Vital Statistics

When: September 9th - 12th, 2010
Where: Bloomington, Indiana
What: “The Combine is a display of talent, entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s an event about tech, specifically the people, ideas and environments that drive technology.”
Featured Speakers: See below
Ticket price as of writing: $199 (buy yours) 

Lucky for you, the guys at SproutBox love the town of Bloomington, Indiana, and work hard and pull their connections to draw some of the internet’s top innovators closer to home.

For the first time, they’ve put together a technology conference in Indiana that startup founders are excited to go to. It’s called the Combine and is designed in the spirit of another “midwest” conference called Big Omaha. Since you’ve probably never heard of that either, just picture all the talent, creativity, and innovation of SXSW, but in a setting where you can spend some time getting to know interesting people, instead of spending all your time fighting the throngs of people.

Just check out the lineup of this year’s speakers. Did you ever think you’d find a group of people like this just an hour south of downtown Indianapolis? And I wouldn’t be surprised if they added more before the event.

The price might seem steep to all of you starving founders trying to make something happen, but I promise you there isn’t a better value this close to home.

First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.

Anyway, some of my big takeaways:

“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”

“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.” 

“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”

“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”

For obvious reasons (i.e. Pocket Tales is a social reading game) this link is extremely valuable to me.

The biggest choice you’ll make in looking at this list is what gambits not to implement. Focus is key, especially if your application isn’t a game, so decide what behaviors or outcomes are the biggest priority, and design your “game” elements around those.

This presentation explains how to use Survey.io to measure product/market fit. You will get more out of it if you visit the source of this presentation at Venture Hacks and take a look at the sample survey. You should also consider reading the transcript or listening to the audio that goes along with this presentation.

Mint continues to serve up great real-world examples of how to successful start and operate a new company. Here are a couple gems to demonstrate why you should read this article:

“The Product. Maybe we didn’t have a high viral coefficient but we had a great net promoter score…The delight after a quick setup, and having all those graphs and balances was palpable and emotional.”

“Blog / Original Content. Noah talks about the pre-launch days here but quite simply we focused on building out a unique personal finance blog…Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app.”

If you’ve ever thought about adding an advisor to your startup or you’ve NEVER thought about it because you don’t know what value they can provide, read this presentation. It’s a great intro and answers a lot of questions you probably never thought to ask.

It’s not pretty, but it’s an effective presentation.

“Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!” by Dave McClure

What is it: A very THOROUGH framework for marketing a consumer internet product
Who needs it: Founders of consumer internet products
When you’re going to need this: Writing your business plan and executing your marketing strategy (that means, you need this to plan, and you’re going to need to revisit it to execute)

Great advice for internet startups on how to use metrics to make REAL decisions.