Month: August 2017

I was proud of the 7th annual Philly Geek Awards

From its origins, I was certainly around the Philly Geek Awards, organized by a volunteer group surrounding the local culture blog Geekadelphia, run by a handful of my friends. But it was mostly from afar, sometimes speaking and being silly with them.

In 2016, as sometimes happens with volunteer efforts, the annual black-tie-meets-cosplay event was thrown into jeopardy, as several of its organizers had moved away in a sudden and similar cycle. It had no one to lead its organization, so I volunteered our team to keep the tradition alive. It was a real risk for our organization and the brand overall, but it felt important to keep the event moving. We pieced it together, with a rushed venue relationship and tricky catering limitations, and though it was far from perfect, we kept the tradition alive.

This weekend our Technically Media team, with the support of a volunteer planning committee, brought the event back to what it was meant to be — a highly produced, sold-out celebration of passionate subcommunities with civic pride in spades.

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We hired lots of sales managers until we kept one: here’s what I learned

So many conversations in bars and coffee shops in Center City, or the few conferences I’ve attended, trying to answer the same question: Who can help us better sell Technical.ly?

I was introduced to that Temple graduating senior. I struck up a partnership with Jason, who had been in digital media agency sales after a Fairmount drink. The former newspaper online sales manager felt promising, so I bought him a second Guinness at Bishops Collar. We made an offer to a former local TV web sales person, who turned us down for a similarly crummy offer at an even more weak local offering. Tara was dating a game designer we knew, and she was the first we had a formal arrangement with, set up at an Old City coffee shop. After an event with a local group of founders, a few more coffee meetings followed. Then there was the big-haired former rock DJ turned local TV ad exec: We never decided if we thought he was brilliant or deranged. (Looking back it was definitely the latter).

In all these cases, we tried to work out some commission-only offering for a product that didn’t have any sales. We tried simple percentages, and more complicated ones — with variable rates depending on inbound or outbound, new or existing relationships and product types.

In the end, the only way to was through. We didn’t really know what Technical.ly was selling, so of course no sales rep would succeed. We didn’t have enough audience for digital ads, not enough tech for product sales, not formal enough events for sponorships.

As founders, we had to figure it out ourselves. No entrepreneur can succeed without a heavy dose of sales. Once our events model was clearer in recent years, we’ve had success. We hired our first full-time biz dev rep and then others. We needed clear value prop, clear prospects, clear inventory, clear processes. It can be improved upon but all that needed to be determined first, and the entrepreneur is the only one who is going to do that.

What I learned hosting a weekly podcast for six months

For six months, I hosted a pre-planned, ‘pop-up’ weekly podcast featuring my favorites from six years of recording stories told by friends at an every-other-event I called Story Shuffle.

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Full audio from my interview of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney during Philly Tech Week

For the fourth time, I interviewed Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on stage, for the third time during Philly Tech Week, the event series I help organize annually. This took place back in early May: find coverage from Technical.ly Philly here.

It’s a kind of journalism I’m embracing for a community I represent.

Continue reading Full audio from my interview of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney during Philly Tech Week

Here are a bunch of ways Technically Media has taken a political stand

There’s a tricky line about how much and in what ways news organizations can take stands. As a rule, they’re not supposed to, in the spirit of being consumed and trusted by an array of people.

That’s changing fast. Still, we at Technically Media do preserve some of the traditional mindset that we aim to be trusted by people with lots of different political stripes.

Update: In 2021, our newsroom overruled me (!) to announce that we’d use Latinx for Latino sources.