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The First YC Conference
- mattwdelong 17y agoI would pay money to attend such a thing. Is this open to the public, or invite only? Not a whole lot of details listed here.
- mrduncan 17y agoIt sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the following: The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them look bad.
- abstractbill 17y agoYeah, there were a lot of anecdotes ("one time, when I was working for company X..."). It was very useful to see concrete examples of how different companies have handled (or mishandled!) a wide range of SEO problems, but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.
- mdg 17y agoWould you mind elaborating on > but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record. Please? It isn't obvious to me :-/
- abstractbill 17y agoWell there's a ton of good reasons why company X wouldn't want you talking publicly about this stuff. What if you suggested an SEO strategy and they implemented it really poorly, or even not at all? Or what if they had a really successful SEO strategy and still consider it part of their "secret sauce"? Even when you don't have an NDA stopping you from talking about company X, you still probably want to maintain good will between you and them.
- mdg 17y agoOk cool, that is what I figured after thinking about it for a bit. Thanks!
- evansolomon 17y agoThose specific anecdotes were also really useful because they let the audience go home and do more research on their own. If someone says "a company did this thing and it worked/didn't" that's useful. But if they give you actual companies who do a great/terrible job on different things, then you can dig up a lot more information after the fact and keep learning. I agree with everyone who said it was a great event. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and everyone at YC for putting it together.
- mrshoe 17y agoNow I want to do YC just to get into these conferences.
- breebree 17y agoI agree. I'm getting a boner just thinking about this YC Conference.
- breebree 17y agoCan somebody tell me why I was downvoted?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mrduncan 17y agoIf you haven't before, make sure you apply for a spot at Startup School (http://startupschool.org/ http://startupschool.org/) this year. It's run by YC and open to non-founders. Edit: This is of course assuming that there will be a Startup School in 2010 since it hasn't been announced that I'm aware of yet.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- pg 17y agoYes, there will be Startup School in 2010. Sometime in the fall.
- jazzychad 17y agoI realize there is probably some jest in that sentiment, but if you only want to do YC for these sorts of things then you're not in it for the right reasons. The extra events are certainly a nice perk, but the main focus is definitely bringing something to market that people want.
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- abstractbill 17y agoThe conference was incredibly useful. I'm looking forward to more of these.
- FreeRadical 17y agoWhat is 'referral traffic'? :/
- stanleydrew 17y agoReferral traffic is the traffic one site sends to another through direct linking. In this case if you add up all the traffic that third party sites get from all search engines, Google is the originating site for 85% of that traffic. It basically means that a lot of people are searching yahoo for things like "yahoo mail" and "yahoo games." Those searches aren't likely to generate referrals to sites outside of yahoo.
- spencerfry 17y agoThe powerpoint is really good: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-YCombinator-February-2010 http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-YCombina...
- FreeRadical 17y agoI wonder if this will eventually turn into a launch event for YC start-ups
- webwright 17y agoIt was a blast-- as a panelist I learned a lot from Rand (who lives and breaths SEO). Check out his post and certainly check out: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors - it's the most definitive work on ranking factors out there. Once you grok that, it's all about psychology-- figure out what would motivate the "linkerati" to link to you (and tweet about you).
- ntoshev 17y agoI wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of opinions. Also the current state with the "linkerati" having disproportionate influence on ranking is natural (there have always been people with bigger influence on what others think) but they are arguably less objective than the end users, so diminishing their influence might improve search results. One way for Google to do it would be to evaluate the topic of the page / site that links to you, and make the link count for more if the source and the target page / site are consistently about the same topic.
- webwright 17y ago@pg I think a great one would be "b2b customer acquisition". This was one of those things that we realized was CRAZY HARD and (anecdotally) I've heard a few other YC startups who have run into this wall. Stuff like inside vs. outside sales, lead generation techniques, hiring salesfolks, adwords, etc. Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).
- pg 17y agoGood idea. Maybe we should make it be about getting paying users generally.
- Alex3917 17y agoThe process for getting consumers to pay $5 is completely different than the process for getting someone to pay 25k, so I think it makes more sense to split them up. Even just focusing on lead generation would make a lot of sense, since that's one of the hardest parts of B2B sales.
- drusenko 17y agoA Freemium-type conference would be really interesting to us...
- webwright 17y agoAmen. I've heard a lot of people run into same issue we did (wufoo and Joe Kraus' Jotspot both talked about this issue). We started with a free product, turned a paid product and promptly said, "WTF! Why aren't people buying our premium stuff?!" It was a long learning-intensive road to get smart(er) about freemium.
- justin 17y agoA no bullshit advertising conference might be good as well. We've learned tons of stuff on network vs direct sales that took a long time to figure out, and the fact that the advertising industry is filled with less than intelligent non-engineering people didn't help that process.
- e1ven 17y agoWill these conferences be recorded, such that they're available for YC Summer 2010 companies and beyond? I understand that people want to keep things private, and not talk to the whole world, but assuming YC continues to do well, there will be scores of companies for years to come. It would be valuable to have access to the presentations for the incoming class.
- pg 17y agoWe'll just have new conferences on the same topic. Answers evolve anyway.
- e1ven 17y agoThat's entirely a fair attitude, but since you'll likely end up replacing speakers, as to not repeat yourself, people will miss out of valuable knowledge. It'd be useful to hear how Company A sold itself, not just how Companies BCD sold themselves. I might suggest recording the talks, even if you never intend to show them to anyone. Having the media recorded gives you the option of changing your mind later.
- zaidf 17y agoJust the knowledge that you're on camera can make speakers and audience members less blunt.
- bhp 17y agoWas the conference recorded? If not, I'm sure everyone here would love to watch the next one on uStream. If not, what are the reasons it shouldn't be streamed?
- ALee 17y agooh my, you just mentioned uStream. I think you meant to say Justin.tv
- pbiggar 17y agoI'm pretty sure they never will be. The speakers couldn't be candid if they were.
- Harj 17y agonever say never. if there's a topic where there wouldn't be reason for off-the-record stuff, we'd be happy to stream it. it's hard to think of something right now, possibly hiring.
- pbiggar 17y agoI think it would be hard to predict what topic people wouldn't be candid about. But more importantly, people change their behaviour when they're being recorded. So many speakers have been 'unprofessional' (for want of a better term) in a way that they wouldn't have been if they were recorded. The only solution I can think of is to record them without telling them, edit out the 'candid' bits, and ask them afterwards if it could be shown publicly. But that might ruin it for later speakers, since they'd know it could happen.