We had a great speaker at last night’s Refresh Miami: Matthew Wensing, co-founder of Stormpulse.com.
Here are some of the things people can learn from his story:

• Success doesn’t come overnight
• The amount of traffic you can get doesn’t matter if you can’t monetize it properly
• Try to leverage companies that already have a distribution channel in place
• Don’t undersell yourself
• Try to identify the hole left in the market by your competitors and go after that
• Identify your shortcomings but focus on your strengths

This is part of a conversation going on among the people helping organizing a tech community. First a quote from a previous message, followed by my reply. I would love to hear everybody’s opinion and create a constructive dialog. Disclaimer: I edited my reply a bit to correct some grammar horrors (yeah horrors, way beyond errors).

We saw last time the turnout has a lot to do with the topic. If we run this as a user group (like the WordPress, iPhone, and Ruby groups, etc.), then the turn out will be like last time. If we reach out wider with more general interest topics, then we’ll get 200 people.

Well I think some tech topics in a tech community won’t hurt once in a while. We need to remember that we want to build a tech community, not just a group of people as big as possible, otherwise we could just talk about sports and I’m sure we would get even 500 people to show up. The real core of Refresh Miami, in my opinion, should be “tech” and the concept of tech should go beyond using a computer, twitter, facebook or emails, cause nowadays almost everybody does those things already. I invite you all to check the schedule of the other Refresh groups (refreshingcities.org). I’m not saying it should be all about code, because that would be wrong as well, I think the September event about copyright and venture capital was great.

Refresh should talk about new technologies and help people creating tech businesses. If this means having 100 people who can put their head together and build (build, not just talk about building) cool projects (those are what really attract VC and press, not cool people), I’ll take those 100 over 200 generalists everyday.

A couple of days ago I gave spoke at Refresh Miami about the status of the iPhone applications market and to present one of my latest projects, Get Apps Done. Since the first time I gave a presentation at Refresh Miami about Twootball, the audience almost doubled, with almost 200 people showing up. And that’s even more impressive if I think about the first time I went to Refresh Miami little less than 2 years ago, when we were just 15 of us. It’s great to see the tech community growing and developing so fast.

Here’s the video and the slides of the presentation I gave for those who couldn’t make it.

Last night I spoke at Refresh Miami about the concept of micro-developing and how it applied to Twootball. I was kinda nervous at the beginning but I think it went pretty well and I was very happy with it.

Here’s the video of the presentation, I’ll soon post online the slides as well.

Here’s also the slides of the presentation: