South by Southwest 2012 Part 2: Parties

This article is part of a 3-part series recapping my experience at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2012. It is split into the following sections: Panels, Parties, and Personal. As a reminder, everyone has a different goal and thus a different experience with SXSW. This is one extrovert’s take on 2012’s conference.

“I’m hungry.”

“I need a drink.”

“How’s the line?”

These are just some of the questions you’ll hear at SXSW 2012, and in all of the cases, you probably are going to get an answer that involves a party or a lounge (micro parties). Before I tackle the larger party scene, I’m going to talk a bit about lounges.
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South by Southwest 2012 Part 1: Panels

This article is part of a 3-part series recapping my experience at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2012. It is split into the following sections: Panels, Parties, and Personal. As a reminder, everyone has a different goal and thus a different experience with SXSW. This is one extrovert’s take on 2012’s conference.

SXSW is full of panels. From 9:30am till 7:30pm for 5 days straight, you can gorge yourself on information across 15 different campuses, with a metric ****ton of content. I categorize all of the panels up into three categories: Learn, Interact, and Entertain. You can think of it like a Venn Diagram:

panel-venn-diagram
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The Life and Times of a Viral Internet Website: DefendRush.org

Over 400,000 individuals have seen the website; the one-liner website that makes you laugh when it presents the unexpected. I’m talking about DefendRush.org, a website I built in a stroke of genius frustration. There is a much more eloquent write-up of my reasoning for creating the website on The Atlantic, if you’re interested. As the Executive Producer of The Daily Show, Rory Albanese, said during the Political Humor 2.0 panel, sometimes what amuses the audience the most is as simple as a poop joke. DefendRush.org was my poop joke.

What I wanted to add to the discussion was the background metrics and traffic trends that occurred for the website in the 7 days from creation on March 7th through the peak of its traffic 48 hours later. Hey look, a graph!

DefendRush Google Analytics
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Until You Ask For Money, You Don’t Know How Serious They Are

The title of this post is from a conversation this week at a Reddit Denver Business Owners meetup/meeting. When I first heard it, I nodded my head in agreement, but today when I was speaking with my accountant about my failed business, Survival Gift Shop, she said, “Did you make any money from it?” The sad answer to that was no.

I’m not terribly proud of this fact, especially since I sunk $700 in product, fees (PayPal and Shopify), and advertising, not even counting my time (because really, what startup actually places a price on their time in the beginning). Results? Not a single person clicked BUY over the 6 month period where it was heavily marketed and even got some organic search traffic. At the very end, I even tried unloading them at cost on ebay and still no takers over two 7 day auctions. Now I grant you, a wise woman who loved the idea and built a Lady’s Personal Survival Kit of her own once exclaimed that it was more of an impulse buy, so the method of delivery was possibly wrong (not the idea), but I didn’t have the capital or the faith to try it again.
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My Words, My Voice: Gourmet Magazine and the Pingdom Podcast

I’ve been pretty lucky lately. I spent an hour in January speaking to a writer for Gourmet magazine about my experience with Kickstarter. He then wrote a fantastic article about crowdfunding food items through Kickstarter, where I was proud to end-cap the article. The same day that the article was released, I recorded a guest spot on the Pingdom podcast (episode #5), talking about an article I published on SEOMoz regarding page speed improvements. We talked about a few other things (okay, I talked a lot).

Pingdom #5 by Pingdom

I don’t know what February will bring, but I was glad to be a small part of both the article and the podcast. Not that I love to talk or anything…

Successful CrowdFunding Venture through Kickstarter – Dice Candies

Candy Dice Mold Making

Candy Dice Mold Making

First and foremost, in the month of December I went to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com and launched a project entitled, “Gaming Dice in Chocolate and Sugar“. I asked for a modest $950 to fund the project, thinking it would just be another small part of the bigger income picture of my life. Well, to my surprise, the project went viral within the gaming community, and in the end it was funded over 1700%, raising over $16,000 (before fees).

Wow.

So, gears shifted, new plans were made, advice was sought out, and Dice Candies was born. My apartment is currently a workstation and storage facility for Lego blocks, mold material, vacuum chamber and pump, and a collection of pots and thermometers. Needless to say, I’m doing a decent job of maintaining a normal living environment, save the loss of a kitchen table. Even with all of the problems and all of the work preparing to make 1800+ sets of dice (11,000 individual dice), it’s a good problem to have. Pictured to the right is an image of the process of building a single mold (this was version #6). It takes 4 days, a strong wrist, and some sore fingertips. However, it’s moving forward, which is always a critical part of the venture.

It’s an adventure to say the least, but I did get to add a new title to my business cards. Mario Lurig — Author. Web Developer. Chocolatier.

Short Stories While Brushing Your Teeth

Short Stories While Brushing Your TeethHot off the heels of my 30 day short-story-a-day challenge, I’ve compiled all of them into a book called, “Short Stories While Brushing Your Teeth”. You can download the ePub file completely for free right here:

Download “Short Stories While Brushing Your Teeth”

I’m also releasing it at as a Kindle Lending Library exclusive for a few months, so you can get it for your Kindle through Amazon (free for Prime members, otherwise $0.99).

As a reminder, every other e-reader, tablet, phone, or e-book reader software is designed to work with ePub formatted books, so grab the download from the link above as soon as possible!