…and all I got was an entire day full of great insight (and a great t-shirt).
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday at the Times-Union Center in Jacksonville attending LessConf. This was a day-long event put on by local company LessEverything, makers of LessAccounting, LessTimeSpent, and a host of other products and applications. Billed as “A conference for marketers, designers, coders, business people, freelancers or anyone who wants to be inspired by amazing business people,” it did not disappoint.
Except at first, when we were all sitting in the theater and it seemed like nobody really had it together or knew what was going on. Steve finally threw it to the audience for jokes while we waited for the T-U folks to get the audio and stage set up. I told my whale joke, someone told a penis joke, and it threatened to quickly go down hill from there. Luckily, everything was ready and we moved on to the first speakers.
Des Traynor & Eoghan McCabe of Contrast.ie taught us some great Irish words and phrases, then gave a clinic in conventions and when and how to use them, and when and how to break them. Excellent commentary all the way through, punctuated by great examples.
Colin Devroe from Viddler seemd to have a lot of fun with his talk. Steve and Allan issued a series of challenges across the Twitterverse in the weeks leading up to the conference (“Colin eats lightning”, “Colin juggles chainsaws”), and Colin took them on in high style, tongue planted firmly in cheek, via a series of comical vids. I thought they were great, and I enjoyed his discussion of how, why and when to measure success.
David Hauser of Grasshopper gave a great talk about impact marketing such as his company’s infamous chocolate covered grasshopper campaign and their more recent Entrepreneurs Can Change the World video. Super insight and information from David, including specifics such as cost details on both campaigns that really drove his points home.
Kevin Hale from Wufoo had an interesting take on how to woo new customers (as if you were dating them) and how to keep existing customers (as if you were married to them). Sounds silly, I know but surprisingly, he made it work, demonstrating how every communication - welcome email, login message, customer service response - is part of the whole formula for love between you and your customers.
Mike McDerment, founder of Freshbooks, talked about how his company came to be and some of the trials and tribulations he went through. This included some discussion of his company’s rebranding and how that change revolved around deciding who they were as a company and who they were after as customers, which I found enlightening.
Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, talked about profitability and how focusing on your customers and their experience with your site is key to getting there. His discussion about how he came to sell CD Baby and what he’s done since then was engaging, and I was more than a little awestruck by his generosity in putting most of the money from that sale into a charitable trust for music education.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a force of fucking nature. I first heard of GaryVee when I saw his infamous email inbox video (recently updated), and he’s well-known through his WineLibraryTV web show, and wow is he something in person. Gary is Mr. Personal Brand and he preaches it non-stop. Let me tell you - if you don’t think this guy is authentic - you’re wrong. If you’re one of the 22% of people that Gary knows think he’s a fucking douchebag - you’re wrong. Whether you’re awesome or you suck, he’ll tell you straight up. From his own remarks (which I don’t think were even prepared), to the manner in which he answered every audience question, it was clear that Gary is genuinely interested in helping people to become as successful as he has become.
After speaking, each presenter was subjected to a battery of questions from Steve, the first one in every case being “How much money do you make? How much money does your company make?” It’s a great question - you not only want to know the answer, but since you generally don’t expect an answer, you want to see how the speaker deals with it. For my money, Gary Vaynerchuk and David Hauser were the most straight-up about it, Mike McDerment and Kevin Hale the most elusive, and nobody completely dodged the question.
Steve’s other questions for each speaker were insightful, and he elicited some great moments of honesty and clarity from people who might not otherwise have shared as much. He pointedly followed up when he thought they might be holding back some interesting nugget of wisdom or emotion, and this was by far my favorite part of the entire experience, even more so than at the end when everyone came back up on stage and the audience was able to ask questions of the panel as a whole.
The conference only cost me a couple of bills, and parking was only $10 for the day, so in that light the minor items of dissatisfaction are hardly worth mentioning. Steve at one point said something like “next year it won’t be this cheap, you guys got a deal”, and I’m sure we did. I think they were hoping for 600 attendees, and it looks like they might have gotten 200 - 250, so you know they came up short somewhere. That being said, the one thing I would have liked to see was some beverages available throughout the day. I paid the little old lady at the mini-bar $3 for a small bottle of water, and that kind of shit always bugs me.
Other big pluses, for me, were the chance to sit down with the Contrast.ie guys during lunch, the free copy of Gary’s new book Crush It!, and the fact that this was a local event to Jacksonville that didn’t require me to be away from home and family for several days. I’m not sure I would have traveled to LessConf had it not been local - besides Gary, I didn’t recognize any of the speakers beforehand. Steve and Allan both mentioned at the end of the day that the next LessConf will probably be somewhere else, which is a little disappointing, but the locations they threw out as options sounded geographically close, and given my overall high level of satisfaction with this year’s event, I’m sure I’ll find a way to be there for #2. Oh, and the conference shirts glow in the fucking dark!
Great job Steve and Allan!
