Eric Siu walks through landing your first speaking gig: start with local meetups and panels, ask organizers about the audience, offer to speak for free, and build a repeatable talk. He covers applying to conferences like Growth Marketing Conference and SaaStock, plus the travel and networking payoff of persistence.
Today we are going to talk about how to get your first speaking gig, but before we do, don't forget to subscribe, whatever platform you're coming from, if you want to grow predictably in life and in business. All right, so let's talk about this. Maybe we should talk about why it makes sense to speak in the first place. So it could be for branding, it could be for getting more clients, it could be for just building relationships with amazing people. So networking, right? Sometimes when you speak, you can travel to places that you normally wouldn't go to. Like I've been to Ukraine, I've been to Poland, I'm going to Australia. I spoke in Hong Kong. I haven't been in Hong Kong since I was like 6 years old or 7 years old. And, um, God, I've been to like, you know, a lot of places in Europe just because of speaking. But, you know, you all have to start from somewhere, right? So for me, I'm not going to say like, um, you know, it's easy getting there, but I will say in the very beginning what I started to do, I first started speaking when I was about 25, 26 years old and I didn't know anything. I was actually deathly scared. This is when I was, um, this is when I was working at, um, leading marketing for a startup. I spoke in front of about 30 people or so. It was like a mini startup event. And my friend that throws these happy hours in LA asked if I wanted to speak. Actually, we have to sponsor his happy hours too. Now I remember. You know, what happened was I was really nervous going up. Like, I wasn't sure if the slides were going to work. I wasn't sure if I was going to add value for people. Um, and I just said, um, right now. I had a lot of ums and ahs. I spoke there for about 30 minutes or so, answered questions for about 15 minutes. And at the end of the day, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I thought people would judge me. I thought all these bad things, right? How to get your first speaking gig is you just ask, right? So what you do there is there's a lot of, you know, local events around you, startup events around you. You just offer to speak. There's a lot of meetups. Go to meetup.com. There's probably tech websites around the local area. They're doing events. Just search like your city, like Los Angeles tech events or B2B events or stuff like that, right? Or sales or marketing, whatever industry that you're in. You go there, you offer to speak, you offer to add value. You want to do it to a small group first. Maybe you come on a panel first, or maybe you moderate a panel first. You ask questions. Those are a lot lighter in terms of you being alone, um, versus you being alone. And from there, again, what you want to do is when you first speak somewhere, you think about, you talk to the organizer and you say, hey, number one, who's in the audience, right? Number 2, what would be a home run to the audience? Number 3, is there anything else you'd like to add? You ask those things and then you can tailor the conversation to adding value to people. Now, now you think about this. When you're on stage, you don't think about what people are thinking about you because that's vain. What you want to do instead is you want to think about, hey, what kind of value can I add for these people? How can I, how can I blow their mind with the value that I'm about to give them? Right? Because I know the stuff that I'm doing is amazing and it's going to help them and it's going to make them level up. It's going to make them grow and you know, they're going to like you more for that because you added value. That's why people become fans, right? You know, the first level is, you know, go to the local meetups first, you know, get to know people and then maybe ask. And then what you do is you go to the next level. Once you gain more confidence, you look at, you know, conferences that might make sense to speak at. And there's often, you know, call for speakers. You can apply to speak. Eventually what will happen is you keep applying, people will give you a shot. And then what happens is if you do a really good job, you're going to be invited to speak again and again and again and again. There's one conference I keep speaking at over and over. It's the Growth Marketing Conference. And this year I'm going back to just SaaStock in Dublin again. I've spoken at SaaStock Dublin, I spoke at SaaStock Hong Kong, going back to Dublin. And I really enjoy it because, you know, there's really smart people there. But, um, it says a lot if you're going to be invited back, right? So initially what you want to do is think about how much value you're going to add, offer to speak for free, reach out to people, be proactive about it, keep going, keep going, keep going, persistence. And then eventually you're gonna get better as a speaker. And what I would say as a speaker is You don't need to come up with new topics all the time because most people haven't heard about you. What you can do is continue to refine your talk over and over and over, add new stories to it, and then that talk will be fresh. There's people that have used the same talk for over 5 years or so. You know, maybe I'll give some practical speaking tips in another video. Let me know in the comments if you actually want me to do that. Yeah, that's how you get your first speaking gig and eventually it leads to the next level. Don't even think about making money on these. I spoke at a conference in Brazil and I paid, I think, like a lot of money to fly down there, stay for one night. It was like a 14-hour flight and then the next day I flew back. That was a really short period. People are like, oh, you're in Brazil for a really short time. But I got to meet, I got to meet my buddy who runs a growth marketing conference. If I didn't meet him in Brazil, I don't know if that would have happened or not. And then I also met another one of my good friends there, um, Zach, who runs, um, Dribbble. I met him there at the time. He was working at a company called Hired. Now he's the CEO of Dribbble. But that wouldn't have happened if I didn't go there for free. So you have to sometimes pony up and eat the costs. And then eventually, you know, you'll go to the next level and you'll start to get paid where they'll at least cover your flights, they'll cover your accommodations, right? And sometimes they'll cover your business class flights and they'll pay you to speak there. And that's, you know, triple amazing, right? So anyway, let me know in the comments if you would like to see me talk about some practical speaking tips in another video. 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