The 7-Figure To Do List: 29 Tactics To Level-Up Your Business In 60 Minutes or Less

Sometimes, you need a few quick wins. In this talk, Rob presents 29 tactics to level up your business, each designed to take less than an hour (with many under 10 minutes). These are gathered from his experience building companies, and the experience of other successful SaaS founders.

How to Craft a Story that Sells

We understand stories are a great way to connect with customers but few startups really take advantage of a good narrative to help them sell. Do your sales meetings leave customers excited or confused? Is your marketing closer to a feature list or a set of compelling reasons to buy? Are you losing deals to competitors with clearly inferior products? In this talk, I am going to give you a framework you can use to build a story that focuses on WHY you built what you built in a way that is differentiating, compelling, and most importantly, gets you business.

A Brief Primer on SaaS Pricing

Raise your prices and other obvious startup advice.

Idea to validation to launch: the first 365 days of Tuple

After a year of full-time work, Ben has some new scars, some fresh knowledge, and a deep appreciation for the highs and lows of starting a business.

CRO: the art and science of guiding the drunk

Create the best user experience possible by pretending like your user is drunk.

How to acquire your first 100 customers

How do some startups figure out customer acquisition so easily? It seems like one second, you’ve never heard of them and the next second, they're everywhere you turn. Asia Matos, CEO and Founder of DemandMaven, walks you through the exact go-to-market process for winning your first 100 customers and discovering your absolute best marketing strategies and channels in the early days.

Question and Answer with Rob Walling

Microconf 2019 talk recap

How to double your conversion rate on cold outreach

The 3 pillars of a high-converting outreach email, 1 big myth that's likely crippled your email, and the process of writing an outreach email start to finish.

9 Ways to Write Higher-Converting Copy

5 musts of high-converting copy, 4 email strategies to increase activation + retention, and common copy mistakes + how to avoid them.

Microconf Starter 2018 Recap

What does the Microconf community consistently say recommend to build a successful business? Choose who to help, talk with them about their pains, and help solve them.

From 0 to 14,000 customers: the survival guide to bootstrapping a SaaS

Microconf 2019 talk recap

From side project to full-time business in 8 months

Learn how Abi Noda went from a Zapier prototype to running Pull Reminders full time

From desk job to startup founder: how multiple side projects lead to a $60k mrr saas business.

When most people share the story of how they started their company, they tend to leave out all the things that happened behind the scenes that contributed to their startup taking off. In this talk, Christopher shares how multiple side projects and years of dabbling helped him launch a $60k MRR SaaS business.

Leverage, Truth, and Fear

Bootstrapping to $10m and beyond.

Microconf Advice

The Microconf community has a common set of values and techniques.

How to read your customers' mind and develop a best-in-class product

Learn why giving your audience what they ask for is a bad idea (and what to do instead), how to apply the 'magic wand' formula to discover your (future) customers' real needs, how to stand out from the competition by applying the matrix method, and how to take emotion (and your ego) out of the equation and provide what's most valuable for your audience.

SEO for Startups

Microconf 2019 talk recap

Sponsorships the Devchat Way

How I doubled my revenue by making a plan and automating it.

SaaS Integration Strategies That Won't Drive You Crazy

Microconf 2019 talk recap

More Users, More Sales, and More High Fives

How to Write Emails and Sales Pages in Less Time with Better Results

Reflecting on my failure to make gumroad a billion-dollar company

From being employee #2 at Pinterest to raising $10M to laying off 75% of the company to building back up and becoming profitable, my learnings (including data!) from eight years of building Gumroad into the sustainable, creator-friendly company it is today.

How to Get Useful User Feedback

Microconf 2019 talk recap

The 80/20 of SEO For Software & Service Companies – What it Takes in 2019

Microconf 2019 talk recap

The Root of the Retention Problem: How to Get the Qualitative Data You Need to Understand and Stop Churn

Multiple choice surveys give you misleading data that you can't use to address churn. What qualitative data should you solicit to understand exactly why people cancel?

Money Words: Seven of the words and phrases we use most often in high-converting copy

Microconf 2019 talk recap

Q+A with Jason Fried

The co-founder of Basecamp talks about how he built his company to millions in profit per year.

How an Offer to Sell Wistia Inspired Us to Take On $17M in Debt

Chris Savage had a dream to become Tony Stark.

Navigating the Startup Landscape

The Startup Runway is a representation of how much money you have left and how much time you have until your business is dead. Navigating the Startup Runway is simple: become cashflow positive before you run out of money.

The Sustainable SaaS: What Permaculture Can Teach Us About Building Software

What does permaculture have to do with building a startup? Everything.

It Won't Be A Straight Line: A Founder's Journey Starting Growing And Selling A SaaS

These are the types of lessons that usually cost an arm and a leg, but I got it half price. Starting any growing a business can be a long journey. Some days are going to suck. Really bad. In some cases, weeks, months, or even years can be incredibly rough. Other times will be great. Business, like life, will have its ups and downs. The key isn't to chase the ups and dodge the downs. It's to embrace the journey knowing that it will never be a straight line. It's not possible to entirely avoid the bad days, but there are always tactics to help you get through. Through his own journey dealing with medical issues, running and ultimately selling his small SaaS business, and slowing down to embrace the new trajectory life had handed him, he's gained some fresh perspective about making the the most of the chaos at the intersection of living life and growing a business.

How to Launch and Scale Your Business With Facebook Ads

Mojca is a Facebook Ads expert, author, and international speaker. Her work focuses on helping businesses generate more leads and increase profits with a carefully developed Facebook Advertising Strategy, so they can devote their time to other aspects of their business. She is the author of the Facebook Ads Manual: Everything You Need To Know To Get Started and the creator of The Facebook Ads Academy.

Lessons From Over 100 Million Dollars in Deals

Since founding FE International in 2006, Thomas has done several hundred million dollars in deals. They invest loads of time with each business to increase the selling success rate. Here's how.

Why there is no downside in going for it

The budding entrepreneurs' Guide to risk. James has made $100k in bitcoin, and prevented a $100k loss in a sushi restaurant investment. Here's his framework.

Cold email to get informational interviews - a 9-item checklist

What is an informational interview? The stated goal is just learning, but it's actually about learning, user feedback, sales, and connections.

How to Conduct a Great User Interview

Microconf 2018 talk recap

Putting the (Onboarding) Cart Before the (Product) Horse

Why (and how) to start thinking about onboarding…even if your product isn't built yet. Is it crazy to think about onboarding before you have something to onboard people onto? Should onboarding be a priority when you're still teeny tiny? We'll talk about how your early stage actually gives you an unfair advantage–and how to use it.

Nailing Your First (Info-Product) Launch

Microconf 2018 talk recap

An Unconventional Way to Validate Your Product Idea

Justin Jackson's product roadmap for: identifying who you are and what you want, Choosing a market, Discovering what they want, and Shipping a (small) initial solution

The Killer Combo Of Free Content With Paid Promotion

CartHook spent about $4k in campaigns from January to March of this year to increase ARR $348k.

How To Use Jobs To Be Done To Perfect Your Positioning

When marketing a product, it's common for founders to focus on the product itself. 'Look at our cool features! We help you do XYZ activity, but better!' This is a recipe for getting lost in the noise, and for losing to competitors with deeper pockets.

Stop Aiming At Happiness: Unconventional Wisdom for Customer Success

Prevailing wisdom says to make your customers happy. Is this true? In practice, you can make customers really happy and they still churn.

From $0 To $10M ARR: The Tactics We Used To Scale Teachable

Microconf 2018 talk recap

When and How to Acquire and Invest Capital into Your SaaS Business

All investors have a common fear of underperforming. You can make them more comfortable by avoiding a few common pitfalls of raising money for your company.

Everything You've Learned at MicroConf is Wrong*

Microconf 2018 talk recap

Micropreneur Hiring, get the right team so you can relax a little

Hiring can easily be a trap to fall into. Get these three things right and you won't fall on your face.

The Dinner Party Strategy: A SaaS Customer Onboarding Framework That Connects and Converts

Do you feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of segmenting your list? Aren't sure what kinds of emails to send besides links to your latest blog posts? Learn how to write emails that reduce churn and stand out.

How to Be Funny (Even If You’re Not): Improv-Inspired Copywriting Tips for Software Founders

There are so many principles of improv and humor that can help you shape marketing copy, connect with your users, built loyalty, and increase retention.

12 Lessons I learned Moving from Bootstrapped to Venture Backed

Rob Walling isn't anti-venture capital - he's anti-everyone-thinking-venture-capital-is-the-only-way-to-start-a-tech-company. If you're self-funded with one or two founders, you can support your entire business from a tiny niche that provides $20k/month in revenue.

How My Weekly Podcast Runs Itself

With every project Brian starts, he asks how can I sustain this after I stop working on it?

The Path to Parallel Entrepreneurship

Parallel entrepreneurship has a negative stigma, but there are a lot of people in this room that do it successfully.

The Case Against Growth

The best way to build something sustainable is to maximize yourself.

Q+A With Patrick Collison, Co-Founder of Stripe

Stripe is a big company - how do they fit into Microconf? They embody the bootstraper ethos - they took it a long way as two dudes in a garage with minimal funding.

12 Principles Of Viral Content

When making viral content, most people focus on clickbaity titles. This will get a bunch of content generated, but it won't be quality content that actually engages users.

SEO Tasks That Produce Results

As a founder of a bootstrapped business, you don’t have time for SEO. I get that. Your competition would celebrate this, but they’re also too busy doing the wrong things. I'm going to show you why SEO as you know it is dead, how to use SEO signals to your advantage, and more than 20 different ways to tap into Google's traffic with minimum effort and time investment. The focus of this talk will be on practical steps that every busy business owner can and should adopt to get more new customers without spending a penny.

How We've Taken Fomo 20 -> 80K MRR in 18 Months

Justin Mares grew Fomo 4x in 18 months. He did this with four simple changes that could apply to any product.

How to Go-To-Market Across Many Verticals

What happens when you've grown and it's clear you've got many market segments? How do you balance them all? Or do you say 'screw it' and niche somehow? In this talk, we'll break down how you can bring more focus and zen to your go-to-market efforts—especially if your product has many use cases and verticals.

The {Modified} Stair Step Approach to Bootstrapping a Legacy

Over the course of 10+ years, Don has developed an approach to pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams while living a balanced life. Learn how Don transitioned from engineer to CTO then pivoted to running a SaaS business as a solo entrepreneur. He's sold his SaaS business, landed at Google, then launched and grew a $1M+ / year business in his spare time.

Hiring Hacks: 7 Unconventional Ways to Build a Killer Team

Climbing the revenue ladder can be exhilarating, but for every milestone you reach, a new set of challenges or needs presents itself. In this session, you’ll learn how to make smart hiring decisions to level up your resources in tandem with your revenue growth and you’ll never find yourself pinched for help.

The State of Bootstrapping in 2019

5 things that have held true and 14 short-lived trends over the past 14 years in the software economy.

Ending Well: The Complex Psychology of Exiting Your Company

Exiting doesn't have to be horrible but it will be hard. Whether you sell your business, replace yourself as CEO, go public or liquidate; ending your relationship with your business involves a nuanced psychological process. In this talk, Dr. Sherry will help you grow your startup with the end in mind. She’ll give you a framework for discerning when it is time to go and give you tips to prepare for the unique psychological challenges of exiting.

80/20 Marketing – what's crushing it right now

A deep dive into which strategies and tactics are crushing it today at each stage of the customer buying journey (Traffic, Conversion, Monetization and Maximization).