Employees Suck

Employees Suck - Presentation Transcript

Employees Suck

This presentation will start shortly. (I promise it won’t suck)

This presentation can be downloaded from: http://slideshare.net/johnbuckman

This presentation is under a Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I can be reached at: john@magnatune.com

This speech is entitled:

Employees Suck

managing is no fun

Coordinating talented & motivated people.

Now that’s fun.

ﬁring is no fun

permanent employees are mostly unneeded

changing circumstances demand new skills

instead of retraining employees, get new contractors for your current projects.

but note: virtual cooperation is very difﬁcult

Hollywood does ﬁne without employees

Bosses suck even more

Nobody can work 8h straight

Talented people are 10x more productive

but paid, at most, 3x as much

and normally they’re paid only 20% more

you’re usually paid less than your boss.

why!!?!?!

employee = mostly dumb-work

employee = very few satisfying tasks

why be clever?

why do your best work?

paid by the hour

rather than paid for your contribution

solution: quit & make intellectual “goods”

solution: and sell them for their true value.

“good enough” is rewarded when you’re an employee

“great work” is rewarded when you’re selling the product itself

Do you enjoy your life?

Do you enjoy your work?

Do you want kids?

Do you like learning?

Do you want to get paid for what your work is actually worth?

Steps to self-employment

Think of lots of ideas. Write them down.

Do nothing.

For a while.

3 months later, are they still good ideas?

Explain your best idea to a friend in a noisy place, while they’re drinking.

Do they have an instant positive reaction?

Next, think about your product.

Make an elevator pitch

Write the ﬁrst line of your press release

Write the ﬁrst paragraph of your home page

Make the home page

Hunt for unique names

Figure out how to do the idea really, really cheaply.

So cheaply that you don’t need anybody else’s money.

Show a mockup, then a demo, to people who might buy it.

Launch before you’re ready.

Pitch bloggers.

If nobody cares, maybe your idea sucked.

Start again.

If your idea was good, all other problems are solvable.

Don’t quit your day job.

If your idea starts to take off, slowly lower your day job commitment

don’t quit until your idea is paying more than your day job.

when you run your own company, you will discover:

Salespeople are a bad idea

Fallacy: “our product is great, it’s just not selling because we don’t have any salespeople”

Good products build word of mouth, and sell themselves.

Fallacy: “our product is great, we just need PR and marketing to get the word out”

If the product were great, your early users would blog that fact, and you’d be on your way already.

The secret to getting massive press:

(1) Be really interesting

(II) Convince two inﬂuential bloggers that you’re interesting.

P.R. secret for traditional print media

Focus on the freelancers, not staff writers.

Be a cause a freelance writer would personally like.

Staff writers get assignments from their editors.

Freelancers have to pitch stories to an editor to get paid.

A press blitz example.

Magnatune: Creative Commons & Boing Boing -> The Inquirer -> Fark -> Slashdot -> USA today / NPR -> New York Times -> BBC / Le Monde / Die Zeit / Nikkei Times

Magnatune story angles: Fair use & Creative Commons Label embraces Sharing Biz model in Peer to Peer reality Piracy used as a promotion tool Indie musicians abandoning labels Not suing our customers Musicians actually getting paid The big money is in music licensing Major labels are Evil iTunes has it wrong Successful entrepreneur tries again Linux vs Microsoft == Magnatune vs Major Labels

the “elevator pitch”

they say: “download, sample cut-up, share”

I say: “remixing makes better music”

They say: “On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited.”

I say: “Download tons of music from artists who don’t want to make money”

Magnatune says: “We are not evil” “We work directly with independent musicians world- wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV ﬁles. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%.You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member. “

Magnatune says: “We are not evil” blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah...

Whoops.

They say: “Give books away, get books you want”

I say: “Give a book away for free, and you can ask someone to send you a book for free”

A good test:

“Will people pay more for this than it costs to create it?”

Some ﬁnal tips:

Dedibox.com is psycho-cheap hosting. for French people only. Ha! Ha!

Use Open Source

Use PHP initially for everything.

Find €3000 for a good independent graphic designer. Make your home page pretty.

Do everything yourself.

If you’re not technical.

Learn to be technical.

PHP is not difﬁcult.

Read tons of books.

Learn: sales, marketing, programming, tech support.

You can’t lead people if you don’t know how to do their job.

Don’t hire. Until you are getting less than 6 hours’ sleep per night.

Only hire for well understood tasks.

Don’t borrow money.

Without debt, your idea can fail and you can try again next week.

Take small steps.

Give yourself 3 years to ﬁgure this out.

It will take at least 7 years to get decent at this and to make any real money.

You can do it.

This presentation can be downloaded from: http://slideshare.net/johnbuckman Contact me at: john@magnatune.com This presentation licensed under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0