Going Solo

You certainly noticed that the list of sponsor logos down the right sidebar is getting longer by the day (and there are more coming, faster than I can upload them and blog about them).

Anyway, we’re happy to announce that as part of our partnership with FreshBooks, there will be a draw for three free one-year Shuttle Bus packages offered by FreshBooks.

Now… what is that?

If you have never heard about FreshBooks, now’s the time to check them out. In addition to having a blog full of resources for freelancers, where the “three skills of the soloist thesis” was first published by Stowe Boyd at the time, they offer a painless online time tracking and invoicing service which is built specially for freelancers and small businesses.

The Shuttle Bus package lets you have upto 25 active clients at the same time — which in my modest opinion should be more than enough for most soloists!

Still hesitating? The agenda is now online and the speaker bio page is complete. Check them out.

With Going Solo, I’m learning tons about how to advertise/promote something through social media. It might seem ironic, as a large part of my work has to do with explaining social media to people, but this is the first time I’m really actively trying to get the word out about something. Of course, I have established my reputation as an individual through social media, but I never really tried to achieve that. It’s something that happened to me, took time, and sometimes almost feels like an accident. I didn’t have an agenda.

In the case of Going Solo, however, things are different. From the start, time was of the essence, as there was a set date where everything had to come together (and that date is now less than two weeks away). I had an agenda: get the word out to as many relevant people as possible, encourage people to blog about it, to register, or to sponsor. Gather feedback, leads, and even get help. Encourage a community to form around Going Solo.

A new experience for me. I made mistakes of course, and learnt from them (I won’t detail everything in this post, or you’ll still be here reading it tomorrow morning — if you haven’t fled by then).

One of the things I still haven’t quite figured out is whether it’s better to “spread the word” all over the place, or concentrate on one or two spots. It’s the same kind of headache I faced recently with videos: upload everywhere, or chose one service and stick to it? My tendancy is to be present in as many spaces and communities as possible, though I’m not sure I quite trust my judgement there. Urs of ComMetrics thinks it’s better to concentrate on a few tools rather than spread oneself too thin (see the end of his post):

As well, to sustain your competitive edge it is necessary to limit the social media tools you use – using a blog and Twitter well is better than doing Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and Twitter – it just fritters away your time.

Urs Gattiker, unified communications – what it means with Twitter, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us

The discussion is open.

In the meantime, as I’ve spread Going Solo all over the place, I’d like to give you a round-up of where you can find us.

Facebook

• Going Solo event
• Going Solo group (this seems to be working really well!)
• Going Solo fan page
• Going Far fan page
• we’ll be adding public events for the pre-conference drinks and the party shortly
• video of LIFT08 Open Stage speech

Upcoming

• Going Solo upcoming event

E-mail

• Going Solo newsletter on Google Groups

Twitter

• Going Solo Twitter account

Crowdvine

• Dedicated Going Solo social network (for attendees only)

There, I hope I didn’t forget anything! I’ll write another post on keeping track of coverage, but in the meantime you can check the link collection on del.icio.us (includes blogs posts and interviews, mainly).

If you’ve been to more than one conference over the past year, chances are you’ve noticed guys in white suits hanging around. If you’re braver than me you might have spoken to them, and learnt that they had something to do with The Next Web. (I’ve always had an irrational fear of “dressed up” people — clowns, stag nights, etc… and even harmless white suits, it seems.)

Luckily, we have a bunch of common friends (see photo below for example), and a few introductions later I was happily plotting with Ernst-Jan by e-mail to establish a media partnership between Going Solo and The Next Web.

Boris, Stowe, and Ernst-Jan

Ernst-Jan wrote a really good post introducing Going Solo, and I’d like to quote part of it here:

I don’t know about your countries’ society, yet I think you might notice the same development: more people start their own business. Several factors stimulate tech and new media professionals to quit their jobs and start an entrepreneurial adventure, some examples:

• personal branding has never been easier, just start a blog and work on your social media magic.
• hobbies get out of hand. When Dutch marketing consultant Marco Derksen started his blog Marketingfacts, he probably didn’t realize it would turn into a business. I’m sure you can name an example from your own country.
• the start-up culture sparks up a fire. Pioneers like Kevin Rose inspire thousands of young ambitious guys.
• You don’t have to be ashamed. Being an entrepreneur wasn’t really prestigious. Yet now universities and schools stimulate their students to start a business after they’ve graduated.

From my personal experience I can tell that being a freelancer isn’t always easy, especially in the beginning. What should I charge? How do I plan my days? Where can I find like-minded people? (on blogs!)

Ernst-Jan will be joining us in Lausanne to live blog the conference for The Next Web blog. Keep an eye open for the man in white, and don’t be shy — say hi!

Join the Going Solo network | Add a Going Solo trip

As you probably noticed, I’ve started introducing our partners and sponsors here so that you can get to know them if you don’t already.

Now, who hasn’t heard of Dopplr? Dopplr allows you to keep track of who is going to be where amongst your contacts — essential, you’ll agree, in today’s increasingly nomadic world (a theme will touch upon throughout the sessions — or should I call them lectures? — at Going Solo).

I’ve long been a fan of Dopplr. It allows me to see who I might be bumping into during my travels (even if they don’t live where I’m going — they could be travelling too!), and who of my long-distance friends might be travelling to my area.

And when I go to a conference, of course… Dopplr tells me immediately which of my “fellow travelers” are going to be in the same town.

So, Dopplr and Going Solo are happy to offer you two fun features to help you connect and stay in touch with the great people you’ll meet in less than a month at the conference:

• First, if you don’t have a Dopplr account yet, follow this special sign-up link. It will allow you to sign up to Dopplr (free, zero risks, many benefits) and automatically make you join the Going Solo network. Joining the network will make it easier for you to find follow travellers who are also part of the Going Solo network. If you already have an account, follow the link too — it will simply add you to the network. The people you may know page is now updated to include people from the network. (Also, don’t let anyone know we told you, but this hidden page shows you people in your networks.)
• Second, to add a trip related to Going Solo to Dopplr, use this smart add Going Solo trip link. It makes things a tad easier to you, and displays a tiny Going Solo icon next to your trip. Shiny!

We hope Dopplr will help you stay connected with your professional and personal network when everybody is travelling!

It’s funny how the importance of certain things is not obvious right at the start, and suddenly it hits you and you wonder why you didn’t realize it earlier.

It was clear to me from the start, when I started imagining Going Solo, that the programme would be built in such a way as to cover a range of topics I thought were relevant. What I didn’t realize is that this is quite different from having a conference/event “theme” and hunting for speakers who have something to say around that theme.

I’ve many times tried to express that although Going Solo is not a workshop or a training session, it is training-like, but I never quite seemed to find a way to explain this clearly. I wanted to say “yes, it’s a conference, but the aim is for people to learn stuff they can use when they walk out.” I think I’ve nailed it now, though: Going Solo is educational more than inspirational.

Most conferences I go to fall in the “inspirational” category. Of course, I learn things there, but mainly, I am inspired, or lifted (if the conference is LIFT). When I planned my Open Stage speech to present Going Solo to the audience at LIFT (watch the video), I wanted it to be inspirational. It’s not a video that teaches you anything, but that inspires you to attend Going Solo (and it did indeed inspire people!)

Even if the conference theme is more technical, and the sessions actually teach you stuff, most often it is a series of related sessions grouped together around a given theme. Reboot is a perfect example of how a theme is used to collect all sorts of contributions.

Not so for Going Solo. Putting together the programme for Going Solo feels much more like being in charge of defining the teaching programme for an academic year (only it’s a day, thank goodness, not a year). At the end of the day, I want the programme to have covered this, that and that. I try to organize the content into sessions, and then I talk with my speakers to see who can cover what.

I’m realizing now that this is the difficult bit — and as a speaker myself, I should have thought of this before. “Speaker topics” do not necessarily match “Steph-defined sessions” — which means I need to go back and reshuffle my sessions (perfectly doable, but it’s more work) to avoid overlaps and important topics slipping through the cracks.

Has anybody had similar experiences? And for any people reading who speak at conferences, if you agree on a topic with the chair and you’re asked to make sure your talk covers aspects x, y and z of the topic, does it make you feel micro-managed? Or is it something that happens regularly?

Understanding all this is helping me a lot in the process of finalizing the programme. I hope we’ll soon have the final session descriptions (I should probably call them “lectures”, because that’s closer to what they are) and speaker bios on the site, as well as the agenda. I know it’s important for people who are still not certain if they want to come or not, because the programme/agenda gives you a clear idea of what you’re paying for.

Yes, quite a few people have been asking if it was still possible to register. It is — there are still seats left (the exact number is of course national security top secret information and will not be communicated even under torture).

You should not wait too long though, because organizing travel and accommodation is more fun if you do it in advance (unless you enjoy stress and sleeping under bridges… we have a bunch of those in Lausanne) — and also because we’ll have to close online registration a week or two before the event so that we can give final numbers to the hotel for food.

Things are moving pretty fast here at Going Solo. With 6 weeks left until the big day, everything is starting to feel very real! We’ve put up a page with presentation of the conference for interested sponsors (Lily is currently talking with a bunch of interested companies, which is fun!), and I’m currently working hard on the programme, so that I can publish more information about the agenda, speakers, and precise sessions by the end of the week-end.

Keep your eyes open!

I should have written this post long ago (I thought about it so much that I was actually certain I’d already written it). Although in my mind the audience for this conference is quite clear, I realise each time I talk about Going Solo to a new person that it’s actually far from obvious.

The people I have in mind can be described as “freelancers and small business owners working in somewhere in the internet industry”. I’m defining an audience through the intersection of a way of working (loosely called “freelancing”) and an area of work (the “internet industry”).

More details, on the “freelancing” part. Who do I include?

• freelancers, obviously
• small business owners/partners (people who are mostly their own boss)
• people who are thinking of going solo/freelance, or might be tempted one day (students, employees, or unemployed)
• any person who is “their own boss”

Now, for the “internet industry” part. I’m casting a wide net here:

• anybody who either “builds” the internet or uses it as a “media channel”
• designers, developers, photographers, social media people, consultants or all shapes and sizes, event organizers, PR and marketing people, independent journalists, bloggers, podcasters, startup-ers, writers, artists, thinkers, tinkerers… and I’m forgetting loads

In addition to that, I believe that anybody who works with freelancers will find this event interesting. And any freelancer, even outside this loosely defined “internet industry” will get something out of this day.

Geographically, now, who is this event intended for? People who are comfortable in English, of course (although Going Solo will be held in French-speaking Lausanne, it will be entirely in English), from all across Europe. It’s open to people from further away, of course — but I’m aware that flying over the Atlantic for a one-day event might be a bit of a stretch for some people ;-). So, let’s say Going Solo is European-centric.

As you can see, I’m describing the attendees from an “insider” point of view. I’m part of this group. But seen from the outside, what would we have? Without expecting every single person to fit the description, I think we can say that the people coming to Going Solo are an audience which is:

• internet-literate
• cutting-edge in what they do (something which pushes many towards freelancing)
• highly connected and networked
• influent
• willing to learn, find solutions, evolve
• enterprising

I hope this post helps make things clearer. Leave a comment with a question if there are murky areas left!

Here’s something I’ve been waiting to be able to announce for a few weeks now: I’m excited to let you know that Going Solo is now open to discussing sponsorship opportunities.

If your company is interested in taking advantage of the unique marketing opportunity offered by the Going Solo conference, contact Lily Yacobi at lily@going-solo.net. Lily is managing sponsor relations for Going Solo, and will present you the variety of sponsorship opportunities we are providing. We’re waiting to hear from you!

I’d like to draw to your attention two events which are being organized by friends of mine, and which will both take place in October.

The first is SHiFT, which will take place in Lisbon, October 15-17. It’s organized by Pedro Custodio and the other members of the SHiFT association. I attended the first edition in 2006 and really liked it — a human-sized conference as I prefer them.

The second is Singularity, which will be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s the first large-scale online conference and it will take place everywhere (!), October 24-26th. It’s organized by Aral Balkan, whom I met at LIFT08 (and then again at BlogTalk and SXSW — seems we’re on the same conference circuit). I’ll be speaking at Singularity.

Cross-posted to Climb to the Stars.

I posted some thoughts about attending conferences over on Climb to the Stars, now that the madness of SXSW is over. Writing this post has brought me back to the reasons for which I gave Going Solo the format it has. Of course, a “small” conference is easier to organize (this is my first event), but that’s not all there is to it.

Going Solo is a 1-day, 1-track, limited-audience conference. A few words about each:

• 1 day: most conferences are multi-day conferences. If people are going to fly in for your event, more days makes it easier to justify the travel.

  However, I’ve noticed that sitting in a whole day of sessions and doing the same thing the next day means that my brain fries. So, what do we do, when we go to a 2- or 3-day conference? We don’t attend all the sessions. Which is cool, because it gives us more networking time, and we all know that the most we get out of conferences is on the networking/contacts/hallway conversation side.

  But on the other hand, if I put a great programme together, wouldn’t I want the attendees to my event to get the most out of it?

  There is a choice to make here: either you make a conference longer, and expect attendees to be present in a diluted way throughout it (from a “content” point of view), or you keep it short, and expect attendees to pay full attention to the official programme.

  Going Solo being an almost training-like conference — meaning that I expect attendees to get a lot out of the programmed content — I think it really makes sense to have it concentrated and short.

• 1 track: most conferences are also multi-track conferences. I had a brief conversation about this with Laurent Haug, who organizes LIFT — when I told him how happy I was that LIFT08 was going to be “one track, everybody in one room”. He told me it took them three years to take the plunge and do it. For a conference organizer, providing a single track means you take full responsibility for the programme. There’s no wriggling out by offering alternatives. If people aren’t happy, they can blame you for your choices. But honestly, I think it’s part of the job.

  One of the things that made me give up on attending panels at SXSW was the fact that there were so many competing sessions to choose from for each time slot that I just didn’t have the energy (and stress reserves) to make the decision. Conferences are already in the realm of too many choices, and going for a single track means that as the organizer, you’re taking some of the burden of choice off your attendees.

• limited audience: more people present does not necessarily mean that you get more value out of the networking or the event. With about 150 people present, Going Solo really wants to be human-sized. I was at BlogTalk 10 days ago, and really liked the feel of a conference where it is easy to interact with a large proportion of attendees present. There is less frantic networking, there are less “tourists”, the people present are more involved and the speakers are more accessible. This is the kind of atmosphere I want for Going Far events.