I met Rob Walling of Software By Rob at the Business of Software conference last year, after a couple years of swapping emails.  He and I hit it off, largely since we come from similar places on the “building small profitable software businesses” solution space.  So when he asked if I would fly around the world to speak at MicroConf, a conference he was organizing for small software business, I of course said yes.  It is June 6 and June 7th in Las Vegas, and tickets are still on sale.  (Special promo code: BINGO gets you $100 off.  I don’t get compensated for that.)

I gave away the one free ticket, but feel free to use the above promo code.  I also have a ticket to give away.  It is yours if

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  • you have a small software business with an actual product which sells to actual people
  • you have sold at least one copy
  • you can get yourself to Vegas
  • you can find my address and email me explaining what you hope to get out of the conference

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Offer good to one person, judging based solely on who I think would benefit most from it.

I have not written my speech yet, but intend to make it worthwhile for folks coming there, both in terms of motivation and in terms of teaching stuff they can actually use for their businesses.  I generally tend to talk marketing when it comes to that.

I’m currently kicking around an extended metaphor about icebergs for the talk.  You see, every business is an iceberg: of the value created by the business, much of it is hidden within the company or (at best) exposed to existing customers, and only a small portion peaks above the waterline, outside of the existing community around the business.  This is unfortunate, because both traditional marketing and SEO revolve around maximizing the visible bit of the iceberg.  There are practical ways to do that which work well for software businesses.  I will likely talk about several of them.

If you have any suggestions on things I should absolutely cover, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

If you come to Microconf, talk to me.  I know most of the other speakers and they’re all very personable people.  You should probably talk to them, too.  But this is an explicit invitation: talk to me.  I’m literally flying halfway around the world and I have no agenda item other than talking to you about your software business.  Ask me for advice.  I can’t promise it will be good advice, but I intend to give lots of it.  I’ll be the tall jet-lagged white guy in the bright red Twilio jacket. (Twilio: it’s awesome, you should be using it.  Plus they make awesome red jackets.)