On Thursday April 23rd I found myself in the action theater at the Sony Metreon along with 150 others looking forward to hearing an answer to the age old question of how to run my business on the cheap.  The SF Entrepreneurs meetup is hosted by Edith Yeung, who if you haven’t met her, is a wonderfully friendly and positive woman, who appears genuinely committed to helping others find the success that she has had.  For this event she recruited three speakers each of whom was given an opportunity to speak about what they do, why they were there, and what insight they had to help others run their business on the cheap.  And as happens so often when you get multiple entrepreneurs into a room, their styles, approaches, and suggestions couldn’t have been more different.

Gary Swart CEO of oDesk spoke first.  Gary is a calm, confident and direct speaker.  I saw him talk at geekSessions 1.5 and his demeanor, though speaking under very different conditions, was nearly identical.  oDesk specializes in helping companies: Hire, Manage, and Pay remote contractors as if they were in your office.  This of course fit almost too snugly into the meetup’s goal, and Gary quickly moved past his company’s ability to help us run our business on the cheap and gave some specific non-oDesk suggestions.  The one that resonated most with me was his statement that companies must “prioritize ruthlessly” by  (1) testing and learning, (2) cut what’s not working, and (3) being the best solution to at least one problem.  Having spent a number of years as a Sales Engineer, I would heartily second the last statement.  Sales people will say they can sell anything, but the truth is that if you give them at least one element of your product that is market leading, it makes their jobs dramatically easier.

Mark Friedler co-founder of Worlds and Games spoke second, and was a strong contrast to Gary.  He was a laid back and often witty storyteller, with no urgency to get to a point, obviously quite comfortable with a free flow of information.  He talked at length about his entrepreneurial past – beginning with starting up Mark’s Cookies, the first American-style cookie store in Sweden.  Though there were plenty of interesting moments in his talk, my favorite of his suggestions was that companies should hire “fake” workers.  By this he meant that each of the real employees should take on multiple personas when talking to customers/partners etc on the phone/online, which would allow the company to look larger than it was, and to, in essence, get free research without endangering anyone real.  As he said, they had Bruce Lee working for them at one of his companies, and “he” was fired and rehired many times.

Hazel Grace Dircksen, Founder of Socialbees spoke last.  Hazel is an enthusiastic, upbeat and intense woman.  Socialbees does consulting work primarily concerned with helping companies with their Facebook strategy, and her talk reflected that laser focus.  But before she got specific, she started with a warning that nothing, not Facebook, not Socialbees, not anything could help you if your product/brand wasn’t, as she said: awesome.  But assuming that something about your product/brand was awesome, then Facebook could help you – if you used it correctly.  She made a number of interesting points, but two stood out to me.  (1) Use a Facebook page instead of a company newsletter or website because of its inherently viral nature.  (2) Run contests constantly, because they were the best generator of new fans, which in turn drove the viral nature of the page, and increased traffic to your site.

The talks themselves were interesting and informative, and while there was nothing earth shattering, I was certainly happy to have attended.  I will be joining future SF Entrepreneurs Meetups, as well as October’s BizTechDay, which promises to be a gigantic version of what I experienced last week.