August 20th, 2011FrOSCon, Bonn, Germany
Walter Heck, Tribily.com
Living the dream: running a FOSS company out of your backpack
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Who am I?
• Walter Heck, 30 years old
• Studied IT (for 2 years)
• Narcoleptic
• Traveler / hitchhiker / couchsurfer
• Diver / Hiker / Geek / Environmentalist / Metalhead
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Timeline
• Worked in dutch corporate world 7 years
• Gave away all my stuff, quit my job and started traveling in 2007
• Started my company in 2008 when I ran out of money
• Lived in 4 continents in 4 years in Thailand, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Brasil, Alaska and currently Turkey
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OlinData
• Started because I didn’t want to stop traveling
• Chose MySQL because I thought it was cool and fit for location independency
• Made 2000EU in the first 8 months only (with non-mysql work)
• Started consulting through Open Query and found 2 small clients
• Started oplexing (shared webhosting for professionals) in 2009, quit it in late 2010 after never making any money
• Started tribily (server monitoring as a service) in 2010
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What worked?
• Winging it! Just get started!
• Don’t be afraid to say goodbye to people, only work with skilled people who can work independently
• Keeping the goal (traveling while making money) in mind when making decisions
• Following my heart, not listening to what others told me from time to time
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What worked (2)?
• Karma overrules business decisions
• Build discipline (work whenever I can)
• Persevere!
• Have benefits from being virtual: all knowledge online and transferable
• Do things the proper way, not the quick way
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What didn’t?
• Trying to make money out of shared hosting
• Trying to hold on to something that clearly didn’t work
• Doing work remotely that wasn’t suitable for it
• Elance (ugh!)
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Marketing
• Speaking at conferences (ok, it’s also a lot of fun ;) )
• Google SEO (Write content) (25% of all visits)
• Commenting on related blog posts (20%)
• Responding to tweets, forums etc.
• Google Search Alert
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Finding people
• It’s hard!
• 1 good employee == 5 lousy ones
• Techies? Chat interview first!
• Personal network / references
• Low income countries
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Why FOSS / Openness?
• Sharing is caring
• Code that needs to be open needs to be reusable (==well structured/designed?)
• Giving back to a community that gives me so much
• Hope for external contributors
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What do we do with/for FOSS
• Using: puppet, mysql (MariaDB), zabbix, drupal, debian, php, redmine
• Sharing back: http://github.com/tribily
• Drupal to zabbix module
• Zabbix templates
• Zabbix frontend modifications
• Zabbix server binary patches
• Help out on forums, irc, mailing lists
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Future plans
• Grow organically, no outside funding
• Employ people from low income countries with decent incomes
• Create time to work on a project that changes the world
• Move from the mysql business (non-stable income) to the tribily business (stable, not depending on amount of work)
• Settle down in a nice location on the planet with home office
• But first: travel more!
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Dreams
• Live off the grid but still connected
• Make enough money to support employees and their families
• Rule the world…. >:)
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