 Yeah, so good morning, everyone. I'm really happy to introduce our first keynote speaker Rachel Volmer who She will tell you about she survived 20 years without having a real job and yeah, so please give a big hand for Rachel Buenas dias Me gusto mucho esta a bilbao. That is the end of my Spanish Okay, so as my talk title implies I'm gonna tell you how I have survived 20 years without Having had a proper job by which I mean I've obviously I've been working, but I haven't had a salary that somebody else hasn't supplied to me for 21 years now So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to teach to tell you some of the lessons that I've learned over this last couple of decades and to potentially give you some ideas about Things you might want to think about yourself so this talk is really aimed at people who Are in a job, but would rather not be because I have the pleasure that almost every day I get up and go to work. I Look forward to it and I look forward to it because I've built the work life that I want doing the kind of work that I want and Sometimes that's made me a fair bit of money and sometimes it hasn't but nothing compares to the pleasure of Actually looking forward to going to work So this is for you if you're in a job and you'd rather not be at all or if you would just like to perhaps Make some money out of the side project that you've been working on I Have some thoughts to share with both of those types of people But who am I now? It may be hard to imagine but that person on the photograph is me 20 years ago And if you think oh God Rachel what happened to you I have to tell you I didn't look like that then either It's amazing what a professional photographer can do but that was To an extent that's summed up where I'd got to with my my dot-com company But I'm gonna start at the beginning. I graduated 30 odd years ago as an engineering student It was the end of a recession Which made it hard for most people to to get jobs But I was lucky because I was an engineering student and I had learnt to code It was very easy to get get a job because there weren't many programmers around at the time So I started off working for an engineering company writing software lasted there a couple of years and then I went to a Research Institute which is where I first discovered the internet So I've actually been on the internet for 30 years, which is I think longer than some of you have been alive But I can remember the days before the internet So I lasted a couple of years doing that I learned a lot of interesting technology related stuff But then I thought well no this working for the people, you know, it's not doing it for me So I made my first foray into Self-employment I left that company to be a freelance contractor Again back then it was very easy to be a contractor because my basic pitch to anybody that was thinking of hiring me was No, I don't know how to do it. Give me a week. Let's see how far I get and that worked every time But I was not content with just being a contractor even though it was a very easy way to make a fair bit of money At the time I had still I've got the idea that at some point I wanted to do something bigger than that So I started working on This the skills and the tools that I'd need to make a success out of that It occurred to me that if I was going to start a company and start writing business plans Then I would need to know about money Not just spending it but what it meant in a business plan context. So I did an accounting diploma part-time in the evening and at the end of that year I'd got a certificate but more importantly I Could write a business plan and I could understand the figures in other people's proper and loss accounts balance sheets that kind of thing Which turned out to be really interesting and useful later on But I didn't start that company just then I kept contracting and Then my plan fell slightly awry because one of the companies I went to work for as a contract was a company called spider systems And they were wonderful. It was a terrific company, but after a while they said, you know Rachel We like you. We don't like your contracting rates. Come and work for us. So I did five years I spent there as a Programmer manager engineering manager sales Support person and that was that was all terrific fun. We were working on internet related stuff in the early 90s And it was just a ball because everything was was taking off and then in the mid 90s the internet became more of a public property and It went Now about that time spider this brilliant company. I was working for got taken over by an American company So I thought this is the time to leave. This is the time. I'm gonna set up my own do my own thing So so I left and I had an interest at the time in digital cash So I started a digital cash company in the mid 90s which in some respect was a great idea because it was People thought it was very interesting as a concept, but as a business idea. I have to tell you it was a dreadful idea It was 20 years ahead of its time if I'd had that idea two years ago I'd be a gazillionaire by now, but 20 years ago. They just wasn't the market for it but anyway, I started this company and The company was called inter trader if you look them up on the website now The domain is used by spread betting company, but that's not my company Mine my idea was to have a digital cash exchange server. So no matter what Digital cash you were paying with whether it was e-gold or Digi gold or cybercash or Mondex or any of the other things that were floating around Then that my cash box would take your money and exchanged into something more solid like pounds or dollars So because that was a concept that seemed to attract some attention. I raised money. I got a board of directors I had a team of great staff to work with me on that and I got a lot of press Partly because my concept was a was an interesting one that was in Scotland at the time. We had a really good comm Scene going on, but we didn't have very many women doing it So just by that chance I stood out a fair bit, which is why I ended up on the cover of this magazine It wasn't because they particularly wanted to write a huge article about me the if you looked inside the magazine It's one column But they wanted to stand out on the on the on the shelves. So what easy way to do that put a woman on a cover So I'm very grateful for that because I got this lovely photo to show for it But that kind of thing was fun, but it was distracting from the Main job of actually finding customers that wanted what I did and making money from it So those of you who remember the dot boom dot.com boom times you'll remember it was wild people were raising money for really crazy ideas and Then suddenly around the 2000s year mark the crash happened and suddenly the dot-com boom became a dot-com bust I still had stuff. I still have an office. We managed to keep that Idea running for another three years after the crash, which I was pretty proud of But in the end I just had to admit defeat It was not going to be possible to turn my brilliant idea and my fantastic customer base into a viable business So sadly I closed it down Which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do But it meant I was free to go off and do other things. So this is takes us to about 2003 Now what I did after that was I licked my wounds for about six months when you put your heart and soul into building a business Walk away from it. It's like a divorce or a death So it took about six months before I felt capable of doing pretty much anything else after that But then I went back to doing a bit of freelancing I went back to doing working some fascinating projects one of them was an open-source project Which I got paid for and I can talk about that a little later if you're interested in that business model But to this idea that I actually wanted to build something again and This time it happened more by chance because I was trying various side projects as a way of re-skilling myself because the problem I had at the time was I'd worked on two big projects. One of them was covered by NDAs So I couldn't talk about it to anybody which has made it hard to use on a CV The second one I was working on this open-source project, which was OpenPGPSDK Phenomenon which is cryptography so I could talk about it all I wanted to but nobody would understand So I needed to put something on my CV that I could show What it was I did and in fact what ended up happening as the side projects became the CV I haven't actually written a CV since 1986 and I'm hoping I never will have to again So I wrote side projects. I wrote little I did a website called HowSafeIsYourMoney.co.uk Which made it easier to understand one of the government websites To find out whether your money was safe in the banks I wrote a website that was a price checker for the Wii Fit when it came out I wrote lots of small things like that, but one of my big loves is ebooks And so I wrote a little ebook price checker and I made it into a website and it was the worst name I have ever heard in my life. It was called ebook price.info Which it did what it said on the tin, but oh my god, that's an awful name and it didn't look very good either It was really ugly. I'm not good at design. I'm good at computer system design I'm just not good at graphic design But people started using it and I thought that's interesting And then one day when I was doing I was working on a contract for somebody I got an approach from one of the five biggest publishers in the world saying we Want to buy your software? The reaction was Oh, that's interesting and then my second reaction was hell no nobody's looking at that code It's not an assailable condition. It's just stuff. I've hacked together But being an entrepreneur, I didn't say hell no. I said, hmm. That's very interesting I can't sell you the software But what I'll do is license you the data that you need which turned out to be a great answer because for the next 18 months, I think it was I supplied this publisher Data that they needed to use for their own strategic purposes about what price movements were doing in the ebook Market and they were paying me handsomely for it. So I was working full-time on a contract for the BBC I was working full-time on this. It was it was a very financially rewarding time in my my life And to a large extent the money that I took in from that period is what I'm still using to fund and invest in myself For what I'm trying to do with that site now So this is the the site that stands now and this is what I'm trying to make a full-time Viable business It's got sites called luz me.com. It's an ebook price comparison site I encourage you to check it out if you do it you'll see it doesn't actually look like this at the moment This is the new version that's coming up But what I'm trying to do with this is different to what I did with inter-trader because inter-trader was the old Style venture-backed model of growing a business where I had to write a business plan I had to convince other people of the merits of that plan. I then had to Get the office, but I find the staff Get a board of directors all those all those joyous things with this I'm trying to do it a different way what I want to do is not go down that route of funding it Through other people's money until I am convinced I've got a scalable model because if I do that It means I'll get a much better price on the valuation when I raise the money the next time But also it means I'm giving myself the luxury of trying things out I'm allowing myself to try and fail with the various ideas. I'm using in this in this project Before I have other people to tell me I can't do that. But that's enough about me. I Want to now talk about you and what you could do because I think we as technologists are Extraordinary lucky to be here at this time because of the Internet because of the globalization that's going along we have the opportunity to build stuff in our back bedroom by ourselves and Turn it into profitable Businesses which can replace a full-time job or just enhance the life that you have by doing it part-time because we don't need to hire a Staff because we can build it ourselves. We don't have to have an office because you can Use a virtual server on Amazon or on Google or wherever. I think this is a terrific opportunity And it's one of the things I would like for people to to start Contemplating what they will do because to my mind We're at a change in the way we do work the future of work is not going to be what it was in the past We don't have the likelihood of having a full-time job even if we wanted one for the rest of our lives The nature of it all is becoming much more a portfolio career where you do one job Followed by another contracts that you take on maybe for a day or a week not for years or decades so Assuming that you have some technical knowledge about a thing or you have an idea These are some of the things that you can do With it now the big choice you need to make is are you going to build a product or are you going to run a service? And they both have merits. It's a very good idea. I believe if you're not familiar with the idea of running a business or having Something that you are building that you are making and you are selling Starting with a one-off product is a much better idea than trying to run a service from day one You can write an e-book in a week In fact one of the books I'm going to recommend later was written over the course of a weekend The reason why it's better is it means that you can go through the whole process of having the idea Building the thing Going out there marketing it and getting somebody to pay for it Without having to put in place the support costs of running it thereafter And it's in really important that if you're going to go down this route that you experience the whole Journey from idea through to sale and ongoing support because it is so easy to have the idea have the fun of building it and then go How I'm gonna sell it now. I don't haven't thought about that bit. That's the important bit if you don't Make the step of finding somebody that wants to buy it preferably before you've built it And then selling it to them. You don't have a business. You've got a hobby and That's perfectly valid thing to do As long as you realize that that's what you're doing if you think that you're trying to run a business But you are in fact having a hobby if you're not gonna have an enjoyable experience because you will run out of money So the one-off things you can do as product you could write an e-book. I Have got an example of somebody that's made a lot of money out of doing that later You could write a course so if for example, you happen to be the expert in I don't know Jango Jango pipes or whatever That's a terrific idea. It's new technology that people will want to know about somebody should be writing that book or that course offering the online training So this is a product is great for a side project or a first project But where the bigger more long-term money Seems to be in is in service Related businesses because then you get the holy grail of the recurring revenue that every month a Customer is gonna pay you money every month The nature of that though is you're likely to get support costs. It's a bit. It's a bigger operation that you need to think about and You have to Commit to being available to do that support 24 by 7 365 days a week. So if you're solo founder like me You might not want to do that because Because you might want to go on holiday or come to conferences But the idea that you have a service or a website that's sitting there making money whilst you do things You want to do is one as an idea that works for me very well And then the other thing that you can do is to publish now publishing used to mean writing a book or writing a blog But now it also means doing a video blog doing a YouTube Podcasts on that on the subject Now and this is great but not just because you can potentially monetize it to make to make money out of what you're doing but by Doing that publishing by producing that podcast. What you do is position yourself as an authority You may be an expert. You may be the world-class expert in a particular field, but if nobody knows about it Why will they contract with you? Why would they ask you for the consulting? Why would they? Ask you to fix their problems So and there's various ways to monetize and I could do an entire session just on the question of monetization But here's it's just a few headings direct sale Writing a book used to be Something you did for an official publisher like a Riley now. It's becoming much more common that people self-publish the technical books For many reasons one of which is you don't have to ask permission You don't have to convince anybody else. It's a good idea. You can just get out there and do it But also the time to market is much faster. I Have a friend who's written a book who completed it last year. It's ready to go but the Traditional publisher isn't actually going to release it till the book fair next year now That's two years of no income from that book that is ready Self-published he'd be able to he'd be earning from it right now Affiliate commission is something which can work well if you do it in a way, which is not cheesy So if you buy a book through my site for example, then I get an affiliate commission from Amazon from Apple It doesn't cost you any more, but I make the money for connecting you with that with that vendor I could say if it's done well, it can work nicely. Some sites tend to just push things at you Whether they're good Whether you want them or not and then I find that cheesy. I don't like that Same with advertising advertising can be a very good way of monetizing a website or service But only when it's done. Well, you don't want to have the advertising become the point It's supposed to match the offering of what you're trying to to sell and find something that's useful Sponsorship is something that's happening a lot with podcasts at the moment. So if you are writing for example Meteor is a subject I'm going to come to later that they do a podcast where it's sponsored by the kind of company that would host a meteor website so What you're doing by providing that podcast is finding them the audience that they want so they can do a very targeted advert As a form of sponsorship on that podcast to people who exactly the target audience for who they want to reach And then the other thing which you can Package up and sell which is what I've also made some money from with the the book side is data analytics So because I have this website I have a lot of data about what people actually do when they're buying an e-book and that data by itself is a valuable product Now I will say to anybody that's some suddenly thinking I use lozmy. What about the privacy aspect? I don't sell individual data. I sell bulk aggregated data. So I can say for example This book that you've never heard of is racing up through people's wish lists But I want to give you some real examples of people that like you who have gone down this path and made some serious money from it So people think you can't make money out of writing a book this example for me says otherwise Meteor is a web framework for doing real-time data The documentation that came with it wasn't particularly good although the technology was fantastic So these two people Sasha grief and Tom Coleman decided to write a book and a website to support that They packaged it such that you could choose what level of book you wanted to buy So I think there was a $29 option which was just the book There was a $59 book which was the Which was the version of the book with some training videos, and then there was the the high-end Option where you got customized support or something like that So there's a case study that they did with gumroad, which was the company. They were selling it through $300,000 in 18 months from a book It's gonna be more than that now because the book is still necessary to understand how to use meteor It's also if you're thinking of writing a book I would recommend you check out their website because it is the best example I have found of how to write a technical book it's just beautiful and It's the framework that I would choose to use if I were writing one But $300,000 one book self-published People say you can't start a business a real business if you're just a solo founder. Well, does anybody here use balsamic? Yeah, Peldi started out in his back bedroom Last time I've seen some public figures on this Annual profits running at two million. He's got a staff about 26 now and they all work remotely This is a beautiful example of how somebody Found a sweet spot in the market Built something that he wanted to use himself started selling it Listen to his customer base and developed it He's had at least one offer to buy that business which he's chosen not to take because he Thinks he can do better for his customer base by staying as an independent company, but it shows what you can do One person two million dollars People say you can't do this unless you live in the USA Well, I have to say I Can say that that's wrong because my biggest customer when I was doing the book data Service was in New York This but publisher he was an American publisher I've never even met them and yet I made I think about a hundred thousand dollars from that contract With company I've never met If you follow Hacker news you might have heard of a guy called patio 11 Patrick McKenzie He has run a number of businesses. He's awesome by the way if you get the chance to follow anything He says he really knows his stuff He was running a successful small business self started called bingo card creator. He lives in Japan He then started doing some he discovered that he had a real talent for marketing Software products and so he was being hired by people like Fog Creek software and major US companies to help them sort out what their strategy should be whilst living in Japan and Here's the thing when when People start to think about trying to build something for themselves and make money from it the most common reaction is but I can't I can't do that I can't do that because oh Whatever list of excuses reasons that you may have I Don't believe that I believe that anybody in this room could if they wanted to I'm not saying that you should I'm just saying that if you wanted to you have the skills To be able to do this and it doesn't matter how introverted you are. It doesn't matter how Busy you are it doesn't matter what your reason for for going. Oh, no, I can't do that You can yes, you can and I want to show you an example here, which somebody I find totally inspiring John Morrow is paralyzed from the neck down He has to have 24 by 7 support to do the basic things of living and yet Despite being paralyzed with muscular atrophy from from the neck down. He has managed to build a successful business He's his particular talent is in copywriting And blogging so he he runs courses. He writes a data Right services about how to be a better blogger And he wants that company from his wheelchair he in all normal Forms of business people would say he was probably unemployable and yet He's employed himself and he's made a really good business and a terrific life from from that So don't think you can't do it if he can do it you can So I have a few final thoughts which Don't really fit into a particular category But it's okay to start small In fact, I'd encourage it because what you need to do is to learn the business of being in business You need to understand what it means To file your tax returns on time because if you're doing a corporate business The rules are different than if you're self-employed if you're that registered It's different than if you're not if you're doing business in if you're in it say in the UK And you're doing business Dealing with businesses in the rest of the EU you've got a whole different level of bureaucracy to to cope with those things Matter as much as being as good as you can for the thing you are trying to sell So start small, but finish One of the books that I recommend is by a woman called Amy Hoy. I don't know if you've heard of her amazing woman her book is called Just ship Because what you learn by shipping a product to completion and having a happy customer is something you cannot buy In a book you can only learn that experience by doing it And the only way you do it is by doing it through to actually finishing the job And it's okay to fail Now I had a business inter trader the comm that would be a failure by any bodies At anybody's criterion Eight years. I think I've raised about half a million pounds for that In that eight years we made profit in two months That's not a successful business However, the business failed the idea failed But I did not fail I am not a failure because I had a business which did not work what I had was a learning experience Most businesses don't get it right the first time And this is one of the things we especially technology related Business founders sometimes struggle with Because we're used to getting everything right, you know the nature of coming through the exam system at school when you do Science-related subjects is you expect to be able to get 90 to 100% on the exams because you know how to do the mass question the physics question and Suddenly the real world is not like that The real world you have to do Experiments that don't work to find the ways through that do work So it is okay to fail Just don't make the same mistake twice And it's okay to think big you may just want to start writing little wordpress plug-in just to try that experience That's fine But always having it in back of your mind thinking well, where could I take this if I was going to try and do this 10 times bigger? What would the next step be to do that? How do I get 10 times bigger 100 times bigger? Because there's usually a way and as a small nimble tech-related company You have the ability to move much faster than some of the behemoths of the corporate world so you can take advantage of that If you have a choice between B2B and B2C which means business-to-business or business-to-consumer Choose business-to-business every time and I'll tell you why because they are used to spending money Whereas most consumers don't like spending money In the book world if you try to sell an e-book that's a fiction We're now conditioned to understand that an e-book on Kindle should be 99 pence $2 cheap cheap cheap If you're doing a business related book and you're selling directly It is perfectly acceptable to be to be selling it for $29 $59 $200 the most expensive book has ever been sold through my website Was 1250 It was I think it was a set of building regulations And the other thing about when you when you're starting up you get to decide what it is you're doing nobody's gonna tell you you decide What kind of business you want which means choose the customers you want and price accordingly so if you Make the choice to have high-end expensive customers are willing to spend large amounts of money with you Don't price cheap Because if you price cheap you'll get cheap customers and charge more this is the thing that Patrick McKenzie has taught me over the years He has this mantra charge charge more First of all you have to charge because until you've taken somebody's money But it's not your friend your mother you saw your sister whatever a person that you do not know has handed over their credit card Online to you and you've taken their money until you've done that You don't know whether anybody actually wants what you've got so you must charge because that's the only way of validating your idea and Then charge more Because nobody charges enough to start with because you think no, how can I have built something that's worth? this amount of money double your prices Triple your prices ten times your prices see what happens I got taught when I was out on sales trips with a spider by a salesman if he didn't lose 50% of his sales Deals on price it wasn't charging enough and I found that really interesting idea that it's okay Not to win the sales deal to make that work You have to have enough of a pipeline that you can try out that experiment But the higher you can put your prices the better service you can deliver to your customers And you'd be surprised what they can pay When I did the book deal with the publisher I haven't got a clue how much to charge and so when we agreed what I was going to deliver He'd asked me for the price. I was humming and earning about it. I said, I really don't know how to how to price for this And he went so I left it to him Inadvertently and he said look we need to get this sorted. How about I pay you what I pay the ad words people so And then he named a price which was like at least three times what I would have thought of charging So I thought great. Yep. I can work with that Showed if I'd left it to myself I would have totally under under price what I was doing and My final thought well, I have actually one other thought which isn't on this which is If you've got any idea about going into business, whether it's a side project or a big Big startup Practice presentation skills You're gonna need them and this is one of the common things that we as techies feel very unhappy about doing standing up here Speaking to a room full of people is really it's scary But it's also fun and you can learn how to do this. I mean I am a very shy person I'm a very introverted person But most people who know me don't think that because they think I stand on a stage by myself talking to an audience of hundreds That must be an outgoing extrovert I've just taught myself How to do this and so I would fully encourage you if you've never spoken in public before start now You doesn't have to be a talk like this Go to your local meet-up. We run one in Scotland. We're always trying to encourage people to a five minute ten minute talk Sign up for Harold's writing talks if you've never done one before it's a it's a brilliant way to start because what can go wrong? You know five minutes anybody can talk about something they care about for five minutes Give it a go and then you learn how to solve the problems of actually doing a presentation like for example I know my knees get nervous So mine and my knees my knees shake quite a lot when I'm feeling uncomfortable But then I wear loose trousers, so you don't know that because you can't see them shaking Things like that you learn by doing and this is the common thing about being in business You only learn by doing so get out there and start doing it My final thought start amazing list. This is the single most useful business tool that you have got Whether it's we've written a technical book whether you're doing a service-based startup You want to have a mailing list of the people who have shown any interest at all in what you're doing So you can continue to have the conversation with them I have a I had a whole load of other things on to say but I think I'm out of time So what I'm sure do is moving in over to questions But what I'd like to say is that for people who are in the other room Who I believe are watching through the video link if you don't have the opportunity to put your question to me now But you do want to you can find me on Twitter. You can find me in a telegram app I'll be around till Wednesday, so just come and have a chat with me if you've got enough interest I can set up a session in the open spaces And if anybody's watching this on YouTube that offer goes to YouTube Just get in touch our Wilma on Twitter our Wilma. I think on the telegram app and I If you if I have said anything here that touches a nerve that makes you go and try something I'd love to know about it. Please. Let me know what you do and Do something Thank you very much. Yeah Thank you very much Rachel