Above: Me on the plane, writing this blog.
Negatives
Every time I travel, I meet someone who talks me through how another company did something great that I could apply to Posse. This week I heard about a clever trick LinkedIn used to grow their user-base, which I’m going to copy. If I hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have heard the story and it would have taken me longer to figure out.
No matter how many tech blogs you read, nothing compares to being in the middle of the community where the best companies are being developed and learning from everyone else’s success. Everything is moving so quickly that not being here means it can be all too easy to waste time solving problems that someone else has already figured out.
Positives
The plus side of being in Australia is that you can develop your product under the radar, testing and evolving without the scrutiny of US tech media or investors.
When we launched our first beta in June, it offered a dismal user experience and didn’t make a lot of sense. But we could launch early, learn from users and evolve to the point where we now have impressive engagement metrics and are about to launch V2.0.
This would have been much harder in the US where I’m sure our beta would have attracted coverage in TechCrunch, many influential people would have signed up and written us off. The cool thing about being in Australia is you get another shot at launching a product that’s been through months of iterations and is working.
A similar phenomenon happens in music, where a disproportionate number of top bands come from small towns. Hardly any come from Sydney, because industry types will often check out and write off a band when they’ve only played a handful of gigs.
Out in the country, the same band could spend years playing at local clubs, testing and refining their music with audiences before attracting the attention of the city industry and media.
Story continues on page 3. Please click below.
