A Whole Lotta Nothing: My Webstock Talk: Lessons from a 40 year old (now with transcript) Here's my talk from Webstock last month (a conference I loved): I will say humbly that it's a good talk on important subjects I've been thinking about for the past several years, but I should explain my sheepish, low-energy delivery. My slot was mid-afternoon, and all morning was spent watching one amazing talk after another, as speakers talked about lofty subjects, tied world history to today's web, and generally blew my mind as they jumped from one abstract concept to the next. I, on the other hand, had this very personal, example-driven, smaller scope real-world kind of talk built around my own history that I hoped could connect with people.
As the morning went on, I increasingly started to worry if my talk was going to resonnate. Anyway, I feel like this might be one of my best talks that I happened to deliver poorly. If you have the patience to put up with my "aw shucks" foot shuffling delivery, I swear it'll have some insights into how to run a web business in this day and age. Just start a experiment, not a damn startup! | Fanchimp blog. You don’t have to go big to succeed: Lifestyle Startups according to Jason Glaspey.
May 2nd, 2011 [Editor: Thanks to Dale Davidson of TrekDek for another guest post.] In the tech community, it has become an axiom that a startup, or any newsworthy startup, should have the goals of building a revolutionary product, receiving venture funding, scaling up massively, and selling the company for hundreds of millions of dollars. As awesome as that sounds, Jason Glaspey, Product Manager at Urban Airship, talked a little bit about the downsides of pursuing this type of path and the benefits of the often ignored lifestyle startup. The title of the talk, “Think Smaller: How smaller, lifestyle startups are more likely to succeed,” was hosted by the Continuous Web Meetup group at the Bagdad Theatre in Southeast Portland and sponsored by Cloudability (thanks for the free beer).
WTF is a lifestyle startup? Good question. Jason pointed out that the goal of the lifestyle startup is to enable and support your… well… lifestyle. Requirements for a lifestyle startup according to Jason. How to Live Cheap. Some big ones were missed, and ones I've had extremely good luck with. Here are mine: Live close to where you go: The vehicular society we have seems more apt to spend $30,000 on a hybrid that gets 40mpg so they can commute 20 miles each way to work, than moving closer to work. In the past 10 years I've always lived within 5 miles of work for a multitude of reasons, but it's probably the smartest thing I've done.
Why? 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) All of the above add up together to make it possible to buy a much cheaper vehicle, or one you really want that you can keep for a long time. Become a self-sufficient repairperson and learn how your stuff works: Many "complex repairs" aren't really that complex, they are simply a set of instructions that need to be followed.
Things are complex, yes, and they can be daunting. On the home front the same is true. See if you can change personal expenses into work benefits: Have a company cell/smartphone AND a personal phone? Another is a work computer. Why you might want to fly solo: “Lifestyle Business” is not a dirty word (well, two) March 23rd, 2012 A lot of startups follow the path of growing incredibly fast and hiring a lot of people and—hopefully—making a lot of money for a lot of people. More often than not, these are the types of companies that grab the Silicon Florist headlines. And at publications that actually matter. But Portland is also home to a ton of successful entrepreneurs who have built amazing “lifestyle businesses.” And they don’t often get the attention they deserve. Justin Miller—whom you may know as @incanus77 and the guy behind Pukka and MapBox—provides a little insight on lifestyle businesses.
Justin spent half a decade dreaming up the perfect solo business while working for others, then another half executing on that plan.