Touched down in Austin on Friday night, had a couple beers (outside of course, it was 20 degrees after all) and headed over to the conference first thing Saturday morning. Here’s a quick rundown of our experience at SXSWi: Day One…

Registration was a bit of a circus so I arrived a bit late for the first session, entitled “Traditional Design and New Technology”. The panel included Jason Santa Maria and Khoi Vinh (the design director of NYtimes.com) and mostly talked about traditional design principles and how those principles have carried over to the web – examining where they fall short, technology limitations and how design goals are different for each medium.

The second panel was an introduction to AJAX and featured Jesse James Garrett (the man who coined the term “AJAX”) and Dylan Schienmann, who co-created the Dojo Javascript toolkit. Discussions focused on the basics of AJAX, it’s benefits and drawbacks (such as usability, degredation, and SEO).

After the morning sessions, Jim Coudal and Jason Fried delivered the opening remarks. Both speakers really resonated with me as a small business owner. For example, Jim, who runs a small creative shop called Coudal Partners, talked about the three questions his firm asks themselves when presented with an opportunity to do work for a client:

1. Will we be able to do good work (that we’re proud of)?
2. Will we be able to make money?
3. Will we learn something?

If the answer to at least two of those questions is yes, then he’ll do the work. Seems like a good barometer to me.

Jason then talked a bit about 37signal’s approach to developing web applications (like Basecamp, Backpack and most recently Campfire) and how his company made the shift from a service-based to a product-based one. I’m a big fan of Jason and his company’s work (their blog Signals vs. Noise is in our blogroll) so I found his experience taking a product like Basecamp from a side project to their main source of revenue quite fascinating.

Jason’s advice echoed what he talks about in 37signals’ new ebook, which provides an overview of his firm’s philosophy towards design, development and marketing, but I’ll summarize here:

• If you’re starting up a web-based product or idea, do it as a side venture. Just dedicate a few hours a week. This allows you to fail in obscurity and continue to develop your product until it provides you with actual income.
• Do it with less money – more money means you’ll waste more.
• Do it with less time – same principle.
• Do it with less features – again, keep it to a reasonable scope and stick to it. Examine what people will really need and give them that. Don’t add extra features that are “nice to haves”.
• Don’t plan (Jason despises feature spec documents and the like). Decide what the product will do, how much time you’ll need to build it and jump right in. When you’ve hit your own deadline, release version 1. That’s not to say it won’t continue to evolve, but I think he wanted to emphasize that it’s better to get something out there and start getting feedback from users right away than tinkering away internally.
• Charge for it. This is how you’ll make money (obviously). Jason argued that while a lot of the web seems to believe that you have to give something away for free to have people use it, if you charge a fee that is less than the value users derive from it then they’ll be happy to pay.

Another good tidbit of advice they both had was that they don’t reply to to RFPs longer than two pages. Their rationale: if the potential client has put that much time and energy into an RFP then they’ll probably be pretty difficult to work with and they probably gave it to several vendors (to recoup some of the investment they made writing it).

My afternoon consisted of a couple panels, neither which impressed me that much. The first one, Starting Small, was moderated by Nick Finck of Digital Web Magazine and was rather disappointing. With Leonard Lin from upcoming.org on the panel, I had expected that it would pick up where Jason’s opening remarks had left off, examining how web firms can make the shift from a consultancy model to a product-based one. Instead it talked about making the shift from day job at a design firm to freelancing on your own.

My final panel of the day I attended purely out of curiosity, and the fact there wasn’t much else I was intersested in seeing. The “panel” only consisted of one speaker and was targeted at how creatives can use simple yoga and meditation techniques to keep energized at work and enhance their creativity. I learned a couple of yoga “moves” that I’ll be testing out when I get back to the office.

Big ups to Frog Design for putting on a great party last night.

Time to head off for day two.