Everyone is guilty of looking at an app and saying "Wow that would be easy to build". What we don't see are the 1st release, the revisions, the decisions and the steps it took to mature the app to that state. We especially don't see the sacrifice the builders took to create that app, how many hours did they NOT spend playing with their kids while they were building that app. How many long nights did they put in?

It's easy to judge, easy to say someone got lucky and certainly easier to call someone gifted than to follow their lead and put in the sacrifice to build something special. It's much easier to call someone lucky then to bust your ass when the outcome is questionable.

Design on Rails Workshop is another amazing LessEverything event.

Who is this workshop for?

• Front-end Developers
• Designers
• Information Architects
• Rails developers that want to learn more about working with designers

What is the workshop about?

It's a single day workshop with talks ranging from working in rails apps, jquery, css best practices, haml/sass and other skills that make designers amazing.

Why put on this workshop?

This workshop is for me. I've fallen behind on front end best practices and need to catch up. I also meet designers all the time that can only deliver html and css and they don't know the joy of working in a rails app, as a designer. Having these skills will allow a good designer to be more productive within a team thus more valuable. This conference isn't going to teach designers to be developers but to show them how to work in a team with developers and not use them as a crutch.

Attendees will receive working demonstrations on...

• how to build partials, structure rails views, changing layouts, design integration.
• why Haml and Sass will make you more productive.
• how to prototype in html.
• how to work with a dev team.
• working with html5.
• designing for mobile applications.
• why compass css will bring you joy.

When & Where

Saturday Oct 16th in Atlanta Georgia, register now it's only $125 per pass.

A few weeks ago we ran a one week burst through Fusion Ads for $400. We rotated two different ads and two different sets of copy (80 characters max). Fusion runs their ads on Tweetie and popular blogs.

The Two Creatives

The Results

My Theories

lessacc-12final.jpg (Hell Ad) got clicks because the ad was eye catching but the visitors probably didn't really need a bookkeeping application they were mostly interested to see what the ad was about. These visitors quickly left.

lessacc-16final.jpg (Normal Informative Ad) the people that clicked on this ad probably read the ad and actually needed the product.

Neither ad converted a worthwhile number of signups to justify the cost, $1.19 per click. (

Impulse buys VS. non-Impulse buys

If you sell a product that can be purchased quickly, at a price that doesn't make the potential customer pause, your product is an impulse buy and ads will convert better for you.

Impulse Buys

• iPhone Apps
• Music or Movies Downloads
• Shirts
• Pretty much anything under $50 on Amazon or Zappos

Products with Inertia

Bookkeeping applications have inertia, there is a threshold to get setup in any bookkeeping application. A product with inertia is anything that require a setup time for a customer.

Products with Inertia

• Operating Systems
• Insurance
• Vehicles
• Email Address
• Day Care
• Dry Cleaners

"Branding" is for company with money to burn

One might argue that having our brand in the eye of the potential user give us better branding, but who can afford to run ads that don't convert.

I'm helping organize Barcamp Panama City Florida on Saturday June 26th 2010. Everyone is invited to attend and encouraged to present.

From the wiki page: BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences (or unconferences), open; participatory workshop-events; whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

If you've never been to a Barcamp, you should absolutely seek these events out. They're casual and a great way to meet new interesting people. Steve and I still have great friends we met at our first Barcamp, Barcamp Miami 2008. Steve and I will both be at Barcamp Panama City hoping to make new best friends, it might be you.

I hope to see you in Panama City Florida on June 26th.

After party will be at my house so please register so I can get a head count.

Everything is long tail.

• Last year I met Willie Jackson, who lives and works in Atlanta.
• Willie Jackson introduced me to Celia Dyer of TechDrawl.com
• Celia attended LessConf '09 in Jacksonville Florida.
• Celia Dyer said she knew of a great venue in Atlanta, so she put me in touch with Bill Cutts.
• Bill Cutts allowed us to use their amazing venue.
• LessConf3010 was in Atlanta because of my friendship with Willie Jackson and the relationships he created Celia and then Celia with Bill.

Serendipity is absolutely real, luck is not.

You never know who you're going to meet so treat everyone the same. My Grandfather met my Grandmother when he was selling vacuums door-to-door.

Relationships are more powerful than banner ads.

Your friends will promote you more than any banner ad will. Make friends, be friendly, be genuine.

Being silly is an excepted form of marketing

A conference isn't about the conference

People come to LessConf to meet, learn, talk, social and get inspired. Having great speakers sells tickets and people want to hear great talks but it's the hallway conversations that stick with them and get them to come back.

Great speakers sell first time conference goers.

This second time conference was different but interesting to see the change. It was almost like a high school reunion, attendees were seeing each other again from the 2009 conference. I think once you attend lessconf you'll come back to hang out with your friends again. Great speakers sell first time conference goers the environment and relationships will bring you back.

Don't drink too much at the first night's party.

I will never drink again...

Last week I was interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstarts and startups.

How The Artsy Fartsy Entrepreneur Behind LessAccounting Is Taking On Quickbooks With Less – with Allan Branch

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

What is Teaspiller?

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Three main services

• Do My Taxes. Have a verified tax expert complete your tax return, all from the comfort of your couch.
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Check out Teaspiller

George C. Wolf, a Broadway director says To make a show go from good to very good is very easy. It's a series of bold, smart things you have to do. But to make a show go from very good to brilliant...it's an endless series of details. An endless series of unbelievable details that lift it." You can see him say it at 3:17 in the video.

In app development, get the first, less version out there. Then, guided by user feedback and your own vision start iterating. Add features, take away features and polish. Iterate the features, the interface and the design. Ultimately this is the difference between your app and there app, who has the right features and who has the polish.

LessConf3010 will be in Atlanta Georgia, May 21-22, 2010.

LessConf is a conference with talks ranging from startups to design to marketing to business. It's a casual two-day event in Atlanta Georgia with awesome speakers here to inspire you. Each speaker will have a 45 minute talk followed by a 15 minute Q/A session with Steven Bristol.

LessConf3010 Speaker List

1st Day

2nd Day

Forget your logo, that's not your brand.

There's no longer such thing as branding. You can absolutely have a brand, but no one can perform "branding." For the same reason when you build a house they don't call it "housing," they call it roofing, plumbing, flooring etc. A brand has ingredients, many moving parts, which can consist of the following:

• quality of your product or service
• the speed you deliver it
• the support you give your existing customers
• the tone/look/feel of your product and advertising

Your brand is a byproduct of your actions. All these ingredients are equally important as the other. If you have a great support, great speed to deliver and your product is crap then your brand suffers.

And if you think that because you're a service based business this doesn't apply to you? You're wrong, you've got a brand too. How fast do you return emails? How soon do you engaged a potential customer? Do your customers feel like you have their best interest in mind? That's all a part of your brand.

In years past "branding" meant to come up with a logo, business card, letterhead, color guide etc. At that time "branding" was very important, it's what your customers and potential customers would see. But now, we live in dark times, your brand is less about the font on your logo and more about the important things. I know, it's scary to think you can't hire a designer and wham, you're branded. But that doesn't work because building and maintain a brand never stops, it's a constantly changing animal.

There is nothing more vital to your success than your brand. But it's impossible to focus on "branding" you must focus on all the moving pieces, the ingredients of your brand.

Gary Vaynerchuk of http://WineLibrary.tv spoke at LessConf2009 about Crushing it and did an awesome Q&A.

You have no control over where you're born, who your parents are, where they send you to school, how much money they have, the genetic blueprint they give you or the decisions they make over the first years of your life. You have little control over how you look or how "smart" you are or the things you're exposed to while growing up. The only thing you have full control over is how hard you work, how much you put in, how much sweat you give and how many times you smile while doing it.

My father always told me that the hardest part of any job is finishing it. Here are somethings you can do to make it easier to finish:

• Launch. If you don’t launch, you’ll never finish.
• Have a reason to finish. “To make my wife/parent/child proud.” “I’m going to change the world with this.” Keep this reason in mind when the going gets tough.
• Don’t do it alone. Have someone that will pick you up and keep you going.
• Make something people will fall in love with. And then fall in love with helping them.
• Put all your eggs in your own basket. If the the other option is going to work for someone else… Who wants that?
• Wear cool shoes. This won’t actually help you finish other than you’ll know you’ll look cool once you do.
• Not only will you feel like a failure if you don’t finish, but by definition you will be a failure.
• You are awesome! Not finishing is not an option.
• Your friends will quickly tire of congratulating and encouraging you on yet another new idea. (They never tire of it if you finish.)
• Your mother will love you anyways, but she will love you more if you don’t quit. Yes she will.
• You’ll look better at your high school reunion.
• You’ll feel better about yourself.
• Whatever you do next will be more successful.
• Chicks dig quitters. Not.
• Would you rather tell the story of how you gave up or that you finished it and gave it everything you had?