Conferences are (mostly) a waste

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now on to the episode. What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman and this is Founders Journal. For those who are longtime Founders Journal listeners, welcome back. For those who are new to the show, here's the deal. Founders Journal is my audio diary made public for the world. My goal is to increase your odds of success as an entrepreneur by sharing the stories, lessons, and tactics that I experience as I build my businesses. You can expect the podcast Monday and Wednesday with episodes that are under 20 minutes in length. And if you want to get notified when a new episode comes out, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Today on the pod, I am talking about why most conferences are a waste of time to attend, but why the one I just went to wasn't a waste and what I learned. Lastly, if you haven't yet introduced yourself, please do so. I love meeting the community and getting to know you all, so shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. That is alex@storyarb.com. D-O-R-Y-A-R-B dot com saying hi, and I'll get the conversation going. Now let's get into it. I usually think conferences are a massive waste of time. You spend hours in transit, hundreds or thousands of dollars on flights and hotels, and instead of working on your business, you spend your time quote unquote networking or listening to panels that oftentimes could have just been you listening to a podcast in your. Home. It just usually is really low ROI. And I've thought a lot about when events can actually be worth it. And I think there are 2 scenarios where they make sense to attend. The first is if you are a quote unquote sales savage and the entire focus of the event is driving leads for your business. I personally have never been able to do this, but there is a certain breed of person that will walk up to anyone at a conference, book back-to-backs with prospects for 12 hours straight. And if this is you or you have someone in your business who is like this, an event can be super high ROI. The second reason is if you get green room rights. If you are a speaker at an event, you get to experience the event in a completely different way from everyone else. Typically, your flight and hotel are comped by the conference or the sponsor of your panel. You get invited to VIP dinners. You get asked to go on podcast recordings at the event. You get access to the green room, which is where all of the other speakers hang out. If you get to experience an event in this way, I think you have to go because you get access to people in a way that may not be possible in any other environment. Which is why now when I go to events, since I am not the sales savage, I typically will only go if I get green room rights. I went to South by Southwest last week. I got green room rights and I got to hang with people that I'd never otherwise have the opportunity to chat with. I thought it would be cool to make you a fly on the wall for these mostly private conversations and share my biggest takeaways from each. So here's the quick itinerary. First, I had a founder-run club. Second, I had breakfast with Lauren Zima, who is a host of Entertainment Tonight. Third, I went to lunch with David Perell, who is a prolific internet writer. Fourth, I went to a Hampton dinner, which basically was a ton of founders with interesting businesses. Fifth, I was on a HubSpot panel with Morgan Ingram, Brendan Gahan, and Alana Joseph. Fifth, I did a trail run with Connor Tomkees, who is a post-exit founder, where we met a dog whisperer. And then sixth, I got to hang with Bryan Johnson, who is leading the movement called Don't Die. So let's go one by one. Stop 1, Founders Run Club. The morning after I arrived at South by, I ran the Lady Bird Lake Trail with 3 entrepreneurs who had completely different journeys from me. By the end of the run, I was reminded of how unoriginal a founder's journey is. One of the founders on the run is a late-stage software business entrepreneur in the religious space. One founder runs an early-stage mobile gaming startup in the real estate space, and one is in the earliest days of building a web app for product designers. So dissimilar, yet I felt deeply connected to them as our breathless convo ranged from imposter syndrome to building a family and a business simultaneously, to the pros and cons of raising money. Stop number 2, brunch with Lauren Zima. Lauren is currently a host at Entertainment Tonight, and we serve on the board of a nonprofit for grieving children together. As we talked through our stories over avocado toast and eggs at Paperboy, I couldn't shake the thought that loss and grief are full of contradictions. Lauren and I both work in media. We also both lost our dads at a young age. We spoke about how loss is full of all of these different contradictions. We'd do anything to have our people back. And yet we are so grateful for the motivation and perspective that loss offered us. We would never wish that someone needed to attend Experience Camps, which is a one-week summer camp for children that lost a parent. And yet we think it is the most special community of people that we have ever been a part of. Stop number 3, lunch with David Perel. David is one of the most intellectually curious entrepreneurs I know. He was the founder of Rite of Passage, an online writing school, and is now the host of How I Write, which is a podcast focused on distilling the writing process of some of the most accomplished entrepreneurs, authors, and musicians in the world. I left our lunch at ABBA with 3 content-related takeaways. First, certain content is being eaten by AI. Expert opinions are safe for now. Entertainment is safe for now. Unopinionated research is toast. The bar for standing out is so much higher higher today, and the way to stand out is by being uniquely human with your content, which means flexing your voice, flexing your opinions, and flexing your taste. Second, YouTube still has massive upside. 20 years in, the platform feels like it's hitting a new inflection point. Podcast consumption is shifting over, TV viewership is shifting to the platform, lots of advertiser money is flowing here. If I was to create a content franchise on one platform today, I would for sure start with YouTube. And third, niche focus with a big TAM is a proven winning strategy in podcasts. A niche focus refers to a new format or specific emphasis that feels novel to podcast listeners. For example, Founders by David Senra bridged the gap between books and podcasts with solo-hosted summaries of the greatest biographies. That's niche, but the market for biographies is obviously massive. How I Write, which is David Perell's podcast, interviews some of the greatest authors, entrepreneurs, and musicians in the world, but about a super specific topic, which is their approach to writing. But again, the market for learning how to write is also massive. Next up, stop number 4, Burgers and Beats, which was hosted by Hampton. That is a membership community for founders that my buddy Sam Parr founded. I left this founder hangout just remembering how there are so many freaking ways to make money. Within 60 minutes of being at this dinner, I talked to 10 millionaires in businesses that I know zilch about. That included one, a leading LSAT tutor and creator with a huge audience in Asia. 2, a no-code app agency owner from the UK. 3, an agent who focuses on representing creators living in Austin. 4, an Amazon consultancy that helps old-school businesses scale on Amazon. And 5th, a software entrepreneur who built a community platform specifically for women's wellness creators. Again, so many different ways you can make money on the internet. Stop number 5, a B2B creator panel. The first lesson from this panel was that marketers waste a ton of time on low-leverage things. It's obviously old news now talking about AI automations and offshore hiring, yet most marketers have barely scratched the surface of actually pulling at these different levers. It is a disservice to yourself and your business to not go deeper and work with these tools. So for AI and automation, marketers should check out tools like Gumloop or N8N. And for offshore hiring, marketers can check out a company like Growth Pair. Lesson number 2: B2B brands are waking up to the power of creator marketing. I always say that B2B is 5 years behind B2C, and influencer marketing is no exception. HubSpot walked in this space so the rest of the industry could run, and now B2B brands are sprinting to set up and scale their creator programs. What does this look like in practice? It ranges from running affiliate deals with hundreds of TikTok and Instagram Reel creators to stacking long-term, deeply integrated partnerships with YouTubers, podcasters, and newsletter creators. Stop number 6 at the event: trail run with Connor. Connor Tompkins is a fellow post-exit founder who built and sold Support Ninja, which is an offshore customer support company. And now he's doing a number of things, including buying cash-flowing businesses and helping them to scale by implementing implementing EOS, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is the business operating system that we use at StoryArc and Morning Brew, and that Connor is an expert in. I finished our run together with 2 thoughts. The first is that momentum is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship. When you don't have momentum, startup life is not fun. Everything feels like a grind. You feel like everything is one step forward, 2 steps back. You start to question if you made the wrong life choice being an entrepreneur, and you're fighting like hell to get momentum back. When you do feel momentum, you feel invincible. Your business feels like a rocket ship with a one-way ticket to Mars, and it feels like making a ton of money or having a ton of impact is inevitable. It really is hard to describe just how good the feeling of momentum is, which is why when you have it, all you can think about is, what can I do to make sure it never leaves? The second lesson is that if you go deeper than anyone else in your specific niche, you will always have unexpected upside. As Connor and I were finishing the back half of our run, we got held up behind a dog walker who was walking 12 different dogs. But there was something peculiar about this entire situation. None of the dogs were on leashes. So Connor and I started walking and just followed the pack of dogs who were following the dog whisperer. She proceeded to take the pack over to a picnic table and got the dogs to stand at attention on every part of the elevated surface. Some of the dogs were on the front bench, some were on top of the table. and some were on the back bench. They did not move a muscle and just watched the dog walker the entire time. As we chatted with her more, she shared how she had been doing this for 30 years, felt like it was her life's purpose, and had an inexplicable control over the dogs that she worked with. After being mesmerized for probably 30 minutes, I left the picnic table and thought to myself that this woman could literally have millions of TikTok followers if she had the right content partner. And more importantly, it reaffirmed that if you become the absolute best in what you do and you go deeper down the rabbit hole of your weird little niche in the world, unexpected opportunities will continue to pop up. And now stop number 7. The final stop on the trip was a chat with Brian Johnson. That name may mean something to some of you. To others, it won't. But as a quick introduction, Brian Johnson is a wildly successful entrepreneur who started Braintree, a payments company that was acquired by PayPal for $800 Today, he's focused on his movement called Don't Die, where he spends $2 million a year trying to slow his aging process and then teaches people how they can approach their own longevity along the way. 2 big takeaways from our chat. The first, religion as an institution is pretty damn remarkable. Right after we sat down, I pulled out a list of questions that I had prepared for Bryan the night before. The top one was about delayed gratification. I said to Bryan, I think the idea of Don't Die is really interesting and I get what you're looking to achieve, but convincing people to have less fun or face short-term pain to maybe die later is an uphill battle. I said, as a species, we as people are constantly seeking short-term gratification, and I can't think of an example where humans have been able to fight this tendency. I asked him, how do you expect a change of behavior that probably sits so deep within our reptile brains? His response: religion. He shared that by calling Don't Die a religion, he anchors his mission to an institution that not only stood the test of time, but also was built on a foundation of values that got its followers to delay gratification for the entirety of their lives. At an intellectual level, I thought this was fascinating. The second lesson: audacious entrepreneurs have irrationally large goals. When I asked Bryan what his goal is with everything that he's doing right now, he looked me dead in the eyes and with a palpable level of conviction said, I want to be remembered by the 25th century. Now, if you think about how many people are remembered 50 years after they die, let alone 400 years after they die, you realize how hard what Bryan is trying to achieve actually is. He explained further that this is why he doesn't care about looking foolish or crazy to people This year in 2025, he expects it. If he wants to be remembered by the future, he needs to build the future, and the future will always look insane to the present. Pretty fascinating conversation and really just a remarkable trip overall. And again, I would say one of the only times where I do feel like an event was super additive for me. That is it for today's Founders Journal. Shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com saying hi, hola, what's up, or whatever else takes you less than 10 seconds. And I will get the conversation going. I love getting to know my listeners so I can make this show as valuable as humanly possible for you. Thanks again for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.