MicroConf 2019 Recap, Confronting Ageism In Tech, And Badgercon 2020

The guys dish about their experiences at MicroConf. Ben talks about entrepreneurial ADD, Josh explains why the "good old days" at Honeybadger are now, and Starr challenges younger developers to a coding battle royale. There is also a preview of Badgercon (pending wildlife insurance procurement).

Full Transcription:
Ben:                ... and now Ikea, they're coming out with a blind that's going to be home kit enabled, so we can be like, Hey, Siri, open the blinds.

Josh:               So you can have the Vegas experience at home.

Ben:                That's right.

Starr:               Oh my god guys, I can't believe you've been holding back on me. Maybe I would have gone to more MicroConfs if I would have known there would have been some James Bond automatic blind situation happening.

Announcer:          They've been in business for seven years, and they still don't know what they're doing. I guess a podcast seemed natural. Here's FounderQuest.

Starr:               I really enjoyed going the MicroConfs with you guys. It was a lot of fun getting to see everybody, getting to be there with Ben Findley and stuff. It was pretty intense in terms of conferences. I feel like everybody there is way more extroverted than I am, but I got my little connections and networking in.

Ben:                I guess it's probably overall more extroverted than your typical developer conference because a lot of people there are interested in running their own business, and they're already down with the idea of doing marketing and sales. They are more out there than your typical developer might be.

Starr:               Yeah. So, there's two additions right? The starter edition, and the growth edition. The growth edition happens first, which is where you mostly have people like us who already have small businesses, and are reasonably successful. The starter edition comes after that, that's people who are looking to start something up from scratch, and maybe haven't done it before. I wonder if the starter edition captures most of the introverts.

Ben:                That could be.

Starr:               Okay. Let's talk a little about the conference itself. MicroConf is a business conference that focuses on term, micro-size businesses. That means anything from zero employees, you're just starting out as a one person developer. It is a very developer heavy conference. Lots of people there are devs. It could be from zero employees, up to, the large people there maybe have 50 to 100 employees, but that's getting up there. Us, as a five person company, I would say we are pretty normal there. Right?

Ben:                Yeah, I think we fall on the bigger size.

Starr:               Oh really?

Ben:                Yeah, I think most people there are probably a company of one or two.

Starr:               Wow. I'm not used to being the big dog.

Ben:                Yeah it's kind of crazy.

Starr:               How long have you guys been doing this? Ben you've been doing this for decades at this point?

Josh:               He's going to be there soon.

Ben:                Yeah, I think I started in 2011. I was there at the first one. Its been a lot of fun. The first one was kind of neat because you know the lean methodology right? Where you go out and you find the customers first, and then you build whatever they want. Rather than making the product first. The lean methodology was really hot in 2011. So, when they first started MicroConf they were like, do you know what, we don't even know if anybody is going to want to do this, and we don't know if anybody is going to show up. They totally advertised the conference before it even existed, just to see if there was interest. When people we signing up, it was like oh, we should probably put on this conference. So, Rob and Mike gathered everything together and it was a lot of fun. It was at the Rio, or the Hot Rock I can't remember which one.

Starr:               Yeah. This one was in Vegas.

Ben:                Yeah, it was in Vegas. It's been going on since 2011. They actually added European ones as well. I haven't been to any of those. Every six months there is a MicroConf, either in Europe or in Vegas.

Starr:               When it started out it was this kind of revelation. It was this scrappy little thing. People were figuring out, okay well we have this new world we are living in, where you have Ruby, you have Rails, you have Heroku. All these things that allow people to make a software business with very few people, as long as you know how to make software. People were sort of figuring this out and it felt very exciting. Well I didn't go to the first one, but I was sort of in the scene, I was around. And this one was good, but you could tell it's been around for a while. It is a little bit more stable. Most of the people who we met there, and who we hung out with, we've met there and hung out with at other MicroConfs. It's not bad, but how do you guys think it has changed over the years? You've been to more than I have.

Josh:               I was going to mention that, as Ben said, it started out kind of small and grew. Up until recently it was just a single track. I guess it's always been a single track conference, and it still it, but we mentioned they recently split it into two separate events. There's the growth and the starter. We are in the growth now. I have a suspicion that the starter would feel more familiar to us because that's where we spent more of our time in the beginning of MicroConf.

Starr:               Okay, that's a good point. Maybe the people in the starter are getting that new conference experience, like this is all new and exciting for them

Josh:               I would assume that a lot of the people at growth have been there for a while if they have a successful business. Or at least in our case, that's the case.

Starr:               I can see why they split the conference into two because after you've been going to the equivalent of the starter edition for a while, it's all similar stuff. You're like, okay that's great you're telling me how to validate market, but I've already validated my market, I've got customers, I just need to figure out how to get more of them. That's good.

Starr:               Let's not just spend all of our time playing the grumpy old man talking about how things were better when you're younger. Before we were so jaded by reality but hard business, facts, and life. What did you guys really like about MicroConf this year?

Ben:                I think the best part of MicroConf is the people that are there. Hanging out with my tribe, really.

Starr:               Yeah?

Ben:  &nb...