20 years without a 'proper job'
Willmer, Rachel
Rachel Willmer - 20 years without a 'proper job' Have you ever wondered how you could be your own boss? or how you could make money from your side project? or build the next Facebook or Uber. To be a coder in today's world of work is to have amazing opportunities to design the business life you want. I've enjoyed the last 20 years without a 'real job', as company founder, freelancer and side-project-hacker. Now I am bootstrapping my current company to profitability. Listen to my stories and learn from my mistakes and successes. - Have you ever wondered how you could be your own boss? If so, then this talk is for you. Maybe you're working on a sideproject and wonder how you could make some money from it? Or maybe you have the idea for the next Facebook or Uber? To be a coder in today's world of work is to have amazing opportunities to design the business life you want. You can work remotely; you can write books, or teach, or consult, with anyone anywhere. You can have a crazy idea on Friday and have it running by Monday. Design your architecture to use cloud computing, so your tiny team can scale up your huge ideas. Or keep it small, and just earn some extra money with a Wordpress plugin, or a training course. It has been 21 years since I last had a 'real job' and a regular income. I survived creating and running a company through the madness of the dotcom years. I made money from sideprojects, that I had started just for fun and for learning. I have freelanced without needing to use an agency to find the work. And now I'm bootstrapping my current business to profitability. Listen to my stories and learn from my mistakes and successes.
 Yeah, so good morning everyone. I'm really happy to introduce our first keynote speaker, Rachel Wolmer, who she will tell you about she survived 20 years without having a real job. So please give a big hand for Rachel. Well thank you. Good morning. Can you hear me at the back? Yes. Fantastic. Can you hear me? Can you hear me at the back now? Great. Buenos dias. Me gusto mucho estar a bilbao. That is the end of my Spanish. Okay, so as my talk title implies, I'm going to tell you how I have survived 20 years without having had a proper job, by which I mean, I've obviously been working, but I haven't had a salary that somebody else hasn't supplied to me for 21 years now. So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to tell you some of the lessons that I've learned over these last couple of decades, and to potentially give you some ideas about things you might want to think about yourself. So this talk is really aimed at people who are in a job but would rather not be. Because I have the pleasure that almost every day I get up and go to work. I look forward to it, and I look forward to it because I've built the work life that I want, doing the kind of work that I want, and sometimes that's made me a fair bit of money, and sometimes it hasn't, but nothing compares to the pleasure of actually looking forward to going to work. So this is for you. If you're in a job and you'd rather not be at all, or if you would just like to perhaps make some money out of the side project that you've been working on, I have some thoughts to share with both of those types of people. But who am I? Now, it may be hard to imagine, but that person on the photograph is me, 20 years ago, and if you think, oh God Rachel, what happened to you? I have to tell you, I didn't look like that then either. It's amazing what a professional photographer can do. But that was to an extent, that summed up where I'd got to with my dot com company. But I'm going to start at the beginning. I graduated 30 odd years ago as an engineering student. It was the end of a recession, which made it hard for most people to get jobs, but I was lucky because I was an engineering student and I had learnt to code. It was very easy to get a job because there weren't many programmers around at the time. So I started off working for an engineering company, writing software, lasted there a couple of years, and then I went to a research institute, which is where I first discovered the internet. So I've actually been on the internet for 30 years, which is I think longer than some of you have been alive. But I can remember the days before the internet. So I lasted a couple of years doing that. I learnt a lot of interesting technology related stuff, but then I thought, well, no, this working for other people is not doing it for me. So I made my first foray into self-employment. I left that company to be a freelance contractor. Again, back then, it was very easy to be a contractor because my basic pitch to anybody that was thinking of hiring me was, no, I don't know how to do it. Give me a week, let's see how far I get. And that worked every time. But I was not content with just being a contractor, even though it was a very easy way to make a fair bit of money. At the time, I had still, I'd got the idea that at some point I wanted to do something bigger than that. So I started working on the skills and the tools that I'd need to make a success out of that. It occurred to me that if I was going to start a company and start writing business plans, then I would need to know about money, not just spending it, but what it meant in a business plan context. So I did an accounting diploma part-time in the evening. And at the end of that year, I'd got a certificate, but more importantly, I could write a business plan and I could understand the figures in other people's proper and loss accounts, balance sheets, that kind of thing, which turned out to be really interesting and useful later on. But I didn't start that company just then. I kept contracting and then my plan fell slightly awry because one of the companies I went to work for as a contract was a company called Spider Systems and they were wonderful. It was a terrific company. But after a while, they said, you know, Rachel, we like you. We don't like your contracting rates. Come and work for us. So I did. Five years, I spent there as a programmer, manager, engineering manager, sales support person. And that was all terrific fun. We were working on internet related stuff in the early 90s and it was just a ball because everything was taking off. And then in the mid-90s, the internet became more of a public property and it went terribly wild. Now about that time, Spider, this brilliant company I was working for, got taken over by an American company. So I thought this is the time to leave. This is the time I'm going to set up my own, do my own thing. So I left and I had an interest at the time in digital cash. So I started a digital cash company in the mid-90s, which in some respect was a great idea because it was, people thought it was very interesting as a concept. But as a business idea, I have to tell you, it was a dreadful idea. It was 20 years ahead of its time. If I'd had that idea two years ago, I'd be a gazillionaire by now. But 20 years ago, there just wasn't the market for it. But anyway, I started this company and the company was called InterTrader. If you look them up on the website now, the domain is used by a spread betting company, but that's not my company. My idea was to have a digital cash exchange server. So no matter what digital cash you were paying with, whether it was e-gold or Digi-gold or Cybercash or Mondex or any of the other things that were floating around then, but my cash box would take your money and exchange it into something more solid like pounds or dollars. So because that was a concept that seemed to attract some attention, I raised money, I got a board of directors, I had a team of great staff to work with me on that. And I got a lot of press, partly because my concept was an interesting one that was in Scotland at the time. We had a really good dot com scene going on, but we didn't have very many women doing it. So just by that chance, I stood out a fair bit, which is why I ended up on the cover of this magazine. It wasn't because they particularly wanted to write a huge article about me. If you looked inside the magazine, it's one column, but they wanted to stand out on the shelves. So what easy way to do that, put a woman on a cover. So I'm very grateful for that because I got this lovely photo to show for it. But that kind of thing was fun, but it was distracting from the main job of actually finding customers that wanted what I did and making money from it. So for those of you who remember the dot com boom times, you'll remember it was wild. People were raising money for really crazy ideas. And then suddenly, around the 2000 year mark, the crash happened. And suddenly the dot com boom became a dot com bust. And I still had staff. I still had an office. We managed to keep that idea running for another three years after the crash, which I was pretty proud of. But in the end, I just had to admit defeat. It was not going to be possible to turn my brilliant idea and my fantastic customer base into a viable business. So sadly, I closed it down, which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. But it meant I was free to go off and do other things. So this takes us to about 2003. Now, what I did after that was I licked my wounds for about six months when you put your heart and soul into building a business. It's difficult to just walk away from it. It's like a divorce or a death. So it took about six months before I felt capable of doing pretty much anything else after that. But then I went back to doing a bit of freelancing. I went back to doing, working on some fascinating projects. One of them was an open source project, which I got paid for. And I can talk about that a little later if you're interested in that business model. But eventually, I knew it was going to come back to this idea. But I actually wanted to build something again. And this time it happened more by chance because I was trying various side projects as a way of re-skilling myself. Because the problem that I had at the time was I'd worked on two big projects. One of them was covered by NDAs, so I couldn't talk about it to anybody, which made it hard to use on a CV. The second one I was working on this open source project, which was OpenPGPSDK for Nominate, which is cryptography. So I could talk about it all I wanted to, but nobody would understand. So I needed to put something on my CV that I could show what it was I did. And in fact, what ended up happening as the side projects became the CV, I haven't actually written a CV since 1986. And I'm hoping I never will have to again. So I wrote side projects. I wrote a website called HowSafeIsYourMoney.co.uk, which made it easier to understand one of the government websites to find out whether your money was safe in the banks when they went bust. I wrote a website that was a price checker for the Wii Fit when it came out. I wrote lots of small things like that. But one of my big loves is eBooks. And so I wrote a little eBook price checker, and I made it into a website. And it was the worst name I have ever heard in my life. It was called eBook price.info, which it did what it said on the tin, but oh my God, that's an awful name. And it didn't look very good either. It was really ugly. I'm not good at design. I'm good at computer system design. I'm just not good at graphic design. But people started using it. And I thought that's interesting. And then one day when I was working on a contract for somebody else, I got an approach from one of the five biggest publishers in the world saying, we want to buy your software. My immediate reaction was, oh, that's interesting. And then my second reaction was, hell no. Nobody's looking at that code. It's not an acceptable condition. It's just stuff I've hacked together. But being an entrepreneur, I didn't say hell no. I said, hmm, that's very interesting. I can't sell you the software, but what I'll do is license you the data that you need, which turned out to be a great answer because for the next 18 months, I think it was, I supplied this publisher data that they needed to use for their own strategic purposes about what price movements were doing in the eBook market. And they were paying me handsomely for it. So I was working full time on a contract for the BBC. I was working full time on this. It was a very financially rewarding time in my life. And to a large extent, the money that I took in from that period is what I'm still using to fund and invest in myself for what I'm trying to do with that site now. So this is the site that stands now. And this is what I'm trying to make a full time viable business. It's called lozme.com. It's an eBook price comparison site. I encourage you to check it out. If you do, you'll see it doesn't actually look like this at the moment. This is a new version that's coming up. But what I'm trying to do with this is different to what I did with InterTrader because InterTrader was the old style venture backed model of growing a business where I had to write a business plan. I had to convince other people of the merits of that plan. I then had to get the office, find the staff, get a board of directors, all those joyous things. With this, I'm trying to do it a different way. What I want to do is not go down that route of funding it through other people's money until I am convinced I've got a scalable model. Because if I do that, it means I'll get a much better price on the valuation when I raise the money the next time. But also, it means I'm giving myself the luxury of trying things out. I'm allowing myself to try and fail with the various ideas I'm using in this project before I have other people to tell me I can't do that. But that's enough about me. I want to now talk about you and what you could do. Because I think we as technologists are extraordinary lucky to be here at this time. Because of the internet, because of the globalization that's going along, we have the opportunity to build stuff in our back bedroom by ourselves and turn it into profitable businesses which can replace a full-time job or just enhance the life that you have by doing it part-time. Because we don't need to hire staff because we can build it ourselves. We don't have to have an office because you can use a virtual server on Amazon or on Google or wherever. I think this is a terrific opportunity. It's one of the things I would like for people to start contemplating what they will do. Because to my mind, we're at a change in the way we do work. The future of work is not going to be what it was in the past. We don't have the likelihood of having a full-time job even if we wanted one for the rest of our lives. The nature of it all is becoming much more a portfolio career where you do one job followed by another, contracts that you take on maybe for a day or a week, not for years or decades. Assuming that you have some technical knowledge about a thing or you have an idea, these are some of the things that you can do with it. The big choice you need to make is are you going to build a product or are you going to run a service? They both have merits. It's a very good idea, I believe, if you're not familiar with the idea of running a business or having something that you are building, that you are making and you are selling. Starting with a one-off product is a much better idea than trying to run a service from day one. You can write an e-book in a week. In fact, one of the books I'm going to recommend later was written over the course of a weekend. The reason why it's better is it means that you can go through the whole process of having the idea, building the thing, going out there and marketing it and getting somebody to pay for it without having to put in place the support costs of running it thereafter. It's really important that if you're going to go down this route that you experience the whole journey from idea through to sale and ongoing support because it is so easy to have the idea, have the fun of building it and then go, well, how am I going to sell it now? I haven't thought about that bit. That's the important bit. If you don't make the step of finding somebody that wants to buy it preferably before you've built it and then selling it to them, you don't have a business, you've got a hobby. That's a perfectly valid thing to do as long as you realize that that's what you're doing. If you think that you're trying to run a business but you are in fact having a hobby, you're not going to have an enjoyable experience because you will run out of money. The one-off thing you can do is product. You could write an e-book. I've got an example of somebody that's made a lot of money out of doing that later. You could write a course. If, for example, you happen to be the expert in, I don't know, Django pipes or whatever, that's a terrific idea. It's new technology that people will want to know about. Somebody should be writing that book or that course or offering the online training. This is a product. It's great for a side project or a first project. Where the bigger, more long-term money seems to be in is in service-related businesses because then you get the holy grail of the recurring revenue that every month a customer is going to pay you money every month. The nature of that though is you're likely to get support costs. It's a bigger operation that you need to think about. You have to commit to being available to do that support 24 by 7, 365 days a week. If you're a solo founder like me, you might not want to do that because you might want to go on holiday or come to conferences. But the idea that you have a service or a website that's sitting there making money whilst you do things you want to do is one as an idea that works for me very well. Then the other thing that you can do is to publish. Now, publishing used to mean writing a book or writing a blog, but now it also means doing a video blog, doing a YouTube, doing podcasts on the subject. This is great not just because you can potentially monetise it to make money out of what you're doing, but by doing that publishing, by producing that podcast, what you do is position yourself as an authority. You may be an expert, you may be the world-class expert in a particular field, but if nobody knows about it, why will they contract with you? Why would they ask you for the consulting? Why would they ask you to fix their problems? There's various ways to monetise. I could do an entire session just on the question of monetisation, but here's just a few headings. Direct sale. Writing a book used to be something you did for an official publisher like a Riley. Now it's becoming much more common that people self-publish the technical books. For many reasons, one of which is you don't have to ask permission, you don't have to convince anybody else it's a good idea, you can just get out there and do it. But also the time to market is much faster. I have a friend who has written a book who completed it last year. It's ready to go, but the traditional publisher isn't actually going to release it till the book fair next year. Now that's two years of no income from that book that is ready. Self-published, he'd be earning from it right now. Affiliate commission is something which can work well if you do it in a way which is not cheesy. So if you buy a book through my site, for example, then I get an affiliate commission from Amazon, from Apple. It doesn't cost you any more, but I make the money for connecting you with that vendor. If it's done well, it can work nicely. Some sites tend to just push things at you whether they're good, whether you want them or not. Then I find that cheesy, I don't like that. Same with advertising. Advertising can be a very good way of monetising a website or service, but only when it's done well. You don't want to have the advertising become the point. It's supposed to match the offering of what you're trying to sell and provide something that's useful. Sponsorship is something that's happening a lot with podcasts at the moment. So if you are writing, for example, Meteor is a subject I'm going to come to later, that they do a podcast where it's sponsored by the kind of company that would host a Meteor website. What you're doing by providing that podcast is finding them the audience that they want. They can do a very targeted advert as a form of sponsorship on that podcast to people who are exactly the target audience for who they want to reach. Then the other thing which you can package up and sell, which is what I've also made some money from with the bookside, is data analytics. Because I have this website, I have a lot of data about what people actually do when they're buying an e-book. That data by itself is a valuable product. Now, I will say to anybody that's suddenly thinking, I use Lozme, what about the privacy aspect? I don't sell individual data, I sell bulk aggregated data. So I can say, for example, this book that you've never heard of is racing up through people's wish lists. But I want to give you some real examples of people like you who have gone down this path and made some serious money from it. So people think you can't make money out of writing a book. This example for me says otherwise. Meteor is a web framework for doing real-time data. The documentation that came with it wasn't particularly good, although the technology was fantastic. So these two people, Sasha Grief and Tom Coleman, decided to write a book and a website to support that. They packaged it such that you could choose what level of book you wanted to buy. So I think there was a $29 option which was just the book. There was a $59 book which was the version of the book with some training videos and then there was the high-end option where you got customized support or something like that. So there's a case study that they did with Gumroad which was the company they were selling it through, $300,000 in 18 months from a book. It's going to be more than that now because the book is still necessary to understand how to use Meteor. It's also, if you're thinking of writing a book, I would recommend you check out their website because it is the best example I have found of how to write a technical book. It's just beautiful and it's the framework that I would choose to use if I were writing one. But $300,000, one book self-published. People say you can't start a business, a real business if you're just a solo founder. Well, does anybody here use Balsamic? Yeah, Peldi started that in his bedroom. Last time I've seen some public figures on this, annual profits running at $2 million. He's got a staff about 26 now and they all work remotely. This is a beautiful example of how somebody found a sweet spot in the market, built something that he wanted to use himself, started selling it, listened to his customer base and developed it. He's had at least one offer to buy that business which he's chosen not to take because he thinks he can do better for his customer base by staying as an independent company. But it shows what you can do. One person, $2 million. People say you can't do this unless you live in the USA. Well, I have to say, I can say that that's wrong because my biggest customer when I was doing the book data service was in New York, this publisher, he was an American publisher. I've never even met them and yet I made, I think about $100,000 from that contract with a company I've never met. If you follow Hacker News, you might have heard of a guy called patio11, Patrick McKenzie. He has run a number of businesses, he's awesome by the way, if you get the chance to follow anything he says, he really knows his stuff. He was running a successful small business, self-started called bingo card creator. He lives in Japan. He then started doing some, he discovered that he had a real talent for marketing software products and so he was being hired by people like Fog Creek Software and major US companies to help them sort out what their strategies should be whilst living in Japan. Here's the thing, when people start to think about trying to build something for themselves and make money from it, the most common reaction is, but I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that because whatever list of excuses, reasons that you may have, I don't believe that. I believe that anybody in this room could if they wanted to. I'm not saying that you should, I'm just saying that if you wanted to, you have the skills to be able to do that and it doesn't matter how introverted you are, it doesn't matter how busy you are, it doesn't matter what your reason for going oh no, I can't do that. You can, yes you can and I want to show you an example here, which is something I find totally inspiring. John Morrow is paralyzed from the neck down. He has to have 24 by 7 support to do the basic things of living and yet despite being paralyzed with muscular atrophy from the neck down, he has managed to build a successful business. His particular talent is in copywriting and blogging. So he runs courses, he writes data, writes services about how to be a better blogger and he runs that company from his wheelchair. He in all normal, normal forms of business, people would say he was probably unemployable and yet he's employed himself and he's made a really good business and a terrific life from that. So don't think you can't do it, if he can do it, you can. So I have a few final thoughts which don't really fit into a particular category but it's okay to start small. In fact I'd encourage it because what you need to do is to learn the business of being in business. You need to understand what it means to file your tax returns on time because if you're doing a corporate business, the rules are different than if you're self employed. If you're that registered it's different than if you're not. If you're doing business, if you're in the UK and you're dealing with businesses in the rest of the EU, you've got a whole different level of bureaucracy to cope with. Those things matter as much as being as good as you can for the thing you are trying to sell. So start small but finish. One of the books that I recommend is by a woman called Amy Hoy. I don't know if you've heard of her. Amazing woman. Her book is called Just F-ing Ship because what you learn by shipping a product to completion and having a happy customer is something you cannot buy in a book. You can only learn that experience by doing it and the only way you do it is by doing it through to actually finishing the job. It's okay to fail. I had a business inter trader, the dot com. That would be a failure by anybody's criterion. Eight years, I think I've raised about half a million pounds for that. In that eight years we made profit in two months. That's not a successful business. However, the business failed, the idea failed but I did not fail. I am not a failure because I had a business which did not work. What I had was a learning experience. Most businesses don't get it right the first time. And this is one of the things we, especially technology related business founders, sometimes struggle with because we're used to getting everything right. The nature of coming through the exam system at school when you do science related subjects is you expect to be able to get 90 to 100% on the exams because you know how to do the math question and the physics question. Suddenly the real world is not like that. The real world you have to do experiments that don't work to find the ways through that do work. So it is okay to fail. Just don't make the same mistake twice. And it's okay to think big. You may just want to start writing little word press plug-in just to try that experience. That's fine. But always having it in the back of your mind thinking, well, where could I take this? If I was going to try and do this 10 times bigger, what would the next step be to do that? How do I get 10 times bigger, 100 times bigger? Because there's usually a way and as a small nimble tech related company you have the ability to move much faster than some of the behemoths of the corporate world. So you can take advantage of that. If you have a choice between B2B and B2C, which means business to business or business to consumer, choose business to business every time. And I'll tell you why. Because they are used to spending money. Whereas most consumers don't like spending money. In the book world, if you try to sell an e-book that's a fiction, we're now conditioned to understand that an e-book on Kindle should be 99 pence. Two dollars cheap. Cheap, cheap. If you're doing a business related book and you're selling directly, it is perfectly acceptable to be selling it for $29, $59, $200. The most expensive book that's ever been sold through my website was $1,250. I think it was a set of building regulations. And the other thing about when you're starting up, you get to decide what it is you're doing. Nobody's going to tell you. You decide what kind of business you want, which means choose the customers you want and price accordingly. So if you make the choice to have high-end expensive customers who are willing to spend large amounts of money with you, don't price cheap. Because if you price cheap, you'll get cheap customers. And charge more. This is the thing that Patrick McKenzie has taught me over the years. He has this mantra, charge. Charge more. First of all, you have to charge because until you've taken somebody's money, that is not your friend, your mother, your sister, whatever, a person that you do not know has handed over their credit card online to you and you've taken their money. Until you've done that, you don't know whether anybody actually wants what you've got. So you must charge because that's the only way of validating your idea. And then charge more because nobody charges enough to start with because you think, oh, how can I have built something that's worth this amount of money? Triple your prices. Triple your prices. Ten times your prices. See what happens. I got taught when I was out on sales trips with a spider by a salesman, if he didn't lose 50% of his sales deals on price, he wasn't charging enough. And I found that a really interesting idea that it's okay not to win the sales deal. To make that work, you have to have enough of a pipeline that you can try out that experiment. But the higher you can put your prices, the better service you can deliver to your customers. And you'd be surprised what they can pay. When I did the book deal with the publisher, I hadn't got a clue how much to charge. And so when we agreed what I was going to deliver, he'd ask me for the price. I was umming and erring about it. I said, I really don't know how to price for this. And he went, so I left it to him inadvertently. And he said, look, we need to get this sorted. How about I pay you what I pay the ad words to people? So, and then he named a price which was like at least three times what I would have thought of charging. So I thought, great, yep, I can work with that. Um, showed, if I'd left it to myself, I would have totally underpriced what I was doing. And my final thought, well, I have actually one other thought which is normal, which is if you've got any idea about going into business, whether it's a side project or a big, big startup, practice presentation skills, you're going to need them. And this is one of the common things that we as techies feel very unhappy about doing. Standing up here, speaking to a room full of people is really, it's scary, but it's also fun. And you can learn how to do this. I mean, I am a very shy person. I'm a very introverted person. But most people who know me don't think that because they think I stand on a stage by myself talking to an audience of hundreds. That must be an outgoing extrovert. I've just taught myself how to do this. And so I would thoroughly encourage you, if you've never spoken in public before, start now. You don't have to be a talk like this. Go to your local meetup. We run one in Scotland. We're always trying to encourage people to a five minute, 10 minute talk. Sign up for Harold's writing talks if you've never done one before. It's a brilliant way to start because what can go wrong? Five minutes, anybody can talk about something they care about for five minutes. Give it a go. And then you learn how to solve the problems of actually doing a presentation. Like, for example, I know my knees get nervous. So my knees shake quite a lot when I'm feeling uncomfortable. But then I wear loose trousers. So you don't know that because you can't see them shaking. Things like that. You learn by doing. And this is the common thing about being in business. You only learn by doing. So get out there and start doing it. My final thought, start a mailing list. This is the single most useful business tool that you have got. Whether it's, we've written a technical book, whether you're doing a service based startup, you want to have a mailing list of the people who have shown any interest at all in what you're doing. So you can continue to have the conversation with them. I have a whole load of other things on to say, but I think I'm out of time. So what I shall do is move it over to questions. But what I'd like to say is that for people who are in the other room, who I believe are watching through the video link, if you don't have the opportunity to put your question to me now, but you do want to, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me in the Telegram app. I'll be around till Wednesday. So just come and have a chat with me. If you've got enough interest, I can set up a session in the open spaces. And if anybody's watching this on YouTube, that offer goes to YouTube. Just get in touch. Our Wilma on Twitter, our Wilma, I think, on the Telegram app. And I, if you, if I have said anything here that touches a nerve, that makes you go and try something, I'd love to know about it. Please let me know what you do and do something. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Rachel. Have some.
 Yeah, so good morning everyone. I'm really happy to introduce our first keynote speaker,  Rachel Wolmer, who she will tell you about she survived 20 years without having a real  job. So please give a big hand for Rachel.  Well thank you. Good morning. Can you hear me at the back? Yes. Fantastic. Can you hear  me? Can you hear me at the back now? Great. Buenos dias. Me gusto mucho estar a bilbao.  That is the end of my Spanish. Okay, so as my talk title implies, I'm going to tell you  how I have survived 20 years without having had a proper job, by which I mean, I've obviously  been working, but I haven't had a salary that somebody else hasn't supplied to me for 21  years now. So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to tell you some of the lessons that  I've learned over these last couple of decades, and to potentially give you some ideas about  things you might want to think about yourself. So this talk is really aimed at people who  are in a job but would rather not be. Because I have the pleasure that almost every day  I get up and go to work. I look forward to it, and I look forward to it because I've  built the work life that I want, doing the kind of work that I want, and sometimes that's  made me a fair bit of money, and sometimes it hasn't, but nothing compares to the pleasure  of actually looking forward to going to work. So this is for you. If you're in a job and  you'd rather not be at all, or if you would just like to perhaps make some money out of  the side project that you've been working on, I have some thoughts to share with both of  those types of people. But who am I? Now, it may be hard to imagine, but that person on  the photograph is me, 20 years ago, and if you think, oh God Rachel, what happened to  you? I have to tell you, I didn't look like that then either. It's amazing what a professional  photographer can do. But that was to an extent, that summed up where I'd got to with my dot  com company. But I'm going to start at the beginning. I graduated 30 odd years ago as  an engineering student. It was the end of a recession, which made it hard for most people  to get jobs, but I was lucky because I was an engineering student and I had learnt to  code. It was very easy to get a job because there weren't many programmers around at the  time. So I started off working for an engineering company, writing software, lasted there a  couple of years, and then I went to a research institute, which is where I first discovered  the internet. So I've actually been on the internet for 30 years, which is I think longer  than some of you have been alive. But I can remember the days before the internet. So  I lasted a couple of years doing that. I learnt a lot of interesting technology related stuff,  but then I thought, well, no, this working for other people is not doing it for me. So  I made my first foray into self-employment. I left that company to be a freelance contractor.  Again, back then, it was very easy to be a contractor because my basic pitch to anybody  that was thinking of hiring me was, no, I don't know how to do it. Give me a week, let's  see how far I get. And that worked every time. But I was not content with just being a contractor,  even though it was a very easy way to make a fair bit of money. At the time, I had still,  I'd got the idea that at some point I wanted to do something bigger than that. So I started  working on the skills and the tools that I'd need to make a success out of that. It occurred  to me that if I was going to start a company and start writing business plans, then I would  need to know about money, not just spending it, but what it meant in a business plan context.  So I did an accounting diploma part-time in the evening. And at the end of that year,  I'd got a certificate, but more importantly, I could write a business plan and I could  understand the figures in other people's proper and loss accounts, balance sheets, that kind  of thing, which turned out to be really interesting and useful later on. But I didn't start that  company just then. I kept contracting and then my plan fell slightly awry because one  of the companies I went to work for as a contract was a company called Spider Systems and they  were wonderful. It was a terrific company. But after a while, they said, you know, Rachel,  we like you. We don't like your contracting rates. Come and work for us. So I did. Five  years, I spent there as a programmer, manager, engineering manager, sales support person.  And that was all terrific fun. We were working on internet related stuff in the early 90s  and it was just a ball because everything was taking off. And then in the mid-90s, the  internet became more of a public property and it went terribly wild. Now about that time,  Spider, this brilliant company I was working for, got taken over by an American company.  So I thought this is the time to leave. This is the time I'm going to set up my own, do  my own thing. So I left and I had an interest at the time in digital cash. So I started  a digital cash company in the mid-90s, which in some respect was a great idea because it  was, people thought it was very interesting as a concept. But as a business idea, I have  to tell you, it was a dreadful idea. It was 20 years ahead of its time. If I'd had that  idea two years ago, I'd be a gazillionaire by now. But 20 years ago, there just wasn't  the market for it. But anyway, I started this company and the company was called InterTrader.  If you look them up on the website now, the domain is used by a spread betting company,  but that's not my company. My idea was to have a digital cash exchange server. So no  matter what digital cash you were paying with, whether it was e-gold or Digi-gold or Cybercash  or Mondex or any of the other things that were floating around then, but my cash box  would take your money and exchange it into something more solid like pounds or dollars.  So because that was a concept that seemed to attract some attention, I raised money,  I got a board of directors, I had a team of great staff to work with me on that. And I  got a lot of press, partly because my concept was an interesting one that was in Scotland  at the time. We had a really good dot com scene going on, but we didn't have very many women  doing it. So just by that chance, I stood out a fair bit, which is why I ended up on  the cover of this magazine. It wasn't because they particularly wanted to write a huge article  about me. If you looked inside the magazine, it's one column, but they wanted to stand  out on the shelves. So what easy way to do that, put a woman on a cover. So I'm very  grateful for that because I got this lovely photo to show for it. But that kind of thing  was fun, but it was distracting from the main job of actually finding customers that wanted  what I did and making money from it. So for those of you who remember the dot com boom  times, you'll remember it was wild. People were raising money for really crazy ideas.  And then suddenly, around the 2000 year mark, the crash happened. And suddenly the dot com  boom became a dot com bust. And I still had staff. I still had an office. We managed to  keep that idea running for another three years after the crash, which I was pretty proud of.  But in the end, I just had to admit defeat. It was not going to be possible to turn my  brilliant idea and my fantastic customer base into a viable business. So sadly, I closed  it down, which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. But it meant I was free  to go off and do other things. So this takes us to about 2003. Now, what I did after that  was I licked my wounds for about six months when you put your heart and soul into building  a business. It's difficult to just walk away from it. It's like a divorce or a death. So  it took about six months before I felt capable of doing pretty much anything else after that.  But then I went back to doing a bit of freelancing. I went back to doing, working on some fascinating  projects. One of them was an open source project, which I got paid for. And I can talk about  that a little later if you're interested in that business model. But eventually, I knew  it was going to come back to this idea. But I actually wanted to build something again.  And this time it happened more by chance because I was trying various side projects as a way  of re-skilling myself. Because the problem that I had at the time was I'd worked on two  big projects. One of them was covered by NDAs, so I couldn't talk about it to anybody, which  made it hard to use on a CV. The second one I was working on this open source project,  which was OpenPGPSDK for Nominate, which is cryptography. So I could talk about it all  I wanted to, but nobody would understand. So I needed to put something on my CV that  I could show what it was I did. And in fact, what ended up happening as the side projects  became the CV, I haven't actually written a CV since 1986. And I'm hoping I never will  have to again. So I wrote side projects. I wrote a website called HowSafeIsYourMoney.co.uk,  which made it easier to understand one of the government websites to find out whether  your money was safe in the banks when they went bust. I wrote a website that was a price  checker for the Wii Fit when it came out. I wrote lots of small things like that. But  one of my big loves is eBooks. And so I wrote a little eBook price checker, and I made it  into a website. And it was the worst name I have ever heard in my life. It was called  eBook price.info, which it did what it said on the tin, but oh my God, that's an awful  name. And it didn't look very good either. It was really ugly. I'm not good at design.  I'm good at computer system design. I'm just not good at graphic design. But people started  using it. And I thought that's interesting. And then one day when I was working on a contract  for somebody else, I got an approach from one of the five biggest publishers in the  world saying, we want to buy your software. My immediate reaction was, oh, that's interesting.  And then my second reaction was, hell no. Nobody's looking at that code. It's not an  acceptable condition. It's just stuff I've hacked together. But being an entrepreneur,  I didn't say hell no. I said, hmm, that's very interesting. I can't sell you the software,  but what I'll do is license you the data that you need, which turned out to be a great answer  because for the next 18 months, I think it was, I supplied this publisher data that they  needed to use for their own strategic purposes about what price movements were doing in the  eBook market. And they were paying me handsomely for it. So I was working full time on a contract  for the BBC. I was working full time on this. It was a very financially rewarding time in  my life. And to a large extent, the money that I took in from that period is what I'm  still using to fund and invest in myself for what I'm trying to do with that site now.  So this is the site that stands now. And this is what I'm trying to make a full time viable  business. It's called lozme.com. It's an eBook price comparison site. I encourage you to  check it out. If you do, you'll see it doesn't actually look like this at the moment. This  is a new version that's coming up. But what I'm trying to do with this is different to  what I did with InterTrader because InterTrader was the old style venture backed model of  growing a business where I had to write a business plan. I had to convince other people  of the merits of that plan. I then had to get the office, find the staff, get a board  of directors, all those joyous things. With this, I'm trying to do it a different way.  What I want to do is not go down that route of funding it through other people's money  until I am convinced I've got a scalable model. Because if I do that, it means I'll get a  much better price on the valuation when I raise the money the next time. But also, it means  I'm giving myself the luxury of trying things out. I'm allowing myself to try and fail with  the various ideas I'm using in this project before I have other people to tell me I can't  do that. But that's enough about me. I want to now talk about you and what you could do.  Because I think we as technologists are extraordinary lucky to be here at this time. Because of  the internet, because of the globalization that's going along, we have the opportunity  to build stuff in our back bedroom by ourselves and turn it into profitable businesses which  can replace a full-time job or just enhance the life that you have by doing it part-time.  Because we don't need to hire staff because we can build it ourselves. We don't have  to have an office because you can use a virtual server on Amazon or on Google or wherever.  I think this is a terrific opportunity. It's one of the things I would like for people  to start contemplating what they will do. Because to my mind, we're at a change in the  way we do work. The future of work is not going to be what it was in the past. We don't  have the likelihood of having a full-time job even if we wanted one for the rest of  our lives. The nature of it all is becoming much more a portfolio career where you do  one job followed by another, contracts that you take on maybe for a day or a week, not  for years or decades. Assuming that you have some technical knowledge about a thing or  you have an idea, these are some of the things that you can do with it. The big choice you  need to make is are you going to build a product or are you going to run a service? They both  have merits. It's a very good idea, I believe, if you're not familiar with the idea of running  a business or having something that you are building, that you are making and you are  selling. Starting with a one-off product is a much better idea than trying to run a service  from day one. You can write an e-book in a week. In fact, one of the books I'm going  to recommend later was written over the course of a weekend. The reason why it's better  is it means that you can go through the whole process of having the idea, building the thing,  going out there and marketing it and getting somebody to pay for it without having to put  in place the support costs of running it thereafter. It's really important that if you're going  to go down this route that you experience the whole journey from idea through to sale  and ongoing support because it is so easy to have the idea, have the fun of building  it and then go, well, how am I going to sell it now? I haven't thought about that bit.  That's the important bit. If you don't make the step of finding somebody that wants to  buy it preferably before you've built it and then selling it to them, you don't have a  business, you've got a hobby. That's a perfectly valid thing to do as long as you realize that  that's what you're doing. If you think that you're trying to run a business but you are  in fact having a hobby, you're not going to have an enjoyable experience because you will  run out of money. The one-off thing you can do is product. You could write an e-book.  I've got an example of somebody that's made a lot of money out of doing that later. You  could write a course. If, for example, you happen to be the expert in, I don't know,  Django pipes or whatever, that's a terrific idea. It's new technology that people will  want to know about. Somebody should be writing that book or that course or offering the online  training. This is a product. It's great for a side project or a first project. Where the  bigger, more long-term money seems to be in is in service-related businesses because  then you get the holy grail of the recurring revenue that every month a customer is going  to pay you money every month. The nature of that though is you're likely to get support  costs. It's a bigger operation that you need to think about. You have to commit to being  available to do that support 24 by 7, 365 days a week. If you're a solo founder like me,  you might not want to do that because you might want to go on holiday or come to conferences.  But the idea that you have a service or a website that's sitting there making money  whilst you do things you want to do is one as an idea that works for me very well.  Then the other thing that you can do is to publish. Now, publishing used to mean writing  a book or writing a blog, but now it also means doing a video blog, doing a YouTube,  doing podcasts on the subject. This is great not just because you can potentially monetise  it to make money out of what you're doing, but by doing that publishing, by producing  that podcast, what you do is position yourself as an authority. You may be an expert, you  may be the world-class expert in a particular field, but if nobody knows about it, why will  they contract with you? Why would they ask you for the consulting? Why would they ask  you to fix their problems? There's various ways to monetise. I could do an entire session  just on the question of monetisation, but here's just a few headings. Direct sale.  Writing a book used to be something you did for an official publisher like a Riley. Now  it's becoming much more common that people self-publish the technical books. For many  reasons, one of which is you don't have to ask permission, you don't have to convince  anybody else it's a good idea, you can just get out there and do it. But also the time  to market is much faster. I have a friend who has written a book who completed it last  year. It's ready to go, but the traditional publisher isn't actually going to release  it till the book fair next year. Now that's two years of no income from that book that  is ready. Self-published, he'd be earning from it right now. Affiliate commission is  something which can work well if you do it in a way which is not cheesy. So if you buy  a book through my site, for example, then I get an affiliate commission from Amazon,  from Apple. It doesn't cost you any more, but I make the money for connecting you with  that vendor. If it's done well, it can work nicely. Some sites tend to just push things  at you whether they're good, whether you want them or not. Then I find that cheesy, I don't  like that. Same with advertising. Advertising can be a very good way of monetising a website  or service, but only when it's done well. You don't want to have the advertising become  the point. It's supposed to match the offering of what you're trying to sell and provide something  that's useful. Sponsorship is something that's happening a lot with podcasts at the moment.  So if you are writing, for example, Meteor is a subject I'm going to come to later, that  they do a podcast where it's sponsored by the kind of company that would host a Meteor  website. What you're doing by providing that podcast is finding them the audience that  they want. They can do a very targeted advert as a form of sponsorship on that podcast to  people who are exactly the target audience for who they want to reach. Then the other  thing which you can package up and sell, which is what I've also made some money from with  the bookside, is data analytics. Because I have this website, I have a lot of data about  what people actually do when they're buying an e-book. That data by itself is a valuable  product. Now, I will say to anybody that's suddenly thinking, I use Lozme, what about  the privacy aspect? I don't sell individual data, I sell bulk aggregated data. So I can  say, for example, this book that you've never heard of is racing up through people's wish  lists.  But I want to give you some real examples of people like you who have gone down this  path and made some serious money from it. So people think you can't make money out of  writing a book. This example for me says otherwise. Meteor is a web framework for doing real-time  data. The documentation that came with it wasn't particularly good, although the technology  was fantastic. So these two people, Sasha Grief and Tom Coleman, decided to write a book and  a website to support that. They packaged it such that you could choose what level of book  you wanted to buy. So I think there was a $29 option which was just the book. There was  a $59 book which was the version of the book with some training videos and then there was  the high-end option where you got customized support or something like that. So there's  a case study that they did with Gumroad which was the company they were selling it through,  $300,000 in 18 months from a book. It's going to be more than that now because the book  is still necessary to understand how to use Meteor. It's also, if you're thinking of writing  a book, I would recommend you check out their website because it is the best example I have  found of how to write a technical book. It's just beautiful and it's the framework that  I would choose to use if I were writing one. But $300,000, one book self-published.  People say you can't start a business, a real business if you're just a solo founder. Well,  does anybody here use Balsamic? Yeah, Peldi started that in his bedroom. Last time I've  seen some public figures on this, annual profits running at $2 million. He's got a staff about  26 now and they all work remotely. This is a beautiful example of how somebody found  a sweet spot in the market, built something that he wanted to use himself, started selling  it, listened to his customer base and developed it. He's had at least one offer to buy that  business which he's chosen not to take because he thinks he can do better for his customer  base by staying as an independent company. But it shows what you can do. One person,  $2 million. People say you can't do this unless you live in the USA. Well, I have to say,  I can say that that's wrong because my biggest customer when I was doing the book data service  was in New York, this publisher, he was an American publisher. I've never even met them  and yet I made, I think about $100,000 from that contract with a company I've never met.  If you follow Hacker News, you might have heard of a guy called patio11, Patrick McKenzie.  He has run a number of businesses, he's awesome by the way, if you get the chance to follow  anything he says, he really knows his stuff. He was running a successful small business,  self-started called bingo card creator. He lives in Japan. He then started doing some,  he discovered that he had a real talent for marketing software products and so he was  being hired by people like Fog Creek Software and major US companies to help them sort out  what their strategies should be whilst living in Japan. Here's the thing, when people start  to think about trying to build something for themselves and make money from it, the most  common reaction is, but I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that because whatever list  of excuses, reasons that you may have, I don't believe that. I believe that anybody in this  room could if they wanted to. I'm not saying that you should, I'm just saying that if you  wanted to, you have the skills to be able to do that and it doesn't matter how introverted  you are, it doesn't matter how busy you are, it doesn't matter what your reason for going  oh no, I can't do that. You can, yes you can and I want to show you an example here, which  is something I find totally inspiring. John Morrow is paralyzed from the neck down. He  has to have 24 by 7 support to do the basic things of living and yet despite being paralyzed  with muscular atrophy from the neck down, he has managed to build a successful business.  His particular talent is in copywriting and blogging. So he runs courses, he writes data,  writes services about how to be a better blogger and he runs that company from his wheelchair.  He in all normal, normal forms of business, people would say he was probably unemployable  and yet he's employed himself and he's made a really good business and a terrific life  from that. So don't think you can't do it, if he can do it, you can. So I have a few  final thoughts which don't really fit into a particular category but it's okay to start  small. In fact I'd encourage it because what you need to do is to learn the business of  being in business. You need to understand what it means to file your tax returns on time  because if you're doing a corporate business, the rules are different than if you're self  employed. If you're that registered it's different than if you're not. If you're doing business,  if you're in the UK and you're dealing with businesses in the rest of the EU, you've got  a whole different level of bureaucracy to cope with. Those things matter as much as  being as good as you can for the thing you are trying to sell. So start small but finish.  One of the books that I recommend is by a woman called Amy Hoy. I don't know if you've  heard of her. Amazing woman. Her book is called Just F-ing Ship because what you learn by  shipping a product to completion and having a happy customer is something you cannot buy  in a book. You can only learn that experience by doing it and the only way you do it is  by doing it through to actually finishing the job. It's okay to fail. I had a business  inter trader, the dot com. That would be a failure by anybody's criterion. Eight years,  I think I've raised about half a million pounds for that. In that eight years we made profit  in two months. That's not a successful business. However, the business failed, the idea failed  but I did not fail. I am not a failure because I had a business which did not work. What  I had was a learning experience. Most businesses don't get it right the first time. And this  is one of the things we, especially technology related business founders, sometimes struggle  with because we're used to getting everything right. The nature of coming through the exam  system at school when you do science related subjects is you expect to be able to get 90  to 100% on the exams because you know how to do the math question and the physics question.  Suddenly the real world is not like that. The real world you have to do experiments  that don't work to find the ways through that do work. So it is okay to fail. Just don't  make the same mistake twice. And it's okay to think big. You may just want to start writing  little word press plug-in just to try that experience. That's fine. But always having  it in the back of your mind thinking, well, where could I take this? If I was going to  try and do this 10 times bigger, what would the next step be to do that? How do I get  10 times bigger, 100 times bigger? Because there's usually a way and as a small nimble  tech related company you have the ability to move much faster than some of the behemoths  of the corporate world. So you can take advantage of that. If you have a choice between B2B  and B2C, which means business to business or business to consumer, choose business to  business every time. And I'll tell you why. Because they are used to spending money. Whereas  most consumers don't like spending money. In the book world, if you try to sell an e-book  that's a fiction, we're now conditioned to understand that an e-book on Kindle should  be 99 pence. Two dollars cheap. Cheap, cheap. If you're doing a business related book and  you're selling directly, it is perfectly acceptable to be selling it for $29, $59, $200. The most  expensive book that's ever been sold through my website was $1,250. I think it was a set  of building regulations. And the other thing about when you're starting up, you get to  decide what it is you're doing. Nobody's going to tell you. You decide what kind of  business you want, which means choose the customers you want and price accordingly.  So if you make the choice to have high-end expensive customers who are willing to spend  large amounts of money with you, don't price cheap. Because if you price cheap, you'll  get cheap customers. And charge more. This is the thing that Patrick McKenzie has taught  me over the years. He has this mantra, charge. Charge more. First of all, you have to charge  because until you've taken somebody's money, that is not your friend, your mother, your  sister, whatever, a person that you do not know has handed over their credit card online  to you and you've taken their money. Until you've done that, you don't know whether  anybody actually wants what you've got. So you must charge because that's the only way  of validating your idea. And then charge more because nobody charges enough to start with  because you think, oh, how can I have built something that's worth this amount of money?  Triple your prices. Triple your prices. Ten times your prices. See what happens. I got  taught when I was out on sales trips with a spider by a salesman, if he didn't lose  50% of his sales deals on price, he wasn't charging enough. And I found that a really  interesting idea that it's okay not to win the sales deal. To make that work, you have  to have enough of a pipeline that you can try out that experiment. But the higher you  can put your prices, the better service you can deliver to your customers. And you'd be  surprised what they can pay. When I did the book deal with the publisher, I hadn't got  a clue how much to charge. And so when we agreed what I was going to deliver, he'd  ask me for the price. I was umming and erring about it. I said, I really don't know how  to price for this. And he went, so I left it to him inadvertently. And he said, look,  we need to get this sorted. How about I pay you what I pay the ad words to people? So,  and then he named a price which was like at least three times what I would have thought  of charging. So I thought, great, yep, I can work with that. Um, showed, if I'd left it  to myself, I would have totally underpriced what I was doing. And my final thought, well,  I have actually one other thought which is normal, which is if you've got any idea about  going into business, whether it's a side project or a big, big startup, practice presentation  skills, you're going to need them. And this is one of the common things that we as techies  feel very unhappy about doing. Standing up here, speaking to a room full of people is  really, it's scary, but it's also fun. And you can learn how to do this. I mean, I am  a very shy person. I'm a very introverted person. But most people who know me don't think that  because they think I stand on a stage by myself talking to an audience of hundreds. That must  be an outgoing extrovert. I've just taught myself how to do this. And so I would thoroughly  encourage you, if you've never spoken in public before, start now. You don't have to be a  talk like this. Go to your local meetup. We run one in Scotland. We're always trying to  encourage people to a five minute, 10 minute talk. Sign up for Harold's writing talks  if you've never done one before. It's a brilliant way to start because what can go wrong? Five  minutes, anybody can talk about something they care about for five minutes. Give it  a go. And then you learn how to solve the problems of actually doing a presentation.  Like, for example, I know my knees get nervous. So my knees shake quite a lot when I'm feeling  uncomfortable. But then I wear loose trousers. So you don't know that because you can't see  them shaking. Things like that. You learn by doing. And this is the common thing about  being in business. You only learn by doing. So get out there and start doing it. My final  thought, start a mailing list. This is the single most useful business tool that you  have got. Whether it's, we've written a technical book, whether you're doing a service based  startup, you want to have a mailing list of the people who have shown any interest at  all in what you're doing. So you can continue to have the conversation with them. I have  a whole load of other things on to say, but I think I'm out of time. So what I shall do  is move it over to questions. But what I'd like to say is that for people who are in  the other room, who I believe are watching through the video link, if you don't have  the opportunity to put your question to me now, but you do want to, you can find me on  Twitter, you can find me in the Telegram app. I'll be around till Wednesday. So just come  and have a chat with me. If you've got enough interest, I can set up a session in the open  spaces. And if anybody's watching this on YouTube, that offer goes to YouTube. Just  get in touch. Our Wilma on Twitter, our Wilma, I think, on the Telegram app. And I, if you,  if I have said anything here that touches a nerve, that makes you go and try something,  I'd love to know about it. Please let me know what you do and do something. Thank you very  much.  Thank you very much, Rachel. Have some.
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Yeah, so good morning everyone. I'm really happy to introduce our first keynote speaker, Rachel Wolmer, who she will tell you about she survived 20 years without having a real job. So please give a big hand for Rachel. Well thank you. Good morning. Can you hear me at the back? Yes. Fantastic. Can you hear me? Can you hear me at the back now? Great. Buenos dias. Me gusto mucho estar a bilbao. That is the end of my Spanish. Okay, so as my talk title implies, I'm going to tell you how I have survived 20 years without having had a proper job, by which I mean, I've obviously been working, but I haven't had a salary that somebody else hasn't supplied to me for 21 years now. So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to tell you some of the lessons that I've learned over these last couple of decades, and to potentially give you some ideas about things you might want to think about yourself. So this talk is really aimed at people who are in a job but would rather not be. Because I have the pleasure that almost every day I get up and go to work. I look forward to it, and I look forward to it because I've built the work life that I want, doing the kind of work that I want, and sometimes that's made me a fair bit of money, and sometimes it hasn't, but nothing compares to the pleasure of actually looking forward to going to work. So this is for you. If you're in a job and you'd rather not be at all, or if you would just like to perhaps make some money out of the side project that you've been working on, I have some thoughts to share with both of those types of people. But who am I? Now, it may be hard to imagine, but that person on the photograph is me, 20 years ago, and if you think, oh God Rachel, what happened to you? I have to tell you, I didn't look like that then either. It's amazing what a professional photographer can do. But that was to an extent, that summed up where I'd got to with my dot com company. But I'm going to start at the beginning. I graduated 30 odd years ago as an engineering student. It was the end of a recession, which made it hard for most people to get jobs, but I was lucky because I was an engineering student and I had learnt to code. It was very easy to get a job because there weren't many programmers around at the time. So I started off working for an engineering company, writing software, lasted there a couple of years, and then I went to a research institute, which is where I first discovered the internet. So I've actually been on the internet for 30 years, which is I think longer than some of you have been alive. But I can remember the days before the internet. So I lasted a couple of years doing that. I learnt a lot of interesting technology related stuff, but then I thought, well, no, this working for other people is not doing it for me. So I made my first foray into self-employment. I left that company to be a freelance contractor. Again, back then, it was very easy to be a contractor because my basic pitch to anybody that was thinking of hiring me was, no, I don't know how to do it. Give me a week, let's see how far I get. And that worked every time. But I was not content with just being a contractor, even though it was a very easy way to make a fair bit of money. At the time, I had still, I'd got the idea that at some point I wanted to do something bigger than that. So I started working on the skills and the tools that I'd need to make a success out of that. It occurred to me that if I was going to start a company and start writing business plans, then I would need to know about money, not just spending it, but what it meant in a business plan context. So I did an accounting diploma part-time in the evening. And at the end of that year, I'd got a certificate, but more importantly, I could write a business plan and I could understand the figures in other people's proper and loss accounts, balance sheets, that kind of thing, which turned out to be really interesting and useful later on. But I didn't start that company just then. I kept contracting and then my plan fell slightly awry because one of the companies I went to work for as a contract was a company called Spider Systems and they were wonderful. It was a terrific company. But after a while, they said, you know, Rachel, we like you. We don't like your contracting rates. Come and work for us. So I did. Five years, I spent there as a programmer, manager, engineering manager, sales support person. And that was all terrific fun. We were working on internet related stuff in the early 90s and it was just a ball because everything was taking off. And then in the mid-90s, the internet became more of a public property and it went terribly wild. Now about that time, Spider, this brilliant company I was working for, got taken over by an American company. So I thought this is the time to leave. This is the time I'm going to set up my own, do my own thing. So I left and I had an interest at the time in digital cash. So I started a digital cash company in the mid-90s, which in some respect was a great idea because it was, people thought it was very interesting as a concept. But as a business idea, I have to tell you, it was a dreadful idea. It was 20 years ahead of its time. If I'd had that idea two years ago, I'd be a gazillionaire by now. But 20 years ago, there just wasn't the market for it. But anyway, I started this company and the company was called InterTrader. If you look them up on the website now, the domain is used by a spread betting company, but that's not my company. My idea was to have a digital cash exchange server. So no matter what digital cash you were paying with, whether it was e-gold or Digi-gold or Cybercash or Mondex or any of the other things that were floating around then, but my cash box would take your money and exchange it into something more solid like pounds or dollars. So because that was a concept that seemed to attract some attention, I raised money, I got a board of directors, I had a team of great staff to work with me on that. And I got a lot of press, partly because my concept was an interesting one that was in Scotland at the time. We had a really good dot com scene going on, but we didn't have very many women doing it. So just by that chance, I stood out a fair bit, which is why I ended up on the cover of this magazine. It wasn't because they particularly wanted to write a huge article about me. If you looked inside the magazine, it's one column, but they wanted to stand out on the shelves. So what easy way to do that, put a woman on a cover. So I'm very grateful for that because I got this lovely photo to show for it. But that kind of thing was fun, but it was distracting from the main job of actually finding customers that wanted what I did and making money from it. So for those of you who remember the dot com boom times, you'll remember it was wild. People were raising money for really crazy ideas. And then suddenly, around the 2000 year mark, the crash happened. And suddenly the dot com boom became a dot com bust. And I still had staff. I still had an office. We managed to keep that idea running for another three years after the crash, which I was pretty proud of. But in the end, I just had to admit defeat. It was not going to be possible to turn my brilliant idea and my fantastic customer base into a viable business. So sadly, I closed it down, which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. But it meant I was free to go off and do other things. So this takes us to about 2003. Now, what I did after that was I licked my wounds for about six months when you put your heart and soul into building a business. It's difficult to just walk away from it. It's like a divorce or a death. So it took about six months before I felt capable of doing pretty much anything else after that. But then I went back to doing a bit of freelancing. I went back to doing, working on some fascinating projects. One of them was an open source project, which I got paid for. And I can talk about that a little later if you're interested in that business model. But eventually, I knew it was going to come back to this idea. But I actually wanted to build something again. And this time it happened more by chance because I was trying various side projects as a way of re-skilling myself. Because the problem that I had at the time was I'd worked on two big projects. One of them was covered by NDAs, so I couldn't talk about it to anybody, which made it hard to use on a CV. The second one I was working on this open source project, which was OpenPGPSDK for Nominate, which is cryptography. So I could talk about it all I wanted to, but nobody would understand. So I needed to put something on my CV that I could show what it was I did. And in fact, what ended up happening as the side projects became the CV, I haven't actually written a CV since 1986. And I'm hoping I never will have to again. So I wrote side projects. I wrote a website called HowSafeIsYourMoney.co.uk, which made it easier to understand one of the government websites to find out whether your money was safe in the banks when they went bust. I wrote a website that was a price checker for the Wii Fit when it came out. I wrote lots of small things like that. But one of my big loves is eBooks. And so I wrote a little eBook price checker, and I made it into a website. And it was the worst name I have ever heard in my life. It was called eBook price.info, which it did what it said on the tin, but oh my God, that's an awful name. And it didn't look very good either. It was really ugly. I'm not good at design. I'm good at computer system design. I'm just not good at graphic design. But people started using it. And I thought that's interesting. And then one day when I was working on a contract for somebody else, I got an approach from one of the five biggest publishers in the world saying, we want to buy your software. My immediate reaction was, oh, that's interesting. And then my second reaction was, hell no. Nobody's looking at that code. It's not an acceptable condition. It's just stuff I've hacked together. But being an entrepreneur, I didn't say hell no. I said, hmm, that's very interesting. I can't sell you the software, but what I'll do is license you the data that you need, which turned out to be a great answer because for the next 18 months, I think it was, I supplied this publisher data that they needed to use for their own strategic purposes about what price movements were doing in the eBook market. And they were paying me handsomely for it. So I was working full time on a contract for the BBC. I was working full time on this. It was a very financially rewarding time in my life. And to a large extent, the money that I took in from that period is what I'm still using to fund and invest in myself for what I'm trying to do with that site now. So this is the site that stands now. And this is what I'm trying to make a full time viable business. It's called lozme.com. It's an eBook price comparison site. I encourage you to check it out. If you do, you'll see it doesn't actually look like this at the moment. This is a new version that's coming up. But what I'm trying to do with this is different to what I did with InterTrader because InterTrader was the old style venture backed model of growing a business where I had to write a business plan. I had to convince other people of the merits of that plan. I then had to get the office, find the staff, get a board of directors, all those joyous things. With this, I'm trying to do it a different way. What I want to do is not go down that route of funding it through other people's money until I am convinced I've got a scalable model. Because if I do that, it means I'll get a much better price on the valuation when I raise the money the next time. But also, it means I'm giving myself the luxury of trying things out. I'm allowing myself to try and fail with the various ideas I'm using in this project before I have other people to tell me I can't do that. But that's enough about me. I want to now talk about you and what you could do. Because I think we as technologists are extraordinary lucky to be here at this time. Because of the internet, because of the globalization that's going along, we have the opportunity to build stuff in our back bedroom by ourselves and turn it into profitable businesses which can replace a full-time job or just enhance the life that you have by doing it part-time. Because we don't need to hire staff because we can build it ourselves. We don't have to have an office because you can use a virtual server on Amazon or on Google or wherever. I think this is a terrific opportunity. It's one of the things I would like for people to start contemplating what they will do. Because to my mind, we're at a change in the way we do work. The future of work is not going to be what it was in the past. We don't have the likelihood of having a full-time job even if we wanted one for the rest of our lives. The nature of it all is becoming much more a portfolio career where you do one job followed by another, contracts that you take on maybe for a day or a week, not for years or decades. Assuming that you have some technical knowledge about a thing or you have an idea, these are some of the things that you can do with it. The big choice you need to make is are you going to build a product or are you going to run a service? They both have merits. It's a very good idea, I believe, if you're not familiar with the idea of running a business or having something that you are building, that you are making and you are selling. Starting with a one-off product is a much better idea than trying to run a service from day one. You can write an e-book in a week. In fact, one of the books I'm going to recommend later was written over the course of a weekend. The reason why it's better is it means that you can go through the whole process of having the idea, building the thing, going out there and marketing it and getting somebody to pay for it without having to put in place the support costs of running it thereafter. It's really important that if you're going to go down this route that you experience the whole journey from idea through to sale and ongoing support because it is so easy to have the idea, have the fun of building it and then go, well, how am I going to sell it now? I haven't thought about that bit. That's the important bit. If you don't make the step of finding somebody that wants to buy it preferably before you've built it and then selling it to them, you don't have a business, you've got a hobby. That's a perfectly valid thing to do as long as you realize that that's what you're doing. If you think that you're trying to run a business but you are in fact having a hobby, you're not going to have an enjoyable experience because you will run out of money. The one-off thing you can do is product. You could write an e-book. I've got an example of somebody that's made a lot of money out of doing that later. You could write a course. If, for example, you happen to be the expert in, I don't know, Django pipes or whatever, that's a terrific idea. It's new technology that people will want to know about. Somebody should be writing that book or that course or offering the online training. This is a product. It's great for a side project or a first project. Where the bigger, more long-term money seems to be in is in service-related businesses because then you get the holy grail of the recurring revenue that every month a customer is going to pay you money every month. The nature of that though is you're likely to get support costs. It's a bigger operation that you need to think about. You have to commit to being available to do that support 24 by 7, 365 days a week. If you're a solo founder like me, you might not want to do that because you might want to go on holiday or come to conferences. But the idea that you have a service or a website that's sitting there making money whilst you do things you want to do is one as an idea that works for me very well. Then the other thing that you can do is to publish. Now, publishing used to mean writing a book or writing a blog, but now it also means doing a video blog, doing a YouTube, doing podcasts on the subject. This is great not just because you can potentially monetise it to make money out of what you're doing, but by doing that publishing, by producing that podcast, what you do is position yourself as an authority. You may be an expert, you may be the world-class expert in a particular field, but if nobody knows about it, why will they contract with you? Why would they ask you for the consulting? Why would they ask you to fix their problems? There's various ways to monetise. I could do an entire session just on the question of monetisation, but here's just a few headings. Direct sale. Writing a book used to be something you did for an official publisher like a Riley. Now it's becoming much more common that people self-publish the technical books. For many reasons, one of which is you don't have to ask permission, you don't have to convince anybody else it's a good idea, you can just get out there and do it. But also the time to market is much faster. I have a friend who has written a book who completed it last year. It's ready to go, but the traditional publisher isn't actually going to release it till the book fair next year. Now that's two years of no income from that book that is ready. Self-published, he'd be earning from it right now. Affiliate commission is something which can work well if you do it in a way which is not cheesy. So if you buy a book through my site, for example, then I get an affiliate commission from Amazon, from Apple. It doesn't cost you any more, but I make the money for connecting you with that vendor. If it's done well, it can work nicely. Some sites tend to just push things at you whether they're good, whether you want them or not. Then I find that cheesy, I don't like that. Same with advertising. Advertising can be a very good way of monetising a website or service, but only when it's done well. You don't want to have the advertising become the point. It's supposed to match the offering of what you're trying to sell and provide something that's useful. Sponsorship is something that's happening a lot with podcasts at the moment. So if you are writing, for example, Meteor is a subject I'm going to come to later, that they do a podcast where it's sponsored by the kind of company that would host a Meteor website. What you're doing by providing that podcast is finding them the audience that they want. They can do a very targeted advert as a form of sponsorship on that podcast to people who are exactly the target audience for who they want to reach. Then the other thing which you can package up and sell, which is what I've also made some money from with the bookside, is data analytics. Because I have this website, I have a lot of data about what people actually do when they're buying an e-book. That data by itself is a valuable product. Now, I will say to anybody that's suddenly thinking, I use Lozme, what about the privacy aspect? I don't sell individual data, I sell bulk aggregated data. So I can say, for example, this book that you've never heard of is racing up through people's wish lists. But I want to give you some real examples of people like you who have gone down this path and made some serious money from it. So people think you can't make money out of writing a book. This example for me says otherwise. Meteor is a web framework for doing real-time data. The documentation that came with it wasn't particularly good, although the technology was fantastic. So these two people, Sasha Grief and Tom Coleman, decided to write a book and a website to support that. They packaged it such that you could choose what level of book you wanted to buy. So I think there was a $29 option which was just the book. There was a $59 book which was the version of the book with some training videos and then there was the high-end option where you got customized support or something like that. So there's a case study that they did with Gumroad which was the company they were selling it through, $300,000 in 18 months from a book. It's going to be more than that now because the book is still necessary to understand how to use Meteor. It's also, if you're thinking of writing a book, I would recommend you check out their website because it is the best example I have found of how to write a technical book. It's just beautiful and it's the framework that I would choose to use if I were writing one. But $300,000, one book self-published. People say you can't start a business, a real business if you're just a solo founder. Well, does anybody here use Balsamic? Yeah, Peldi started that in his bedroom. Last time I've seen some public figures on this, annual profits running at $2 million. He's got a staff about 26 now and they all work remotely. This is a beautiful example of how somebody found a sweet spot in the market, built something that he wanted to use himself, started selling it, listened to his customer base and developed it. He's had at least one offer to buy that business which he's chosen not to take because he thinks he can do better for his customer base by staying as an independent company. But it shows what you can do. One person, $2 million. People say you can't do this unless you live in the USA. Well, I have to say, I can say that that's wrong because my biggest customer when I was doing the book data service was in New York, this publisher, he was an American publisher. I've never even met them and yet I made, I think about $100,000 from that contract with a company I've never met. If you follow Hacker News, you might have heard of a guy called patio11, Patrick McKenzie. He has run a number of businesses, he's awesome by the way, if you get the chance to follow anything he says, he really knows his stuff. He was running a successful small business, self-started called bingo card creator. He lives in Japan. He then started doing some, he discovered that he had a real talent for marketing software products and so he was being hired by people like Fog Creek Software and major US companies to help them sort out what their strategies should be whilst living in Japan. Here's the thing, when people start to think about trying to build something for themselves and make money from it, the most common reaction is, but I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that because whatever list of excuses, reasons that you may have, I don't believe that. I believe that anybody in this room could if they wanted to. I'm not saying that you should, I'm just saying that if you wanted to, you have the skills to be able to do that and it doesn't matter how introverted you are, it doesn't matter how busy you are, it doesn't matter what your reason for going oh no, I can't do that. You can, yes you can and I want to show you an example here, which is something I find totally inspiring. John Morrow is paralyzed from the neck down. He has to have 24 by 7 support to do the basic things of living and yet despite being paralyzed with muscular atrophy from the neck down, he has managed to build a successful business. His particular talent is in copywriting and blogging. So he runs courses, he writes data, writes services about how to be a better blogger and he runs that company from his wheelchair. He in all normal, normal forms of business, people would say he was probably unemployable and yet he's employed himself and he's made a really good business and a terrific life from that. So don't think you can't do it, if he can do it, you can. So I have a few final thoughts which don't really fit into a particular category but it's okay to start small. In fact I'd encourage it because what you need to do is to learn the business of being in business. You need to understand what it means to file your tax returns on time because if you're doing a corporate business, the rules are different than if you're self employed. If you're that registered it's different than if you're not. If you're doing business, if you're in the UK and you're dealing with businesses in the rest of the EU, you've got a whole different level of bureaucracy to cope with. Those things matter as much as being as good as you can for the thing you are trying to sell. So start small but finish. One of the books that I recommend is by a woman called Amy Hoy. I don't know if you've heard of her. Amazing woman. Her book is called Just F-ing Ship because what you learn by shipping a product to completion and having a happy customer is something you cannot buy in a book. You can only learn that experience by doing it and the only way you do it is by doing it through to actually finishing the job. It's okay to fail. I had a business inter trader, the dot com. That would be a failure by anybody's criterion. Eight years, I think I've raised about half a million pounds for that. In that eight years we made profit in two months. That's not a successful business. However, the business failed, the idea failed but I did not fail. I am not a failure because I had a business which did not work. What I had was a learning experience. Most businesses don't get it right the first time. And this is one of the things we, especially technology related business founders, sometimes struggle with because we're used to getting everything right. The nature of coming through the exam system at school when you do science related subjects is you expect to be able to get 90 to 100% on the exams because you know how to do the math question and the physics question. Suddenly the real world is not like that. The real world you have to do experiments that don't work to find the ways through that do work. So it is okay to fail. Just don't make the same mistake twice. And it's okay to think big. You may just want to start writing little word press plug-in just to try that experience. That's fine. But always having it in the back of your mind thinking, well, where could I take this? If I was going to try and do this 10 times bigger, what would the next step be to do that? How do I get 10 times bigger, 100 times bigger? Because there's usually a way and as a small nimble tech related company you have the ability to move much faster than some of the behemoths of the corporate world. So you can take advantage of that. If you have a choice between B2B and B2C, which means business to business or business to consumer, choose business to business every time. And I'll tell you why. Because they are used to spending money. Whereas most consumers don't like spending money. In the book world, if you try to sell an e-book that's a fiction, we're now conditioned to understand that an e-book on Kindle should be 99 pence. Two dollars cheap. Cheap, cheap. If you're doing a business related book and you're selling directly, it is perfectly acceptable to be selling it for $29, $59, $200. The most expensive book that's ever been sold through my website was $1,250. I think it was a set of building regulations. And the other thing about when you're starting up, you get to decide what it is you're doing. Nobody's going to tell you. You decide what kind of business you want, which means choose the customers you want and price accordingly. So if you make the choice to have high-end expensive customers who are willing to spend large amounts of money with you, don't price cheap. Because if you price cheap, you'll get cheap customers. And charge more. This is the thing that Patrick McKenzie has taught me over the years. He has this mantra, charge. Charge more. First of all, you have to charge because until you've taken somebody's money, that is not your friend, your mother, your sister, whatever, a person that you do not know has handed over their credit card online to you and you've taken their money. Until you've done that, you don't know whether anybody actually wants what you've got. So you must charge because that's the only way of validating your idea. And then charge more because nobody charges enough to start with because you think, oh, how can I have built something that's worth this amount of money? Triple your prices. Triple your prices. Ten times your prices. See what happens. I got taught when I was out on sales trips with a spider by a salesman, if he didn't lose 50% of his sales deals on price, he wasn't charging enough. And I found that a really interesting idea that it's okay not to win the sales deal. To make that work, you have to have enough of a pipeline that you can try out that experiment. But the higher you can put your prices, the better service you can deliver to your customers. And you'd be surprised what they can pay. When I did the book deal with the publisher, I hadn't got a clue how much to charge. And so when we agreed what I was going to deliver, he'd ask me for the price. I was umming and erring about it. I said, I really don't know how to price for this. And he went, so I left it to him inadvertently. And he said, look, we need to get this sorted. How about I pay you what I pay the ad words to people? So, and then he named a price which was like at least three times what I would have thought of charging. So I thought, great, yep, I can work with that. Um, showed, if I'd left it to myself, I would have totally underpriced what I was doing. And my final thought, well, I have actually one other thought which is normal, which is if you've got any idea about going into business, whether it's a side project or a big, big startup, practice presentation skills, you're going to need them. And this is one of the common things that we as techies feel very unhappy about doing. Standing up here, speaking to a room full of people is really, it's scary, but it's also fun. And you can learn how to do this. I mean, I am a very shy person. I'm a very introverted person. But most people who know me don't think that because they think I stand on a stage by myself talking to an audience of hundreds. That must be an outgoing extrovert. I've just taught myself how to do this. And so I would thoroughly encourage you, if you've never spoken in public before, start now. You don't have to be a talk like this. Go to your local meetup. We run one in Scotland. We're always trying to encourage people to a five minute, 10 minute talk. Sign up for Harold's writing talks if you've never done one before. It's a brilliant way to start because what can go wrong? Five minutes, anybody can talk about something they care about for five minutes. Give it a go. And then you learn how to solve the problems of actually doing a presentation. Like, for example, I know my knees get nervous. So my knees shake quite a lot when I'm feeling uncomfortable. But then I wear loose trousers. So you don't know that because you can't see them shaking. Things like that. You learn by doing. And this is the common thing about being in business. You only learn by doing. So get out there and start doing it. My final thought, start a mailing list. This is the single most useful business tool that you have got. Whether it's, we've written a technical book, whether you're doing a service based startup, you want to have a mailing list of the people who have shown any interest at all in what you're doing. So you can continue to have the conversation with them. I have a whole load of other things on to say, but I think I'm out of time. So what I shall do is move it over to questions. But what I'd like to say is that for people who are in the other room, who I believe are watching through the video link, if you don't have the opportunity to put your question to me now, but you do want to, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me in the Telegram app. I'll be around till Wednesday. So just come and have a chat with me. If you've got enough interest, I can set up a session in the open spaces. And if anybody's watching this on YouTube, that offer goes to YouTube. Just get in touch. Our Wilma on Twitter, our Wilma, I think, on the Telegram app. And I, if you, if I have said anything here that touches a nerve, that makes you go and try something, I'd love to know about it. Please let me know what you do and do something. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Rachel. Have some.
20 years without having a real job. So please tell you how I have survived 20 years without having had a proper job, by which I mean, I've for 21 years now. So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to tell you some of the lessons that it because I've built the work life that I want, this is for you. If you're in a job and you'd to perhaps make some money out of the side project that you've been working on, I have some left that company to be a freelance contractor. my own thing. So I left and I had an interest at as a business idea, I have to tell you, it was a started this company and the company was called raising money for really crazy ideas. And then which made it hard to use on a CV. The second one because for the next 18 months, I think it was, I it through other people's money until I am running a business or having something that you so easy to have the idea, have the fun of that later. You could write a course. If, for other thing that you can do is to publish. Now, themselves and make money from it, the most that. The real world you have to do experiments that don't work to find the ways through that do which means business to business or business to business, whether it's a side project or a big, fun. And you can learn how to do this. I mean, I just come and have a chat with me. If you've got much, Rachel. Have some.