Why You Should Always Get Back Up If You Fail — Part 2
This is the second part of the story of perseverance through adversity, and why you should be open to new ideas while not giving up. Here you can find Part 1
Developers
Having the entire event as my own again, and with losses far too great for me to cover at the time, I wondered what to do next. The reason I kept going was — I really don’t know actually, maybe just ego. I couldn’t fail my city, my community and my peers — people have been coming to Shift for four years now, how could I stop now?
My other company Codeanywhere at the time was doing really well, we had received an investment of $600.000, were hiring new people and growing. At this time the Shift Conference was still a side thing, something I would start planning 3 months before the event with some friends, volunteers and maybe a couple of people from the company.
I thought, “I can’t pay this debt, let alone take on more, so how do I keep it going?” Then, a lightbulb moment. I was in San Francisco for a Codeanywhere investor meeting, and I was walking into the train station headed to a friend’s house in Mountain View when I saw a billboard of a conference that read, “Signal by Twilio — a developer conference.” Developers, that’s it! I have a developer company, why not pivot my startup conference to a conference for developers!? I remember thinking at the time, “it’s not the same audience, but there is some overlap”. I called my co-founder and lead investor and asked, “what do you think of me pivoting Shift to Developers? Calling it Codeanywhere Shift.Codeanywhere pays nothing, gets brand recognition, a booth and everything for free…unless I lose money then you just pay that amount so I don’t go into debt. Deal?”
“Deal”, they said and I was off!
The rise of Shift
At this point I had no idea what the market for developer conferences was, it was just a strategy for the conference to survive. While the idea of it assisting Codeanywhere for meeting investors was gone, the goal of building bridges to our community in Croatia would remain.
As I would soon learn, this developer conference was a different beast compared to the startup conference and on that first transitional event, people that liked the startup event really didn’t care for the developer talks. In fact, they hated them. Plus, the developer audience didn’t like the style of some of the “startup people.” Needless to say, at the end of the event there were some mixed feelings and at the closing party, I wasn’t sure if I’d failed or not.
Shift was all in on developers from now on!
The next year we doubled down, making it clear it was a pure developer conference and it became a success from both an attendance and profit standpoint. I thought I might be onto something but I also worried it may be a fluke.
Flywheel effect
Around this time at Codeanywhere, there was a massive falling out; money was drying up, people were leaving, my cofounder and I had a huge disagreement and we almost closed the company. Ultimately we agreed on a less drastic approach, but it meant cutting costs by letting go of our office space, going full remote and having less employees. Which on the flipside freed up some time for me and enabled me to work more on Shift.
Codeanywhere was fairly popular and Shift was growing as well, so some people knew me as the “event guy” while others saw me as the “code editor/startup guy.” As anyone who’s read Jim Collins book Good to Great will tell you, it’s really hard to succeed with essentially a split personality. Normally you want to do one thing, and be focused on it completely, so that the entire world knows you for that one thing, and in that manner, everything you do and everyone you know will add to your success — in that one thing. In the book this is referred to as the “Flywheel effect.”
My entire life I was doing multiple things, as most people do when you’re trying to figure things out and rise in the world. You wind up doing anything and everything that you think will launch you forward. It feels like the right move at first but, unfortunately, in most cases it’s the wrong strategy.
This was my chance to course correct. With very little that I could do at the time with Codeanywhere since it was mostly on my co-founder at that point, I re-branded myself as “the conference guy.” I changed my social statuses to the founder of Shift, spoke at conferences as the founder of Shift, introduced myself as the conference guy and read any and all books I could on the subject of events, conferences and creating experiences. In other words, I completely immersed myself in Shift. What’s more, with a bit of profit coming in, I decided to invest into a full-time team; at first hiring just one full-time person, then gradually more each year.
And you know what?
It worked!
Shift was again a success, even more than the last one, and we sold out sponsor booths and tickets — we were shocked. What now? We decided to do more events! The next year we did two events, with the first again in our hometown of Split, Croatia and the second in the capital city — Zagreb. We used the same formula as our main event; fun, high energy, entertaining and of course building bridges to the world. We invested time and money, as this was our first event in a new city, and our benchmark for success would simply be breaking even.
On the eve of the event, it was already sold out and became an was an amazing, smashing success!
This was 2018 and our best year ever.
Rise
Not to get ahead of ourselves for 2019, we decided to stick with 2 events for the year and see if we can do it again. If it worked, we would expand further. We hired two more people, started implementing some procedures and were actually starting to look like a legitimate little company. We upped the quality and instilled some best practices. We were a little conference generating train, just chugging along 🚂.
Halfway through 2019, we already saw that it was going to be at least as successful as 2018, so at this point I’m wondering, am I really a conference guy? Although there were conflicting thoughts in my mind, it wasn’t something I imagined myself doing for the rest of my life. Then again, it looks like it’s something I’m genuinely good at.
Before the second event in 2019 I sat down with the team and asked, “how do we make this bigger?”. Thinking to myself at the time, if this conference thing is going to be my calling, I better do it BIG!
“What’s next?” I ask the team. “We are already the best in Croatia, in the region even, but how do we take this to the next level?”. The answer came fairly quickly and unanimously, “international expansion!”
This was a big step, with a new country comes new laws, new people and new challenges. We were terrified but resolute. First we looked at where to expand to, we had a short list of about 20 cities but after one brainstorming session, it became clear to us that Dublin, Ireland was the place. It’s a tech centre, which means there’s a built-in audience. There weren’t many tech conferences which meant there was a need within that audience and lastly, there were a lot of Croatian people there, so we figured they’d help us once we got on the ground.
Soon after I flew the entire team to Dublin. We were like soldiers invading new territory, looking at venues and hotels, reaching out to acquaintances of any kind, getting to know the land. It was just an amazing and energetic experience all around. It was fun, exciting and scary all at the same time and we loved every moment of it. We really did feel like we were on our way to taking over the world.
On our very first day back in the office in Croatia we posted a huge layout of the Dublin venue on the wall — it was our “war map”, visually showing us what we needed to get done to succeed. Our day to day work was focused on our now-annual second event in the capital city but work on the Dublin event was slowly but steadily happening in the background.
We were on a roll at this point and as you’d expect by now the second event went well — amazingly well in fact. Mind you, right around this the news just started mentioning a virus that had popped up in China. But as with most of the Western world, we didn’t care. We were at our after party enjoying our success and planning for what’s next, ready togo full-on with the Dublin event. We were finally going to take over the world with our conference! 🌍
Continue reading the last chapter: Why You Should Always Get Back Up If You Fail — Part 3
