pycon ie keynote 2014 "a techie's adventures in startup land"

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

A Techie’s Adventures in Startup Land

Rachel Willmer

rachel@luzme.com

Slides: http://slideshare.net/rwillmer

Website: http://luzme.com

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

Who Am I?

• Developer & enterpreneur

• Worked for : PAFEC, MARI, Spider Systems

• Customers : London, Rome, New York

• Co-organiser in Edinburgh:

– TechMeetup

– ‘Disruption in Publishing’ Conference

– Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering

Conference

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

Freedom

Freedom by kliefi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

Luzme Is Born

Anguilla beach by Lionel Eric is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

Luzme• Luzme is the ebook price comparison site

• 1000 4000 registered users worldwide

• USA, Canada, UK, Australia, India

• And now Germany and Spain

• 25 35 VMs in 4 7 countries

• 1 dev/ops/support/marketing/sales = ME

• Written in Django/Python

• And now also Meteor/Javascript

• Started in 2008

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

• Switching to OmniGraffle for

architecture walkthrough…

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

And now in words…• Original: webserver + database + cron job

• #1: Extra worker nodes: scraping, API lookups

• #2: Datafeed node

• #3: Overseas workers (geographical location matters!)

• #4: Queueing (celery/rabbitmq)

• #5: Caching (redis)

• #6: Search (elasticsearch)

• #7: Host Monitoring (zenoss)

• #8: Business metrics (logstash, graphite, statsd)

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

My First Job

Strelley Hall by veggiesosage is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

[Photo of Harris Computer]

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

The Two Rules of Business

• Rule #1: Stay in Business

• Rule #2: Profit is a concept; Cash is

reality (note rule #1)

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

My Dot-Com: Intertrader

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

2003: Now What?

• Back to freelancing…

• With some sideprojects for fun:

–WiiFit price checker

– “How Safe Is Your Money”

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

And Then…

ebooks => $$$

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

There’s More Than One Way To Do It

• Wordpress Theme

• Single function website (e.g. wiifit)

• Self-published ebook

– e.g. “How to do <SHINY NEW TECH>”

• Training Course on Udemy

• Self-funded growth (like I’m doing)

• VC-funded growth (but you give up control)

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

And Finally…

One last piece of advice for anyone

thinking of jumping in at the deep

end…

DON’T DO IT!

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

Resources• PODCASTS:

– http://www.earwolf.com/show/startup-school Seth Godin

– http://startupsfortherestofus.com

– http://tropicalmba.com

• BOOKS:

– http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project

• Use “PYCON” discount code for 20% off

– http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

• Use ‘rachel’ discount code for 20% off

– http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

– http://www.startupbook.net “Start Small, Stay Small”

PyCon IE, Dublin, Oct 2014

QUESTIONS?

• Slides are available on slideshare

• http://www.slideshare.net/rwillmer

• Twitter: @rwillmer