Photo by rantfoil.

Hello, it’s Mathieu here, from France. I’ve been doing an internship with Scout Labs since January, and it’s exciting to be contributing to this very cool application. I’ve taken advantage of my time here by attending all sorts of hi-tech and entrepreneurship events happening here in sunny California.

I attended Startup School 2008 at Stanford University this past weekend. Startup school is an annual free conference organized by Y Combinator and BASES for hackers interested in creating their own startups. One of the most interesting and entertaining talks of the day was from David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby On Rails and founder of 37signals.

The most interesting advice he gave us was about how to make money online: Have a great product and define the right price for it. It’s interesting because it can be very hard to define the price of your great product, especially when it is sold as a service like a lot of software now (and like Scout Labs). You can fail at pricing your product correctly, and this is what happened to 37signals.

David told us that Backpack, one their applications, has been really successful (they doubled their revenues) in the last 2 months after they re-launched the application. They basically raised the price and changed their marketing message to target the long tail of businesses, what he calls the Fortune 5,000,000. You don’t have to aim at the Fortune 500, you don’t have to aim at the general consumer. There is a large and profitable market in the often-neglected long-tail, and software-as-a-service companies like Scout Labs are poised to capitalize on that opportunity.

You can find David’s talk below. All the videos from Startup School 08 are available on Omnisio.