Category: Everything Else

I just got back from LessConf in Atlanta this Sunday. Wow. That really kicked ass!

There was so much great stuff I can’t possibly list it all. But I met some really cool people over there; I even finally got to meet and hang out with Peldi from Balsamiq who I’m a big fan of.

As far as the accommodations were concerned, the hotel was ridiculously roomy. There was even a bedroom and full kitchen! All for $100 a night.

There were a couple of parties at night though I was only able to make it the first one which was co-sponsored by one of my favorite products of all time: MailChimp.

What about the speakers?

Top-notch. Really inspiring stuff. My two favorite talks:

• Cameron Moll — His talk was focused on design, creativity, and inspiration. Someone mentioned that it felt like a TED talk; I have to agree, except that it was longer (which was great) than most TED talks.
• Peldi from Balsamiq — Now, I’ve read all of Peldi’s blog and have seen a couple of his interviews so I thought it would be similar to Jason Fried and DHH’s Q&A where I could guess what was coming next. I was completely wrong. The talk was funny, inspiring, and got me thinking differently about Bidsketch from a long term strategy perspective.  Absolutely awesome stuff.

All in all, it was a great experience and I’m glad I went out of my way to make it. I’ll definitely be going to the next one wherever it may be.

Over at the Bidsketch blog I wrote about my upcoming trip to LessConf in Atlanta. I’m really looking forward to it! I’ll be meeting a couple of people I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time.

Realizing that I didn’t have all essentials for my trip, I head out to MOO for some updated business cards. Very impressive service they provide there; check it out if you ever need some cards.

Also, I recently sold my 13″ MacBook so I could buy an iPad. Now I’m left with an iPad and my giant (and heavy) 17″ MacBook Pro which isn’t all that portable.

Which one should I take?

Well, I could bring the iPad and do most of what I need with the iPad. The problem is that I’m typically ultra productive on flights, and I just can’t get real work done on the iPad. I guess I’ll be bringing in the MacBook Pro. Maybe I made a mistake?

Oh, and if you’ll be at the conference (or in the area), I’d love to meet up. Just send me an email: ruben@bidsketch.com

I continue to be amazed by people that complain about the lack of free time because the day job sucks the life out of them. They say that they just have enough time to make dinner and relax at night.

I’m not sure I buy that.

I mean, you can get home and eat dinner by 7 PM (or maybe 8 PM) right? If you’re a TV watcher, then watching TV while eating dinner should get you your fix.

What happens after that? Looks like there’s plenty of time to read a book or make some money on the side if you ask me.

I have a full time job, a web based business, and I still find plenty of time to “read” books like crazy. Well, I only really read about thirty minutes to an hour each night before I go to sleep. That stuff is usually fiction. I rely on my iPhone to catch up on the non-fiction stuff during the day when I would normally be wasting time.

It’s amazing how much material you can go through if you listen to audio while doing chores, grocery shopping, or driving.

For instance, at lunch time I’ll start playing my audiobook in my car on my drive to the sub shop. As soon as I get there, I slap on my ear buds and start listening on my iPhone. I do this while waiting in line and paying for my food. I’ll pause it just long enough to get my order in.

This is what I do most everywhere I go. Yeah, it sometimes annoys people when they have to wait for me to hit pause. Big deal. I’d rather piss off a few people than completely waste my time just waiting in line.

This March I’ll very likely be heading out of the country.

It looks like my wife and I will be flying to Switzerland for a few days, then Italy for 3 days. That would leave time for one more country. We haven’t decided which one yet, and might leave this open so we can decide while we’re over there. I’m not a big on thoroughly planning my vacations if you can’t tell.

I do have a live product with paying customers now, so I’ll need to make arrangements to ensure everything runs smoothly while I’m gone. I have a 13″ Laptop that I’ll be taking with me and plan on staying in hotels where they have WIFI available.

I haven’t worked out all of the details yet but it doesn’t seem like any of this will pose a problem. It’s nothing I’ve had to deal with before, but I’m very glad I have a successful product that I have to worry about now.

It’s been about a month and a half since I launched and I recently pulled together a bunch of my Bidsketch numbers to prepare for a case study I did with Rob Walling, for the Micropreneur Academy.

Other than my conversion rate, all of my numbers continue to rise, even though I’m past that initial launch phase. I’m almost at 600 users right now, 16k+ visits for the month, and some unknown number of writeups 🙂 Yesterday I received 3 writeups from PR3 or better blogs, but I’d like to see how many I’ve received in total so far.

I’m considering playing around with my Free plan, to see what that does to my conversion rate. I was also considering adding a pay-as-you-go pricing option, but after taking a closer look at this, it’s much more difficult to implement than I thought it would be. I’ll come back to that after I release version 2 of Bidsketch.

I’ll take a couple of weeks for some minor enhancements, analytics work with KISSmetrics (which is awesome, I’ll blog about this later), and then I’ll start on version 2 of Bidsketch!

So far, things have been going much better than I envisioned at this early stage; I just need to continue showing activity with Bidsketch to keep that positive momentum going.