
The First YC Conference - snewe
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference
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webwright
@pg I think a great one would be "b2b customer acquisition". This was one of
those things that we realized was CRAZY HARD and (anecdotally) I've heard a
few other YC startups who have run into this wall. Stuff like inside vs.
outside sales, lead generation techniques, hiring salesfolks, adwords, etc.

Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the
gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).

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pg
Good idea. Maybe we should make it be about getting paying users generally.

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Alex3917
The process for getting consumers to pay $5 is completely different than the
process for getting someone to pay 25k, so I think it makes more sense to
split them up. Even just focusing on lead generation would make a lot of
sense, since that's one of the hardest parts of B2B sales.

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mrshoe
Now I want to do YC just to get into these conferences.

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maxklein
You know what we should do? Get a hotdog stand, then set up shop right outside
where the conference is happening. Then when people get hungry, they come out
for hotdogs, and we'll be like: hey, it's mrshoe and maxklein from news.yc,
so, what did the speaker just say. Then we take notes.

Then they'd invite us for the after party, and we'd blow all the money we made
from hotdogs on drinks, get them drunk AND get even more information about the
conference.

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kyro
Are you looking for another cofounder? I'm a rockstar hotdog flipper and am
knowledgeable in condiment spreading.

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jayliew
But I have mad social engineering skillz!

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webwright
It was a blast-- as a panelist I learned a lot from Rand (who lives and
breaths SEO).

Check out his post and certainly check out:
<http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors> \- it's the most
definitive work on ranking factors out there. Once you grok that, it's all
about psychology-- figure out what would motivate the "linkerati" to link to
you (and tweet about you).

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ntoshev
I wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These
pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of
opinions.

Also the current state with the "linkerati" having disproportionate influence
on ranking is natural (there have always been people with bigger influence on
what others think) but they are arguably less objective than the end users, so
diminishing their influence might improve search results. One way for Google
to do it would be to evaluate the topic of the page / site that links to you,
and make the link count for more if the source and the target page / site are
consistently about the same topic.

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abstractbill
The conference was incredibly useful. I'm looking forward to more of these.

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e1ven
Will these conferences be recorded, such that they're available for YC Summer
2010 companies and beyond?

I understand that people want to keep things private, and not talk to the
whole world, but assuming YC continues to do well, there will be scores of
companies for years to come. It would be valuable to have access to the
presentations for the incoming class.

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pg
We'll just have new conferences on the same topic. Answers evolve anyway.

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e1ven
That's entirely a fair attitude, but since you'll likely end up replacing
speakers, as to not repeat yourself, people will miss out of valuable
knowledge.

It'd be useful to hear how Company A sold itself, not just how Companies BCD
sold themselves.

I might suggest recording the talks, _even if_ you never intend to show them
to anyone.

Having the media recorded gives you the option of changing your mind later.

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zaidf
Just the knowledge that you're on camera can make speakers and audience
members less blunt.

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spencerfry
The powerpoint is really good:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-
YCombina...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-YCombinator-
February-2010)

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FreeRadical
What is 'referral traffic'? :/

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stanleydrew
Referral traffic is the traffic one site sends to another through direct
linking. In this case if you add up all the traffic that third party sites get
from all search engines, Google is the originating site for 85% of that
traffic.

It basically means that a lot of people are searching yahoo for things like
"yahoo mail" and "yahoo games." Those searches aren't likely to generate
referrals to sites outside of yahoo.

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bhp
Was the conference recorded?

If not, I'm sure everyone here would love to watch the next one on uStream. If
not, what are the reasons it shouldn't be streamed?

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pbiggar
I'm pretty sure they never will be. The speakers couldn't be candid if they
were.

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Harj
never say never. if there's a topic where there wouldn't be reason for off-
the-record stuff, we'd be happy to stream it. it's hard to think of something
right now, possibly hiring.

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pbiggar
I think it would be hard to predict what topic people wouldn't be candid
about.

But more importantly, people change their behaviour when they're being
recorded. So many speakers have been 'unprofessional' (for want of a better
term) in a way that they wouldn't have been if they were recorded.

The only solution I can think of is to record them without telling them, edit
out the 'candid' bits, and ask them afterwards if it could be shown publicly.
But that might ruin it for later speakers, since they'd know it could happen.

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mattwdelong
I would pay money to attend such a thing. Is this open to the public, or
invite only? Not a whole lot of details listed here.

~~~
mrduncan
It sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the
following: _The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't
have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them
look bad._

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abstractbill
Yeah, there were a lot of anecdotes ("one time, when I was working for company
X..."). It was very useful to see concrete examples of how different companies
have handled (or mishandled!) a wide range of SEO problems, but of course also
very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.

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mdg
Would you mind elaborating on

> but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about
> off the record.

Please? It isn't obvious to me :-/

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abstractbill
Well there's a ton of good reasons why company X wouldn't want you talking
publicly about this stuff. What if you suggested an SEO strategy and they
implemented it really poorly, or even not at all? Or what if they had a really
successful SEO strategy and still consider it part of their "secret sauce"?

Even when you don't have an NDA stopping you from talking about company X, you
still probably want to maintain good will between you and them.

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mdg
Ok cool, that is what I figured after thinking about it for a bit. Thanks!

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FreeRadical
I wonder if this will eventually turn into a launch event for YC start-ups

