Employees
Suck

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(I promise it won’t suck)

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Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I can be reached at:
john@magnatune.com

This speech is entitled:

Employees
Suck

managing is no fun

Coordinating
talented & motivated
people.

Now that’s fun.

firing is no fun

permanent
employees are mostly
unneeded

changing circumstances
demand
new skills

instead of retraining employees, get
new contractors for your current projects.

but note: virtual cooperation is
very difficult

Hollywood does fine
without employees

Bosses suck
even more

Nobody can work
8h straight

Talented people are 10x more
productive

but paid, at most, 3x
as much

and normally they’re paid only
20% more

you’re usually paid less than
your boss.

why!!?!?!

employee
=
mostly dumb-work

employee = very few satisfying
tasks

why be clever?

why do your
best work?

paid by the hour

rather than paid for your
contribution

solution: quit & make intellectual
“goods”

solution: and sell them for
their true value.

“good enough” is rewarded when
you’re an employee

“great work” is rewarded when
you’re selling the product itself

Do you enjoy your life?

Do you enjoy your work?

Do you want kids?

Do you like learning?

Do you want to get
paid for what your work is actually worth?

Steps to self-employment

Think of lots of ideas.
Write them down.

Do nothing.

For a while.

3 months later, are they
still good ideas?

Explain your best idea to
a friend in a noisy place, while they’re drinking.

Do they have an instant
positive reaction?

Next, think about your
product.

Make an elevator pitch

Write the first line of
your press release

Write the first paragraph of
your home page

Make the
home page

Hunt for unique names

Figure out how to do
the idea really, really cheaply.

So cheaply that you don’t
need anybody else’s money.

Show a mockup, then a
demo, to people who might buy it.

Launch before you’re ready.

Pitch bloggers.

If nobody cares, maybe your
idea sucked.

Start again.

If your idea was good,
all other problems are solvable.

Don’t quit your day job.

If your idea starts to
take off, slowly lower your day job commitment

don’t quit until your idea
is paying more than your day job.

when you run your own
company, you will discover:

Salespeople
are a bad idea

Fallacy: “our product is great,
it’s just not selling because we don’t have any salespeople”

Good products build word of
mouth, and sell themselves.

Fallacy: “our product is great,
we just need PR and marketing to get the word out”

If the product were great,
your early users would blog that fact, and you’d be on your way already.

The secret to getting massive
press:

(1)
Be really interesting

(II) Convince two influential bloggers
that you’re interesting.

P.R. secret for traditional print
media

Focus on the freelancers, not
staff writers.

Be a cause a freelance
writer would personally like.

Staff writers get assignments from
their editors.

Freelancers have to pitch stories
to an editor to get paid.

A press blitz example.

Magnatune: Creative Commons & Boing
Boing -> The Inquirer -> Fark -> Slashdot -> USA today / NPR -> New York Times -> BBC / Le Monde / Die Zeit / Nikkei Times

Magnatune story angles: Fair use
& Creative Commons Label embraces Sharing Biz model in Peer to Peer reality Piracy used as a promotion tool Indie musicians abandoning labels Not suing our customers Musicians actually getting paid The big money is in music licensing Major labels are Evil iTunes has it wrong Successful entrepreneur tries again Linux vs Microsoft == Magnatune vs Major Labels

the
“elevator pitch”

they say: “download, sample cut-up,
share”

I say: “remixing makes better
music”

They say: “On Jamendo artists
allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited.”

I say: “Download tons of
music from artists who don’t want to make money”

Magnatune says: “We are not
evil” “We work directly with independent musicians world- wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV files. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%.You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member. “

Magnatune says: “We are not
evil” blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah...

Whoops.

They say: “Give books away,
get books you want”

I say: “Give a book
away for free, and you can ask someone to send you a book for free”

A good test:

“Will people pay more for
this than it costs to create it?”

Some final tips:

Dedibox.com is psycho-cheap hosting. for
French people only. Ha! Ha!

Use Open Source

Use PHP initially for
everything.

Find €3000 for a good
independent graphic designer. Make your home page pretty.

Do everything yourself.

If you’re not technical.

Learn to be technical.

PHP is not difficult.

Read tons of books.

Learn: sales, marketing, programming, tech
support.

You can’t lead people if
you don’t know how to do their job.

Don’t hire. Until you are
getting less than 6 hours’ sleep per night.

Only hire for well understood
tasks.

Don’t borrow money.

Without debt, your idea can
fail and you can try again next week.

Take small steps.

Give yourself 3 years to
figure this out.

It will take at least
7 years to get decent at this and to make any real money.

You can do it.

This presentation can be downloaded
from: http://slideshare.net/johnbuckman Contact me at: john@magnatune.com This presentation licensed under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0