Welcome to Freshview thoughts, a place for our ideas and ramblings about building and supporting a popular web application from Sydney.

Stay in the loop

Dig into a category

Search all posts

Our products

The easiest way for designers to send email newsletters for themselves and their clients.

Mixing with our mentors in Boston

Posted by David Greiner on September 9, 2008 5:46 PM

Last week Ben and I were lucky enough to spend a few days in Boston at the annual Business of Software conference. It takes a special kind of event to get us to fly to the other side of the planet for only two days, but just like last year's event, it was well worth it. The conference is put on by Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software, easily the nicest guy in the business, and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software (yep, that Joel). These are two guys I have enormous respect for. Over the years they have personally taught me a great deal about how to run a software company, and have fun doing it.

We managed to see some great talks from the likes of Seth Godin (of purple cow fame), Jason Fried (a customer, friend and all round nice guy) and Eric Sink (a big inspiration for starting Freshview in the first place). It was also great to see a live usability demo from Steve Krug, which is just the motivation I needed to start including guerilla usability testing in our design process. Just like last year's conference, most of the sessions were inspirational or informative, and gave us plenty to think about.

But, as is the case for most events like this, it's the conversations you have outside the presentations that are the most valuable. It's not every day you can take Jason Fried out for coffee in the morning and then Joel Spolsky out to dinner that night. The web's an amazing thing for learning and sharing, but nothing beats some face to face time with real people. Even if they do tell Boston jokes that fly right over my head.

We also finally got the chance to catch up with Ben Chestnut, founder of the very cool MailChimp. I've been a big fan of Ben's blog for a long time now, and we're both doing some interesting stuff in the email marketing space. We recommend all of our customers who aren't comfortable coding their own emails to check them out, so it was great to finally meet him in the flesh. We also came up with some interesting ways we can work together in the future. Amazing what kinds of ideas surface over a few beers!

Judging by the feedback from other attendees, it looks like the conference will be on again next year, so if you're interested in smart, practical advice on running a software company, it's not one to miss.

4 comments so far

Ralph Willgoss

wrote on September 10, 2008 11:14 AM

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the heads up.

Anything particular you can share with us about what you learnt/took away this time?

thanks!
Ralph

Trent Agnew

wrote on September 10, 2008 12:43 PM

Boston! Sounds like a great time. I hear they have some amazing candy stores over there.

Dave Greiner

wrote on September 10, 2008 4:04 PM

Good question Ralph. There are definitely some things we plan on doing that we'd rather hold off sharing until they are released. There were certainly practical things like how important usability testing really is, what role a product manager plays in a growing company, etc.

But, in a general sense they tie around the message that there's no point building a "good enough" product. Your product has to be "remarkable" in the true sense of the word - something that makes people remark about it to others. It was just the motivation we needed to try a few different things that will help us stand out from the crowd and hopefully help our customers kick ass.