Is that really the question you want to be asking if you’re behind a web startup?
Yes.
The idea came to mind when a friend/co-founder, Paul, pointed me to this Laughing Squid post about the SF Ignite talks. A fun idea, 5 min to teach/preach an interesting topic.
What have I learned that could make for an interesting talk?
Earlier that morning, I traded emails with a Brazilian who ran a soccer forum on our forum hosting service, about translating his site into Portuguese. The previous week he offered to help with translations. His offer eventually turned into him personally translating about 1,200 phrases!
However, the Brazilian admin was also excited to be providing a service that Portuguese speakers everywhere could benefit from. He loved our forum product and thought it would be a useful product to other Portuguese speakers. Not only would his forum benefit, but future Portuguese forums would reap the benefits as well.
Now this concept is nothing novel, in the tech world, we’ve seen it happen with Open Source software and taken to another level with things like the Creative Commons and wikipedia. Non-profits, political campaigns, and countless other efforts all employ these same methodologies – but this was my first time articulating it as way to grow a small-shop web startup.
So when I had to fill out the brief little form for the SF Ignite talk with just a title and description, it all clicked. I submitted the title knowing that it would have that ‘tongue in check’ feel to get noticed. I guess I was right, they invited me up, and here is a recording of that talk:
After chatting with my fiancée Kristine (a community evangelist at a startup) about this idea, we realized that we held different viewpoints to the approach, but shared an understanding on the overall benefits – a sort of ying and yang to the modus operandi. So we hope to share and contrast our styles right here for you.
