Phusion Blog

TL;DR: An inspiring tech conference on design, development and experience sharing by field experts at a fraction of the cost of comparable conferences. Cheeky name included. It will be held on October 12th in the renowned Tuschinski theater in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. Limited tickets available, so get yours today!

BubbleConf is a conference for tech startups by tech startups. Okay, so depending on your definition of tech startup, that might not entirely be true. It is actually organized by one tech startup (Phusion), a super talented design studio (Teixido) and a publicly traded tech company with annual revenues of over $100M (Nedap). Despite these annual revenues of about 1/6th of a photosharing service, Nedap has managed to keep the startup culture deeply embedded in their DNA for over half a century. 😉

“How is this conf going to be any different from the other million confs currently out there?” you might be wondering. Well for one, BubbleConf is dedicated to covering a wide range of topics instead of committing to a single one. They are topics that we believe are essential for today’s tech startups ranging from design, development to even the legal aspects of having a startup. Needless to say, we will have select number of speakers that are considered experts in their field to share their warstories with you.

Also, unlike other conferences, we believe in actually making this accessible for early startups. This means that we won’t be charging you $1000+ for a conference ticket, but instead try to charge only a fraction of that amount. We believe that when money becomes a barrier for highly motivated people to learn and grow, something is fundamentally flawed. Having experienced this first hand with Hongli in the very early days of Phusion, we aim to fix this while trying to grow the startup scene in Amsterdam and its surroundings. With early bird pricing starting at the low price of EUR 150, we believe we’ve succeeded in doing just that. Students actually can attend for less than EUR 100 so you really shouldn’t have any excuses to miss out on this one.

We aim to bring as many talented people together as possible from a variety of fields. This not only holds true for the speakers, but also for the attendees. Who knows, you might be able to find your designer or developer co-founder there as well! In fact, we’re planning on encouraging people to team up by providing the stage to a select number of lightning talks as well. And a beautiful stage it is indeed.

Photo by Bram Van Damme

Speakers

We’ll unveil a new speaker on a weekly basis to keep things exciting and true to the entrepreneurial spirit of committing to something without knowing everything up front. More specifically, we would like to have attendees that are just as excited as we are in having an event like this. Also, we understand that trust is a fragile thing, and thus reward those who are willing to commit early with a discount on their ticket via the early bird offering.

• 
  Zed Shaw (Learn Code The Hard Way)
  Zed A. Shaw is a prolific programmer who recently gave up coding for various startups, governments, universities, and mega-corps to work on a small business helping people learn to code. His “Learn Code The Hard Way” series has been read by over a million people from all over the world. This is really all an excuse to get to play guitar whenever he’s not writing.

• 

  Juanma Teixidó (Teixido)

  Juanma Teixidó, award-winning Designer since 1994 spent the last 10 years co-founding and building agencies from the ground-up. Since then his client base grew to include Nike, The United Nations, Nedap among others. These days you can find him on Twitter chirping about all things design.

• 
  …and about 5 more epic speakers to be announced. Stay tuned, as we’ll be announcing a new speaker every week.

Interested in doing a lightning talk about your startup? We’ll be accepting proposals soon so stay tuned.

Sponsors

BubbleConf is going to be attended by people who are actively looking to invent the next big thing since sliced bread. They are highly motivated developers and designers working on startups that may very well turn out to change our way of living. Sponsoring this event provides your company with a unique opportunity to reach out to these startups and connect with them from an early stage on out. It also BubbleConf to make this event even more epic than we’ve already got in the works.

If you’re interested in sponsoring this event, contact us via email and let’s talk. Please add the word “notspam” to the email to bypass our spam filter.

It’s the journey that counts

We love doing things that are out of our comfort zone! Doing a conf is pretty much a direct result from that. More specifically, we believe that doing things that look scary at first allows us to learn and grow in ways that can’t be matched by booksmarts alone.

For people who share this passion, we’re going to document the process of organizing a conference on this blog as much as possible. We believe this is very much in line with our philosophy on open source and acting as transparent as possible so that we can share our gained knowledge with the rest of the world. Your mileage of course may vary, but feel free to submit your questions in the comment section below.

Hope to see you October 12th!

• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Luuk Hendriks
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)