Why I'm running a bootstrapping conference in Vienna, Austria

I'm from Vienna. I recently started letsannotate.com. It's absolutely true that role models help extremely.

When my cofounder and I were in the really early stages we often were looking for inspiration and while we knew very well that lots of US and many UK bootstrapped SaaS products exist and thrive, we feared their success wouldn't easily translate to us.

We were thinking "Oh maybe people from the US and UK won't buy from continental europeans, who aren't native speakers, wo live in a different time zone, where (in the US case) totally different laws apply" and while in no way this was going to make us stop, it was constantly nagging in the background of - at least - my mind.

It has turned out this is not the case. As of today there was exactly one case where a company from the US told us they'd love to use our product, yet feared to export their sensitive data to the EU.

But before we knew that from hard evidence we had inspiration: letsfreckle.com (Vienna), mite.yo.lk (Berlin) and mindmeister.com (Vienna and Munich) exist and thrive just as well as US based SaaS providers.

And this is IMHO what Amy Hoy is talking about in her blog post: These were our role models and while I don't think we would have stopped creating letsannotate.com if we wouldn't know about their success stories, it certainly helped to know we weren't the first to step into this unexplored terrain of bootstrapping in continental Europe.

Hi, my name is Anita. I'm from Vienna too. I started wienett.com and raumdirekt.com some years ago. I can say it's not only "Angst" that prevents Austrians from being entrepreneurs but also it' s the political and social system. many friends of mine - employees - say they would never be so silly (!) to give up their social security they have being employed. yes it's true, we need role models and we need changes in our school system (learning business), in our insurance system (microbusinesses are treated like big companies) and in our mindsets. I'm on the schnitzelconf mailing list and hope to be in the second batch of early bird tickets ;-) and yes: I'd love to spend 250 euros to be able to meet new faces and people from abroad.

I may be completely wrong here, but sometimes I fail at recognizing the real ROI of such conferences, especially in terms of knowledge that I don't know yet. Also, having the speakers being some kind of rockstars (Peldi is been 'on tour' all summer so far, does he ever work on Balsamiq?) might create a huge gap between you and them, and this dosen't help creating solid connections in most of the cases. I'm not sure if the 'you've got to spend money to make money' motto applies here, but again, I may be wrong. Any real-life experiences on this kind of events?

I'm from Vienna as well and this sounds great. If I manage to get my hands on a ticket, I'll definitely attend.

And € 250 or € 300 are certainly cheaper than hopping on a flight to london or the states to hear and meet guys like those announced.

And even if I don't manage to learn anything from them (what I don't believe), I can at least deliver some feature requests for balsamiq first hand :-)

Sounds like a great idea, but honestly - I would never pay 250 euros[1] for attending such a conference.

Good luck though, hopefully I'm just not your target demographic :)

[1] for a frugal Viennese hacker aiming at ramen (knödel?) profitability, 250 euros is almost 2 weeks' living expenses.