Liveblog: Techcrunch Geek n Rolla Event 4

This is part of a series of blog posts writing up the events on the day at the TechCrunch Geek n Rolla tech entrepreneurship event in London...

14:27 Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO, Songkick

Ian founded SongKick, helping music fans to discover live music events. They started with help from YCombinator. He's going to talk about some of the tools web startups can use. The talk is written up on TechCrunch at: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/geeknrolla-the-secret-of-focus-is-to....

14:31 Finding tools
In the development of Songkick they kept finding things they needed that weren't their core focus, but were important. Eg they need to send emails to customers, but emailing isn't their core focus or skill - so they looked around for tools that other people had developed to help them develop them quickly - and avoid them having to re-invent the wheel. He's collected these tools at http://startuptools.pbwiki.com

14:43 Panel Discussion: How to win, excite and keep users

Next up is a panel discussion with Ryan Carson of the Future of Web Apps conference, Nick Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit (a VC), Keiran O'Neil of Playvfire.com, and Wendy White from Moonfruit.com. Ryan Carson is the master of personal branding. He's become known for always wearing a hat - and everyone can see when he arrives and where he is - making him easy to find in networking time.

14:50 Values and Loyalty
The first thought was that its important to have clear values, and a good story to tell about what you stand for. Moonfruit were in the first wave of dot.com businesses, but then faced the tech crash in 2001. They then had to turn a free service into a paid service. They maintained good customer loyalty through openness and honesty.

14:56 Agile process
Moonfruit, and many other companies here use an agile development process, with small regular releases. I'll be blogging more about the Agile Project Management process on this site soon. Ryan says a key thing to understand is that no-one cares about you as a company, just their own needs and how you server them.

14:59 Happy
It's good to focus on what makes users Happy - find out, and deliver it. Ryan said 'How successful would Ryanair be if you actually liked them rather than hated them?'

15:00 Feel the pain
make sure you use your own product - a lot. That way you find out what pain your users are experiencing and you can fix it.

15:07
The panel on listening to customers...
To build a great startup you have to take the world forward - and that means taking people they didn't know existed - so you can't ask customers what they want. If you listen to your users you get incremental change, not earth shattering change. Big ideas from entrepreneurs is what makes people famous.

15:09 Twitter from @AndyBeard
"Additional point, if you give users everything they want, you aren't left with anything to charge them for"

15:10 Twitter from @londontech
"it's an interesting balance between giving the users what they want, and staying focussed as an entrepreneur on your vision."

15:11 Twitter from @edsaint
"if I had asked my customers what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse." Henry T Ford

15:37 Nick Halstead, Favorit

Runs http://fav.or.it and www.tweetmeme.com. Started Oct 07. Raised