On Saturday I attended The-Entourage’s unconvention Sydney event in Sydney. I went along on the day as a friend of mine Pieter was interested to attend. I was also interested too see speakers from companies like UBER, Airtasker, Canva and Rewardle and how they all have grown their businesses over the years to now be worth millions of dollars.
Now I have been running my current business for three years which I started from the ground up and I have also sold businesses in the past along with been in online marketing for over 9+ years. I will admit am not really the main target group for the conference as it is really focused for individuals who have yet to start something and are keen to get motivated.
From the day my two favorite speakers were Tim Fung from Airtasker. Tim seemed to be one of the only presentations on the day where he actually showed the crowd how he built his business and what growth tactics he used many of the speakers on the day gave far more general style talks. Tim talked about numerous areas of how Airtasker grew traffic in the early days from Guerrilla PR stunts to ASO (App Store Optimization) he also provided some good frameworks for Startups.
I also liked the talk given by Ruwan Weerasooriya, as it was quite an inspiring presentation about his life and how he went from been a university drop out to starting a ISP, web dev company, Taxi advertising business, Cafe Advertising business and now a ASX listed Rewards Program business for SMB’s.
From the day I decided to select 10 inspiring quotes or pieces of advice and share them below –
1. Lean Startups principles are a must have for any startup business owners.
2. Get out their and be a street fighter in business and be sure hustle 24/7 to gain new business.
3. Focus on building an amazing team around your business.
4. Unique PR stunts that have a feel good story work really well, but make sure the marketing communication is rehearsed.
5. Integration with business partners and app store optimization are good ways to grow traffic.
6. Gumtree is a perfect market research place to see what Australian potential customers are looking for.
7. Tim Fung shared a great graph from Paul Graham @ Ycombinator on Business timelines –
8. At Scale Stage get your business processes and efficiencies in to your company. Otherwise you never Grow & Scale.
9. Become self sufficient business and fix the leaking boat before asking for investment.
10. During the gold rush most gold diggers didn’t get rich, the hardware stores did!
Overall if you are looking to start a business I would say the Unconvention is a good event for you to attend. If you are an established business owner and startup community member the event may not be ideal for you. Tho as I was talking to some other business owners on the day who were established they all said they attend because they want to get motivated from the talented speakers on the day I will admit they do fire you up.
Thanks to the team from The-Entourage for putting this event on.
