Earlier this week I attended MicroConf for the first time. What a great conference. I admittedly felt like a bit of an imposter (since I’m not actively trying to start my own company), but I still picked up a number of great insights, and met a number of interesting people.

One thing that became quickly obvious is that no one experiments with growth at the speed and efficiency that bootstrap founders experiment with growth. 🙂 This is of course out of necessity.

A couple of additional thoughts that resonated with me:

Onboarding

• Duolingo has really stellar onboarding, as does Slack.
• Close.io, Drip, and Wistia all offer good examples for how to run successful drip email campaigns.

Copy

Loved these insights from @Copyhackers talk:

• There are very little actual best practices when it comes to copy. DO NOT try and copy and paste from other peoples polished successes – it never works.
• Headlines and buttons work well when optimized together.
• Repeat your headline copy in your button.
• Don’t imply work is involved in button copy.
• Every element on your page has one job. A headline is meant to keep you on the page. A button is meant to be clicked. Look at each element to see whether they are doing their one job. If not, focus your attention there.
• In the end, no one has a clue what you should be saying to your customers (nope, not even you!). Just try a bunch of stuff and use whatever works best.
• While you can’t copy and paste successful copy, you can mine ideas for great copy from testimonials, support emails, reviews, message boards, book reviews on Amazon. Anywhere regular people gather to talk in an un-polished way about your industry.

Sales

Some great insights from @steli:

• Sales is about you being the most decisive person in the room.
• Start by qualifying people – what are their needs? People just want to know what’s in it for them.
• Follow up until you get a yes, or a no. Silence does not equal rejection. Just keep following up.
• The magic is in the follow up. After 2-3 follow ups most people quit.
• Keep demos short – 10 min max – focus specifically on how your product will solve their pain, then stop talking.

Pricing

You always hear that you should price your products based on value. When you first launch something, the actual value your product delivers can be quite low. @robwalling talked about “aspirational pricing” where you set a price (that’s potentially too high to start off with), and you keep adding value until the value in your product eventually matches your price.

Overall

What a great community. I loved the sense of inclusion by everyone. I loved that everyone was both a teacher and a student. I loved hearing all of the inside tales about what people are working on, what’s working for them, and what isn’t. In the end, I’d highly recommend this conference.