pycon ie keynote 2014 "a techie's adventures in startup land"
DESCRIPTION
30 years ago, I was an engineering graduate starting my first job. Now I'm an entrepreneur using my technical skills to start and grow my business. Here's the story of my journey.TRANSCRIPT
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
A Techie’s Adventures in Startup Land
Rachel Willmer
Slides: http://slideshare.net/rwillmer
Website: http://luzme.com
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
Who Am I?
• Developer & enterpreneur
• Worked for : PAFEC, MARI, Spider Systems
• Customers : London, Rome, New York
• Co-organiser in Edinburgh:
– TechMeetup
– ‘Disruption in Publishing’ Conference
– Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering
Conference
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
Freedom
Freedom by kliefi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
Luzme Is Born
Anguilla beach by Lionel Eric is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
Luzme• Luzme is the ebook price comparison site
• 1000 4000 registered users worldwide
• USA, Canada, UK, Australia, India
• And now Germany and Spain
• 25 35 VMs in 4 7 countries
• 1 dev/ops/support/marketing/sales = ME
• Written in Django/Python
• And now also Meteor/Javascript
• Started in 2008
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
• Switching to OmniGraffle for
architecture walkthrough…
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
And now in words…• Original: webserver + database + cron job
• #1: Extra worker nodes: scraping, API lookups
• #2: Datafeed node
• #3: Overseas workers (geographical location matters!)
• #4: Queueing (celery/rabbitmq)
• #5: Caching (redis)
• #6: Search (elasticsearch)
• #7: Host Monitoring (zenoss)
• #8: Business metrics (logstash, graphite, statsd)
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
My First Job
Strelley Hall by veggiesosage is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
[Photo of Harris Computer]
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
The Two Rules of Business
• Rule #1: Stay in Business
• Rule #2: Profit is a concept; Cash is
reality (note rule #1)
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
My Dot-Com: Intertrader
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
2003: Now What?
• Back to freelancing…
• With some sideprojects for fun:
–WiiFit price checker
– “How Safe Is Your Money”
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
And Then…
ebooks => $$$
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
There’s More Than One Way To Do It
• Wordpress Theme
• Single function website (e.g. wiifit)
• Self-published ebook
– e.g. “How to do <SHINY NEW TECH>”
• Training Course on Udemy
• Self-funded growth (like I’m doing)
• VC-funded growth (but you give up control)
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
And Finally…
One last piece of advice for anyone
thinking of jumping in at the deep
end…
DON’T DO IT!
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
Resources• PODCASTS:
– http://www.earwolf.com/show/startup-school Seth Godin
– http://startupsfortherestofus.com
– http://tropicalmba.com
• BOOKS:
– http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project
• Use “PYCON” discount code for 20% off
– http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com
• Use ‘rachel’ discount code for 20% off
– http://nathanbarry.com/authority/
– http://www.startupbook.net “Start Small, Stay Small”
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PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014
QUESTIONS?
• Slides are available on slideshare
• http://www.slideshare.net/rwillmer
• Twitter: @rwillmer