DemoCamp 8
July 26, 2006 – 10:42 amThey do seem to be coming thick and fast, don’t they? Last night’s DemoCamp was held at No Regrets once again; turnout was down a little from the previous one, but I blame that on it being cottage season. Presentations were:
- WildApricot: a web-based tool to help small organizations (think a local soccer league) handle memberships, registrations, fees, and events. The presentation came complete with apricots
- JobLoft: the hands-down hit of the evening, this started last September (!) as a student project at Ryerson, and is now a four-person company with real customers. It’s a job-finding service aimed at young people looking for work in the fast food and retail industries. The site is very slick, and they’ve done an excellent job of integrating geographical information, RSS feeds, and all the other useful bits of Web 2.0. I think the crowd was blown away by how professional it looked, especially considering how quickly it was put together, and how young its authors are.
- Filemobile: helps bloggers manage pictures, video, etc. The presenter didn’t seem very excited about his own stuff.
- Languify: a collaboration between John Greene (Nuvvo) and Nicolaas Handojo, an undergrad student at U of T, who did the work as a 49X project. Languify is a web-based system for managing the translation files used to internationalize and localize applications. Nuvvo is putting is up as a service to the community, in the hopes that volunteers will use it to provide translations for various pieces of open source software. This presentation was part of Nicolaas’s coursework; he passed
- Mike McDerment of FreshBooks.com closed the evening with a never-quite-coherent lecture (with slides—sssss…) about the importance of funnels. Or something. I was hoping he’d show us how to implement some of the ideas from Peterson’s Web Site Measurement Hacks, but he didn’t.
The coolest thing for me all evening was the fact that DemoCamp9 is already full, are are four of the five slots for September’s DemoCamp10, and David Crow didn’t know. That’s as good a definition of success as I can think of…
7 Responses to “DemoCamp 8”
I’m with you…not crazy about how that went - and I can only blame myself for that. I was trying to impress upon the developers and non-business, tech types in attendance the importance of understanding your business in terms of a funnel…guess I blew it.
That said, sounds like you were more interested in a talk about analytics software…could have done that, and will be hosting a tele-seminar with the CEO of ClickTracks.com on that subject this fall (we’ll post it on the FreshBooks blog) - but I think that as a topic, analytics is too general and untargeted for the demo camp audience - though I could be wrong - and as you saw last night from some of the audience answers in the (way too short) questions period, not all hacks work in all cases. Hence my effort to make one point: think in funnels.
By way of feedback…can you be a little more specific about what you wanted? Or maybe, what you expected?
By Mike McDerment on Jul 26, 2006
Thanks for the rave review, Greg! We all loved it and linked it from our press page at ( http://www.jobloft.com/press.aspx ). From all the recent press coverage we received, I’ve actually gotten some of my other partners excited about starting our own blog (i just installed wordpress today)…and they’ve never blogged before, not to mention 2 of my partners just have recently discovered RSS.
As for Mike’s presentation, I was actually really amused at his creativity for his ’scrolling slides’. Personally I attribute the quirks in his presentation to the amount of alcohol consumed while waiting for others to present.
However, I’d have to say that I learned a lot….i remember checking the stats on our Google Analytics account to see how our funnels at each step were performing for each of our 4 goals, during the presentation. I’ve vowed last night to patch up any potential ‘leaks’ in ours.
By Lee Liu on Jul 26, 2006
I wouldn’t be so hard on Mike’s presentation.
Having talked to him on several occassions (and over several beers) on topics of SEO and analytics, I was no stranger to what he presented. But I imagine that many people in the audience have not thought too deeply about measuring the increments between traffic and dollars as he suggests.
If you can accept his casual style, there’s a lot of experience and insight in there.
By John Philip Green on Jul 27, 2006
[In response to Mike's comments]
> That said, sounds like you were more interested in a talk about
> analytics software…could have done that, and will be hosting a
> tele-seminar with the CEO of ClickTracks.com on that subject this fall
> (we’ll post it on the FreshBooks blog) - but I think that as a topic,
> analytics is too general and untargeted for the demo camp audience -
I think the funnels idea is important, but I think that particular
audience would have been more likely to follow something that started with
“here are some tools, and what they count”, then moved to “here’s what
you’re allowed to infer from those counts” and “and here’s how you fix
it”.
By Greg Wilson on Jul 28, 2006
Thanks Greg…in that light maybe I was too focused with MY intended audience. I was aiming at people who are running or planning to build web services - certainly not everyone in the room and therefore I guess I was not being all that inclusive. On the upside, 2 of the four presenters have since contacted me for assistance in improving their funnel, so I guess I struck a chord…and that does not include the JobLoft guys
Having said all of that, more context - as you suggest - would have gone a LONG way to bringing everyone along. I will learn for this. Also, thanks for your email with your more personalized feedback - clearly not interrupting myself is something I need to work on. I will; thanks again.
By Mike McDerment on Jul 28, 2006
By the way…a more coherent version of that presentation is now available on here:
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/how-to-measure-the-success-of-your-web-app
By Mike McDerment on Aug 2, 2006