Business of Software Podcast

Derek A/B tests his possible talks with the audience before talking about how and why he grew one of the most successful online music distribution businesses in the world. Why did he sell it and why has he given the money away?

What’s the primary goal of your website? Not to sell software. With most visitors returning multiple times before making a purchase, your primary goal should be to draw visitors back to your site. In this talk, Rob looks in-depth at why this is the case, and how to make it happen.

Jason has been worried that too many people take A/B Testing too seriously, or at least take it seriously without understanding what it can do for your business. He is worried that not enough people know when to use AB Testing and when you should do something else. In this talk, he makes the case for optimising for the big wins in any start up, before you start to dig too deep into data: “When you’re a small company you need to seek very large outcomes from any optimization because any subtle things like a 10% increase or whatever you literally can’t measure them”.

Kathy takes a deep dive into the psychology of motivation and look at simple but powerful tools to help us think about and create products, services, support, and marketing. But secrets to motivation are counter-intuitive. Typically we struggle to get and keep our users motivated by trying to ADD motivation, when the real solution is to find and fix what’s BLOCKING the motivation they already have (or easily could have). We can use these tools to help new, existing, and even potential users find and keep the kind of motivation that’s strong and sustainable. While this talk focuses on *user* motivation, the tools apply to helping our employees, kids, and ourselves as well.

Dharmesh is obsessed by code and making customers happy. In this talk at Business of Software 2010, Dharmesh talks about why venture capital is neither necessary, nor evil, how value is created, why user experience is EVERYTHING and how Hubspot developed its key metric, the ‘CHI’ – Customer Happiness Index.

The inbound dream: Every sale you make comes to you magically through the internet with no human touch. Does that mean you can’t do better? Is there another way to more sales? Steli has accelerated sales in some of the fastest growing Silicon Valley startups as well as growing his own SaaS business, Close.io. Steli offers some proven techniques to grow your sales revenue and improve your sales processes. You can apply many of the same ideas to get things done in your own organization, regardless of your role. As Dan Pink said, ‘To Sell Is Human‘.

Rand Fishkin, Founder, now Wizard of, Moz gave a very honest and open talk at BoS Europe this year reflecting on what he could have told his younger self. We’ll let Rand provide some context for the talk from his blog post about it but take it from us, it will both make you smarter and move you. A talk that is not just about SEO and Inbound marketing but the entrepreneurial journey. Thanks to Rand and Geraldine for sharing this story.

Jennifer Aaker gives a talk on how we can achieve happiness, and how the pursuit of that is a miserable business.

This is probably one of the most important talks you will ever hear if you are an entrepreneur in any discipline. Professor Clayton Christensen talks models of disruptive innovation, what the job of your product is and explains why there will always be room for disruptive innovation an entrepreneurs in the world. Trust us, you just don’t want to miss this talk.

Difficult Conversations for Growing Companies. Every business person faces hard conversations at some point in their growth. One of Paul Kenny’s best talks at Business of Software Conference. Not about sales, but about the challenges that everyone faces in growing a business. He discusses why having those difficult conversations, with co-founders, co-workers, employees, employers, partners are so difficult to have. More importantly, he offers some excellent, practical advice about how you can make the hard stuff easier and more productive. Equally applicable in times of growth or trouble.