My Upcoming Talk at PodcampHFX 2012: My Year of "Hits"
Jan 17, 2012 20:52

This coming Sunday at Podcamp Halifax, I'll be giving a talk called My Year of "Hits" - Remembary and Starshipsstarthere:

About a year ago, after 15 years of simply billing clients by the hour, I decided to build (and promote and sell) my own things for a change. I built an iPad app called Remembary and a fun photoblog called Starshipsstarthere.ca. The year has been interesting: from rave reviews to PR disasters, from the front page of Hacker News to the CBC's "Oddities" website, from being a big deal in Indonesia (briefly) to being mentioned in a speech by Premier Dexter, from buying Google Adwords to having a vendor table at Hal-Con. This talk will cover all that and more: what worked and what didn't, how my new motto "fail early, fail often" has led to some surprising successes, some real world numbers for site traffic and sales, some social media advice, and what happens when something goes 'viral' (and when it doesn't).
It's a follow-up of sorts to the talk I gave at last year's Podcamp Halifax, where I talked about my initial experiences in building Remembary and not being very successful at promoting it - only a few days after that talk, Remembary's sales took off and 2011 became a real roller-coaster of a year, with many new experiences and lessons. I'm going to give some real sales and web traffic numbers, and share what I've learned over the year.

If you can't make it to the talk, I'll be transcribing it here afterwards.