Lori Anne Wardi is the Vice President of .CO Internet.
We just returned from Mountain View, California where 500 Startups hosted the unSEXY conference last Thursday, August 9th. In case you couldn’t make it out to the West Coast, we brought home some tidbits to share with you.
Unsexy.co is about learning lessons from the leaders of tech companies in businesses that are typically considered “unsexy” (like email, data, infrastructure, etc.) – but who have one very sexy thing in common — they make lots of money! We’re talking about often under-rated and overlooked companies that are booming – growing fast and bringing home some serious bacon!
The morning included a very interesting session with Ben Chestnut, CEO of MailChimp on Designing Disruption: Killing the Competition with Design Driven Products. From MailChimp’s bootstrapping days to non-traditional customer segmentation (targeting “tech savvy weirdos”), Ben stressed importance of the company’s creative design philosophy – and community building by, among other things, giving away t-shirts and monkey hats. Taking a contrarian view – he also eschewed the prevailing wisdom that everything needs to be measured. He does have a point, I mean, try as you may, can you really measure the value of giving away t-shirts?
There were other great sessions throughout the day featuring Amit Kumar (CEO & Founder of Lexity), Miekkel Svane (CEO of Zendesk), Michelle Broderick (Marketing/Strategy/Curator of Culture of Uber) and a number of others. They discussed topics such as Lessons About SMB Customers, Startup Lessons from Customer Service Disasters and Turning Users into Raving Fans. Each and every speaker had a wealth of knowledge to share and the crowd soaked it all up!
After a couple of afternoon beers, Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, hit the stage to discuss the topic of finding opportunities. Dave focused on how he brought the margins down at SurveyMonkey to make more money – and the focus the company is placing on international growth. The future of SurveyMonkey sounds bright – we can expect to see cloud-based analytics packages that will integrate with other third party sources. Pretty sexy stuff, right?!
In the late afternoon, our very own CEO, Juan Diego Calle, took the stage with Dave McClure for a session titled “Don’t be a Tool, Fool: Behind the Scenes in Turning a Utility into a Phenomena.” The domain industry has without a doubt been seen as a very unsexy business. (And if you doubt it, just check out this video by the .JP registry in Japan – you’ll be quickly convinced, if you don’t fall asleep first!)
Juan discussed .CO’s growth over the past two years and shared some valuable insights about the company’s customer acquisition and growth strategies — including the importance of finding the right “early adopters” to use your product – such as Twitter (t.co), Angel List (Angel.co) and 500 Startups (500.co). The crowd, full of .CO-ers, listened intently as Juan shined a sexy light on the domain industry – and convinced everyone that domain names are definitely not just a boring utility!
To see more of Juan’s panel and Q&A session, check out the LiveStream video here (he takes the stage at 47:10).
Lots of sexy business insight is available online so, check out the entire video of the unSEXY conference at LiveStream.com/500Startups.
