Hogtown Consulting

This was my first panel of SXSWi 2007. Featuring: Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster Inc.; Tara Hunt, CoFounder & CMO, Citizen Agency; Gabe Rivera, CEO, Techmeme; Shanalyn Victor, Owner/Designer, Pixelgirl Shop; Ryan Carson, Carson Systems.

The title didn’t excite me, but the panelists seemed like an interesting bunch so I thought I’d give a try. Glad I did, it was a really energetic and interesting discussion.

The general drift of the conversation was that it’s cool to just start doing something online because you think it’s cool or important, and then figure out how or if to attach a business model later on. The exception to that rule was Ryan Carson, who has had failures in the past trying to graft business model onto a successful project, so now starts with the model baked into the idea.

There was lots of anecdote and personal experience, which for me lifts a panel above ‘I could have read that on a dozen blogs’ to ‘yeah, that was a worthwhile human experience’. Unfortunately I don’t report that anecdote stuff well, but here are a few quotes I liked (paraphrased to match my not taking rate).

Tara Hunt – ‘it’s cheap to fail, so fail often’. Seems right to me, it’s an often mentioned driver of web 2.0 that open source and cheap hardwcompanies are (amongst others) allow one or two people to build a web site/app/thing quickly and cheaply. You don’t need to borrow $1mil to get it going, so it doesn’t matter so much if your thing turns out to be a big thing or not. So you can try often and fail often, searching for the thing that works and hopefully having fun along the road.

Asked by an audience member ‘What’s your exit strategy?’ Shanalyn answered that she didn’t really have one ‘the premise of Pixel Girl is that it’s stuff picked by me, and I can’t see anyone else being me.’ This seemed to be a theme, Tara said something similar and again Ryan was the exception to the rule saying that all companies should be built with the intention of being sold (not sure if I got that right, if I did then I disagree, depends on what sort of company you’re talking about I guess).

I really liked the tone of the talk in general. The message seemed to be that you should do something you love (and accept that, at least to start, you may be the only one who loves what you’re doing) and you can’t go too far wrong. With that message, brought to you my Disney Corp., I’m closing the browser to go see the first panel of SXSWi day 2.