Here are my notes from the small business hacks session at Web2Open. Don MacAskill, Jen Bekman, and Bryan Mason were the major guests.

Don’t discount until completion.
Bryan says that when they do pro-bono or non-profit work they don’t discount their work until the client has implemented their advice. I can relate to that. CrowdVine’s second customer got a nice discount because we were looking for reference clients and then the customer changed direction mid-project, leaving us without a public reference implementation.

Don’t ever discount.
Jen’s advice is to offer something that’s got a lot of value and don’t ever deviate from your message about how valuable it is. There’s a low priced option for her art, but there’s never going to be a discount on that option. It’s too valuable to discount.

Don’t do direct sales or marketing.
All three were relying on word of mouth and felt that gave them focus: have an amazing product. Brian said that the only cold call sale they ever made was cornering someone from Flickr at a party and begging them to let Adaptive Path do a rev on the product.

Give each employee two 30″ monitors.
Nothing says you’ll have the tools to do your job than showing up on day one and finding two 30″ monitors. That’s one of many tricks responsible for a 100% retention rate at SmugMug. Way to go Don!

Hire Customers.
Don’s other trick for retention (and also for finding kickass employees) is to hire customers. They take less training, have higher loyalty, and you can observe them before you talk to them.

There’s so much good advice that’s hard to get online but easy to get through word of mouth. It’d be nice to do a monthly small business dinner or something where we could get at these tricks.