never spoken at a conference before a Start filling out those like RFP things because there are new speakers at almost every conference and almost every conference organizer will tell you They want new voices on the stage, but be if you can't Speak at an event like no one will invite you to speak there Throw your own event and then you get to pick the speaker list consisting of you and yourself and nobody else And this can be done anywhere for any business and it works fantastically So i've met a few people here who do like ruby on the intersection of ruby on rails and security Which is a wonderful field to be in and very needed by the market. Oh god anyhow Um All you need to do is say like okay I live in austin there does not exist a place to learn about the intersection of ruby on rails and security in austin I will throw the ruby on rails security meetup in austin And I will go to the vfw hall and pay the matrivial amount of money like 20 bucks to rent out a room for two hours And then i'm going to go to starbucks and dunk in donuts and pick up some coffee and donuts and email you know the local Uh local listservs or whatever for folks who in the ruby on rails community and say hey guys Free talk on friday. The whatever After work Come listen to talk for an hour. I'm going to talk about how to perform a security assessment on your ruby on rails application And then after this talk there'll be a little bit of a mixer so you can meet other people who are interested in this And for 55 minutes of that hour you do exactly what it said on the 10 you just tell people Okay, here's how you perform a ruby on rails Security assessment of your applications. Here's the classic mistakes. Here's how you verify that that happened or not Here's how you do the remediation the last five minutes you say, okay, that sounded like a whole lot of work By the way, that's the only thing we do if you're interested talk to me later Okay, uh now everyone gets to mingle for an hour And I will tell you because I have spoken at a lot of events what happens immediately after you get off the stage Is everyone will bum rush you and say oh man that was totally interesting But it wasn't specific to exactly my needs do you want to talk about exactly my needs because I sure do And you say oh, yeah, totally. Um, it seems like there's a lot of people here Can I get your card or get your email address and we'll have coffee and talk over this about in uh for an hour Just for you at leisure And what you're going to do in that conversation is just qualify them like is this someone I should be working for? Did they have the budget? Do they have the authority to bring me in if yes great you say this has been an awesome conversation I think we could do great work together I will start working on a proposal for you if you qualify them out at the result of that conversation like Okay, you just started yesterday your company's revenue is five dollars You can't really forward a four thousand dollar ruby on rails assessment yet You say hey, this has been awesome meeting you and keep me in You know keep in touch. I love to uh I give you some informal advice about this at some point and you just don't offer them the proposal And you'll you'll find that if you can get 20 people in a room And it's easy to get 20 people in a room to talk about anything That you're going to get five coffee dates out of that and close one to two new engagements Which if you're charging enough for your engagements makes that one hour worth of your time totally worthwhile Let's talk about getting referrals from other customers So customers travel in packs Good customers. No other good customers bad customers. No other good and no other bad customers This is one of the reasons you want to qualify your customers down to make sure you're doing only your best work for the people who are best capable of appreciating it But when you know that someone is a is the perfect fit for you You've just and you're at the maximum point of happiness in your relationship with them Which is typically right after you've sold them on using you you should immediately say hey, this is wonderful We're going to do excellent work together I'm so excited about the opportunity to work for work for you before we get started working together I just have one question Who do you know in your own personal network at your firm at somebody else's firm who would also benefit from this sort of work together? And they might ask and why do you need to know that and you say well We're all in business here. My business is selling this sort of engagement for people and it will If you just uh, you know introduce me to a few of your friends That will mean I get to spend less time selling more engagements for next month and more time doing the best possible work for you And people will typically say oh, that sounds fair. All right. Um, you know, I used to work with bob over at uh, foosoft Bob could totally buy something like this and you say great I have an email written. Um, I can just send it to you and you can uh forward that language Uh, you send that language directly over to bob or you can introduce me to bob in whatever words you think are appropriate And I will talk to bob about that and I'm looking so forward to getting started with you next week This is one of the highest ROI channels for getting new gigs cost you nothing except for a few minutes of your time And by the way, this is one of the asks you can make which It increases the sales value of your company But your clients will like getting it you're positioning them as hey I know you're very well connected in the austin ruby community. Um, I know other people trust your judgment Who who could you do a solid for? By giving them your considered opinion that I am good at this thing that I've just pitched you on so Another thing that you can all to set up an email list via mail chimp trip customer.io Whatever tool you want to use there's a million of them these days And every time you create value somewhere on the internet You just add a little like thing saying hey, uh, if you like this There's more where that came from if you give me your email list I will trade it for some specific immediately delivered valuable thing like maybe Um continuing with the ruby on rail security thing Maybe like a white paper on the top five vulnerabilities that I found ruby on rails applications over the years And how to fix them and I'll send you one or two essays a month Which you'll find useful and then you give people exactly what you promised on the tin one or two essays a month Which which you find useful and whenever you find your pipeline is Your pipeline could use a few more clients in it or you could use a few more sales this month, which is Basically on every day which ends in y You mail people and say hey, uh, it's been great teaching you this month this much this month by the way I have a little bit of availability coming up So if you want something which is more specific to your exact needs just hit reply in this email It goes directly to me and let's talk about You know we'll book a time to skype for an hour and talk about exactly what your problem is in your company right now And then you do the qualification you And you book them into gigs marketing for developers Is sort of like this So you do so much work which is really crucial and yet isn't seen by anyone You can think of like an iceberg you see only like the tiny a little bit that's above the waterline and don't see everything That's below you need to raise more of your work above the waterline That's probably the single best thing that open source gives us as developers Not like oh free codes available all over the internets But rather the ability to take our professional work Which is previously siloed in organizations that the rest of the world cannot perceive And put it out there with where folks could say wow this person really does know their stuff When you do great work for clients you should aggressively solicit case studies All you need to do is say on the last day of engagement. This has worked out great I'm proud of this work we have done together. I want to give you even more value out of this engagement totally free You know how you're always trying to write more interesting stuff for your blog I will write up a Story of what we just did together minus all the cut minus the you know a few Confidential parts and why that's the Why that's going to produce additional value for your customers And if they say yes your golden then you write basically a testimonial for your ability to do great work You post it on their their blog and then every other time a client A prospect asks you in the future. Hey, can you like point to something that says you're capable of doing the work? Like yeah, take a look at my clients here. They they mentioned that we did this great work together Had results x y and z if you want to see an example of this This case study basically built my consultancy. It's called Our marketing is up fog creek, which I did for fog creek You can google it and just read that there the subtleties and there's not really much subtlety I asked hey, can I put in the dollar value that we think this was worth to the company and they were like We keep that number under our under our uh Under our somethings. Um, we don't publicize the amount of money we make every year I said can I just say obliquely that it was a double digit increase in your revenue and Percentage increase in your revenue and they're like, oh, yeah, we're cool with that And so for the next like three years my consulting career. I was like by the way I once did a double digit increase to fog creek's revenue. Here's where they talk about it Actually, it's me talking about it, but it's true And that got me a lot of additional work with great clients who trust them I am running a little bit longer than I would be so I'm going to blow through some stuff This is what the sales funnel looks like and the key thing about sales and marketing is that With each stage of increasing engagement with you, you're going to lose some people So You're going to want to get good at the transitions between these stages to lose as few people as possible So you get as many as possible down to this magic click getting money from them thing at the end Money or any other type of value What you're going to want to do to that is to have repeatable sales processes so Who here like deploys code to production at any point in their jobs? Who here does that like totally? Cowboy style every time where you make it up from scratch as you go along great. No hands You use camp or something right because you want that to work every time you do it Similarly when you're doing sales after you find something that works you want to reproduce exactly that every time Like guess what some people are going to say. Hey, you're really expensive You should not like just magic up an answer to hey, I'm really expensive on the fly You should anticipate that objection and have a canned two sentence answer that you can give for it every time Like hey patrick you charge five times as much as any rails developer. We've ever worked with Yeah, I understand, but I'm not really rails developer. I'm the guy who makes software company Software companies more money You can see from my list of case studies that I've made clients millions of dollars in additional revenue So in the context of millions of dollars of additional revenue that we could potentially generate from this engagement A 60 thousand thousand dollar investment is really not that much Canned can deliver that every time I probably said that speech a hundred times and that achieved overcome the objection quite a lot One reason why you want to To make these processes repeatable by the way Because you're going to have to be doing them in parallel with each other So if you imagine like Isn't a point or whatever if you go to the right side and say this is the The folks I was pushing through the sales funnel like two months ago and then like work your way left Okay, last month I was pushing these folks through the funnel stuff is starting to like collide with each other And then this month I'm pushing these folks through the funnel and now I don't understand what the heck is going on So if you make your process is repeatable you can do them You can do them via pipelining just like you had pipeline instructions on a processor If you don't make your process is repeatable and you're like making stuff up as you go along every time What you're going to end up doing is processing sales serially And that's the underlying cause of most people's problem in consulting where they have like feast or famine It's like, okay. I got a gig this month. I'm a hundred percent focused on doing the gig. All right The gig is done. I'll send them an invoice And it's going to take me a week to collect the invoice. Okay. I've collected the invoice ca Now I got to find my next gig and then they have three weeks of like bubble where they're not working And they're not billing anyone for the work they're not doing Instead you want to be having all these things going on continuously and yeah, it's a lot of work but you can find Numbers and find other Life advantages that running consultancy as opposed to being an employee gets you which makes getting good at this not too Well very motivational for you in the long run Most of you in here probably don't need to have a formal CRM. You can just But you do need something That's a little more sophisticated than I keep the entire state of my business in my head Once just like you wouldn't try to keep the entire memory state of your program in the programmer's head and just Expect them to know like what state transition looks like. I just use trello um for For sales where I've got a few people in each of the things This is like actually the legit trello board for star fighters. So please don't tweet out those names because we're not live yet but um You know when I'm when I have a conversation with someone where it's like, okay This is not going to result in us working with them I move them over to the D prioritized and maybe check back in a few months When I get a letter of intent out of them I move them uh towards the right and then you can see that in my near future I got to get a lot of contract signed and just a simple glance on that lets me know what I need to be doing this week So uh last I want to encourage you to play long ball um I've been doing this for about 10 years after the world of warcraft as my main professional achievement and uh When I started out nobody knew out who I was I was working in obscurity and key food prefecture, which is not exactly a major technology center to put it mildly and I really knew essentially nothing about anything but I think that you know some of some of you folks might think oh that kind of describes my situation You know, I don't I don't feel like uh, I can relate to a $30,000 week rate You totally can it's just the future you So prior to getting to the future you you want to work on stuff Work on things where people can see you working open sources of wonderful for this work on things that you can show Work on things that you can own Great assay on this is called stacking the bricks It's by Amy Hoy who I think a lot of you have probably heard about If you look at the careers of people who are really really successful like by any metric of success Like say, I don't know there's 37 signals crew base camp crew these days. You think wow, they're so awesome It's like a wall of pure awesomeness And nobody's wall of awesomeness spring up from nothing it started like okay 10 years ago nobody knew knew who it was But they did like an engagement for a consultant client boom That's a brick and then they did engagement for another consultant client boom. That's a brick And then they made a little application that no one had heard about at the time called base camp boom That's a brick and then they extracted uh, you know This quirky like framework built out of an academic language from japan that nobody used boom. That's a brick boom, brick, brick, brick, brick. Ten years later it's a wall. And if you work with intentionality about this sort of stuff, 10 years later it'll be a wall for you. The term of art for this in business is called unfair advantages. And I don't love this word because of the connotations of unfair. So for example, for Starfighter, we have myself and my co-founders have a pretty unfair advantage for starting a technology-based recruiting company, relative to any random person in the world. We've already proven out the business model in micro scale. We have 15 clients who bought in before the product actually existed. We've got a list of 20,000 engineers who want to play on day one, which BTW probably next week. And our founders are kind of internet famous. So you remember that like crack about hacker news of being, what was it, Chuck E. Cheese tickets except located in Mordor? So if that crack is true, then I'm like the eye of Soran of hacker news. And my co-founder is Soran of hacker news. We're literally like number one and number two by karma. You might think, well, that's kind of unfair if you're selling two developers and software companies, but these advantages are not really unfair. They're kind of earned over the course of a long career, like taken style, right? Liam Neeson, how does he phrase it? I've accumulated a few very specific skills over the course of a long career, skills that make me really good at launching software products. So I really like talking to folks. Send me an email. This is my best email address, Patrick at starfighterswithanest.io, because the one without an S is not available. I hate internet domains. Starfighter is going to be launching really soon. If you hire developers or want to get a new job as a developer, it is relevant to your interests. Please again, touch with me. And by the way, one last tactic that you can steal for all of your talks. So we talked about earlier building a permission email list and getting yourself invited to speak at conferences. You should put your permission email list and say, hey, if you like this talk, you can get more here. So you can get more here. I don't really try to sell anything over that anymore, but I do try to write an essay every couple of months. So if that sounds interesting to you, yeah, Moseon over there. Thanks very much for your time.