Over the past decade, I've started, been employed by, and advised a flock of startups. More recently, I've been an advisor at events like Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine, and the new Longhorn Startup Program at UT.

One of the big pushes in recent years - I suspect primarily due to Lean Startup - is customer interviews. At some point during these interviews, the "would" question comes up. Generally it's structured something like this:

"Would you like a product that makes X better?"

And every group celebrates that "95% of our customers said yes!"

That's great, right?  Well.. let's break this down a bit.

First of all, until they give you money, they're not a customer. That's it plain and simple.. so therefore, these are potential customers or potential users but not customers.

In previous years, I've reviewed & covered each conference as I went to them. In 2011, I got so busy that I gave up midway through the year and just decided to do a recap at the end.. it's only now that I realized how many I actually attended. So without further ado.. here are the conferences in order:

January

I've covered CodeMash previously, so I'll spare you from a second round. [post]

I've already written on PHP Benelux, so check out my PHPBenelux coverage here.

February