I spoke in public about Tides NZ

This month’s Wellington Mobile Dev Meetup was a collaboration with the Wellington DesignPro Meetup. Titled ”Designing for Mobile”, I was asked by the organisers to give a 15 minute speech.

I don’t think that I am very good at speaking in front of people, nor do I think that people will find me very interesting. I mean, what am I going to stand up in front of nearly 50 people and waffle on about for fifteen minutes!

(It’s a lot easier to waffle on here…)

Anyway, after Adrian and Melby asked me to speak about something a couple weeks before the event, I couldn’t say no. One of my new years resolutions was to get out of my comfort zone and attempt to speak in front of people more often.

I had a couple of weeks to figure out a topic and prepare a presentation. Naturally, I put this off for as long as possible and only ended up seriously preparing a couple days before hand.

As I’d left it quite late, there was no time to research and master a topic enough to feel confident talking about it so I decided to bring it back to something I already know.

Tell a story; says all the advice about public speaking. It’s the best way to keep the audience engaged, and I kind of had a story about how Tides NZ came into fruition. Writing a few notes down and loosely following speaking.io, I managed to cobble something together.

A couple of hours later, I had this complete deck of slides and enough in my head to remember what I should say.

After it was over, I was so relieved and could chill and watch the other speakers. There were a lot of questions at the end, which I took as people found it interesting, not that I didn’t explain everything!

I found out that a couple of people actually used Tides NZ. That was the first time I’ve met someone who’s organically downloaded an app of mine, that felt insane!

It was a great night and the other speakers were fantastic.

Go check out Tides NZ now for the best tides app in New Zealand!