The Alpha Geek's Guide to Finding a Business Model: PBwiki's 4-Year Odyssey

In 2005, David Weekly wrote the original code for PBwiki during a one-night hackathon at SuperHappyDevHouse. Four years later, PBwiki hosts over 1,000,000 wikis and over 10,000 paying customers. But while the journey may have looked smooth from the outside, in this talk, David will talk candidly about the long process of finding a successful business model for the company, including an open discussion of the false starts and failures along the way.

But the real benefit is not simply another set of war stories about a successful startup, but a deep examination of how his geek instincts both helped and hurt during this 4-year process, how he made the decision to seek VC and bring in experienced business managers, and the process PBwiki went through to align the company with its ultimate business model. (Ultimately, PBwiki chose to bring in experienced managers to supplement the team and shift from web self-service to a telesales model)

This talk will be especially useful for technical founders who are wondering to what extent they can trust their traditional decision-making processes (customer feedback! data mining! testing!) and to what extent they need to incorporate traditional business management (strategic plans! market segments! salespeople!).