Elevator Pitch
About a year ago, PaperCall set out to make conferences and speaking at conferences better. In that time, we’ve had our fair share of screw up and missteps. We’ll look at the slow trudge of PaperCall from idea to full fledged side project, and the struggles & successes we’ve faced along the way.
Description
The PaperCall journey is pretty interesting and by interesting I mean it’s been filled with obstacles to overcome (aka we screwed up a bunch).
Original Funding Plan: Run a Conference & bootstrap with the proceeds. Outcome: Anemic Ticket Sales, broke even.
Original Technical Plan: Build a bunch of Go Microservices and have the most scalable app possible. Outcome: A Rails App
Original Marketing Plan: Free CFP App! Of course everyone will want this over a Google Form! Outcome: Turns out people actually want to give a speaker 100 fields + a video to make, and honestly don’t care about the speaker experience.
Most importantly, we constantly struggle with not having enough time. We both have full-time, challenging jobs (Director of Engineering @ InfluxDB, API Architect @ The New York Times) that are in themselves exciting and require a lot of our attention.
We’ll walk through this journey, the set backs, the successes, and what we wish we knew before we went down this road.
Notes
As an alum of two Monktoberfests (and a purchaser of a ticket to ThingMonk Denver), I know what a RedMonk crowd expects from talks. Not to mention I homebrew beer, which I assume makes me doubly qualified.