In this special bonus episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, host Jim James talks with Mike DePleaner (Australia) and Jan Koch (Germany) about ScaleFest, a 24‑hour virtual conference for serious entrepreneurs and scale‑ups. They explain why the event exists – a gap in the market for founders who have moved beyond the startup stage but aren’t yet large enterprises – and describe the target audience as owners of businesses ranging from 7‑figure revenues to those preparing for 9‑figure exits. ScaleFest is scheduled for 27 April 2024 and runs across four time‑zone hubs (Sydney, Singapore, London, New York) in a continuous relay format. The program is built around four pillars – People, Capital, Systems, and Revenue – and features experienced founders, crypto/Web3 leaders, marketers, HR and operations experts. Speakers include Taylor Welch and a yet‑to‑be‑announced roster, with a flash talk by Dennis Yu on low‑budget video marketing. The event combines a single‑stream keynote/panel phase with parallel workshops and masterclasses, allowing attendees to cherry‑pick sessions that match their needs. It is industry‑agnostic, emphasizing universal business fundamentals such as financial modeling and human psychology. Pricing offers a free tier (full session access) and paid tiers from $295 up to $1,500, unlocking additional networking, pitch competitions, and investor access. Registration is via scalefest.com, where participants can sign up once and attend any city’s live stream or recordings. The hosts stress the goal of building a global peer community that transcends geography, enabling entrepreneurs worldwide to share solutions to common scaling challenges.
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Hello and welcome to this slightly special edition of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, because today we're going to go to Sydney and we also have a guest in from Germany. Mike DePleaner is going to talk to us about Scale Fest, which is an event for anybody that's scaling their business across the no man's land from starting to actually getting to be big. Mike, this looks like a great event. Tell us more about it, please.
Look, in very simple terms, the inspiration for Scale Fest literally came from, there are very few events if you're running a serious scale-up. There's a lot of amazing stuff for startups. There's some really cool events if you're running a big business. When you're, as you said, getting across the ditch or getting the valley of, across the valley of death, it's very hard to find the right information. So I work in that space through my other business and we just felt that it was time for us to share a lot of the stuff that we've learned with a broader audience.
So tell us about ScaleFest. When is it and who's going to be speaking at the event and who's it for?
So ScaleFest happens on the 27th of April this year. It is for the, shall we call it, the serious entrepreneur, for those that are either running a scale-up, whatever the definition may be that you feel is fitting for that, or for those that are looking to get into running a scaler. And, you know, we're not discriminating, say, hey, you're right, you're not. It's really for those that, that want to arm themselves with the right information and, and basically boost their business, get it to the next level. Jan, do you want to talk a little bit about the people we got coming?
Absolutely. So with Scale Fest, one of our priorities is that everybody who's on stage, on the virtual stage, They talk from experience. So everybody we have on the stage is a business owner. They range anywhere from 7 figures to 9-figure exits. And who we have coming, to drop some names, Taylor Welch is there. We've got some very exciting speakers I cannot announce yet actually, but who have a 9-figure portfolio of companies and who have sold essentially the same idea twice and banked 8 figures along the way. And everybody who's on the stage comes either from the entrepreneurship space, they come from crypto and Web3 startups, they come from the marketing perspective, they come from HR and operations. And we've designed Scale Fest around these 4 pillars where we have content about people, about capital, about systems and revenue, as those are what we've identified as the common bottlenecks that entrepreneurs and scale-up owners go through as the business grows.
Yeah. Now you're in Germany and Mike is in Australia. Just tell us about where the show is going to take place because you've mentioned virtual. So where could people take part in Scale Fest?
So if you imagine that Scale Fest is like 24 hours continuing, we start in Sydney, 8:30 in the morning here. And as we get sort of a few hours into the day, Singapore wakes up. And Singapore kicks in. So for a few hours, we'll have both Singapore and Sydney running in parallel. Then it's time for London to wake up. And then by that time, Sydney have clocked off and gone home to finish the drinks. And eventually we'll get to New York City. So if you imagine the 4 cities sliding across from one to the next, and we will finish about 24, 25 hours after we started in Sydney, we'll finish at the end of the day in New York City.
So there's going to be some bleary eyes, Mike, if you're trying to run this as a 24-hour event, which I guess mirrors the experience of many people scaling up a business. But why did you choose this format? And the next question then will be, if you are taking part in Sydney, will you be taking part in New York, or are they just discrete events but with the similar format?
Look, we would encourage people to dial into all 4 of them if you can. And it's like, there is obviously the bleary-eyedness that might get in the way, you know, and you can buy the recordings if you're going, well, I'm not going to stay up all night, of course. But more importantly, you may want to mix and match. There may be things that you cover in the Singapore sessions that go, that's really interesting for my business. And maybe other things that you cover in London, you go, that's really pertinent to where we're going to be going. So we actually encourage people to cherry-pick from the different sets of agendas.
Okay. So if—
I think what's important here is, sorry to interrupt you, James. It's one digital venue. You sign up once and depending on the time you log in, you will see the separate sessions as they go live. And as Mike said, each of these cities has a unique focus and a unique angle on the scale-up world. And you can have panel discussions, pitch comps, all sorts of things, virtual lounges to network, to find your potential co-founder or to get in front of Hungry to invest towards. And that is where you have to decide what is most important for you at your stage in the business.
Okay. That's really good. So as you say, yeah, and people sign up once and have access to the overall event and where they participate and when they participate is up to them. They won't be gated into just one geography only.
No, correct.
Right. And you've mentioned 4 If you like, areas of bottleneck. I notice you haven't mentioned marketing in there, which is quite often a bottleneck. And for me and the show, The Unnoticed, will anyone be talking about getting noticed?
Yes. I think we see marketing as part of generating revenue. I know marketing in many cases does other things as well. There's brand marketing, which doesn't necessarily directly affect the bottom line, but at the end of the day, We see the revenue generation is very different across different businesses. There are people, there are businesses that are almost purely marketing driven and really doesn't have a sales function. You just go to the website. There's others that are at the other end of the spectrum, barely have any marketing and are just sales driven. And so instead of trying to split that apart, we just call it revenue. So there is a lot of talk about revenue, brand, PR, conversion, all of those kind of things, scaling rapidly. Effectiveness in closing revenue, which is something that a lot of people struggle with.
Okay.
One, one example on the e-marketing front in particular is a flash talk that my friend Dennis Yu is giving in the New York track where he talks about 1-minute videos and how you can scale your audience on a shoestring budget using video and then turn that audience in, into customers.
Okay, wonderful. So that was gonna be my, if you like, my next question was, you've mentioned panels and that's, if you like, almost a masterclass there with Dennis Yu. Can you just explain the format of the day? Because if it's a conference, quite often there is a conference and panel discussion in breakout rooms, for example, and then a social event. What would people be taking part in when they sort of join the event?
Yeah, so there's kind of 2 main parts of each of the 4 cities. The first part is a single stream. We don't have multiple streams in each city because that's just going to be too much to wrap your head around. That stream is a mix of keynotes, panels in different combinations. Some of the panels we call firesides because it sounds more fun. Some of the keynotes are a bit shorter, some are a bit longer. But at the end of the day, it's either one person on stage or it's multiple people on stage. When we get sometime in the middle of the afternoon, we then go, okay, that was enough for that kind of if you will, learning inspiration, aspiration kind of track. Now it's time to roll the sleeves up, as we talked about in one of the first minutes, and it's really about, we now get into workshops and masterclasses. They run in parallel because there's a lot to cover and we don't want to go to, you know, all the night long. And so basically people can pick and say, well, I want to have an hour's worth of a masterclass on, say, marketing, and maybe the other masterclass or workshop maybe on HR and team issues, for example. And so you can again mix and match as to what is most relevant to you.
What about industries? Are you focusing on any specific industries or is it open house in terms of what kind of companies you are hoping to attract?
It's totally open house. There is really, in modern terminology, leadership, revenue generation, marketing, all of these kind of things have in a funny way become quite homogenized across industries. The way we often express it is that running a good business is understanding Excel really well and the numbers and understanding human psychology really well because you've got to get inside the brain of somebody out there to influence them, to get them to buy something, or maybe it's your team members. that you're gonna motivate and inspire. But if you don't really understand what goes on in here, it's actually really difficult. And if you don't understand the numbers on the spreadsheet, you may get into trouble. And so, you know, it's, those are 2 key things. And we find that they are generic across whether it's an ad tech or a med tech business, whether we are dealing with a B2B or a B2C, you know, sure, there are nuances within that, but we've chosen to be Can I call it industry agnostic?
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Interesting there because some of the scaling coaches, for example, also are really viewing these as disciplines, aren't they? Management disciplines rather than industry calls. Now, the next dimension to that is you've gone global, you know, Mike and Jan, why are you going global rather than saying, well, there are some specific aspects of doing business in Australia, and it needs its own set of Australian scaling up experienced entrepreneurs. Singapore, Southeast Asia, you know, where I lived for 15 years, has got its own set of dynamics. How can you say that it's going to be the same problems faced by entrepreneurs around the world?
Well, us being global is a bit of a metaphor for what we see A good scale-up should be able to do because of, if you will, a lot of business now being, shall we call it electronic, or, and if they are dealing with physical goods, you can ship pretty much anything to anywhere. And a lot of things you can 3D print just to make it even more fun. We don't have the traditional barriers that we had even 25 years ago between, okay, I'm running a business in Australia or business in Singapore. It's like, you know, I remember a couple of years ago, a buddy of mine who started a new SaaS business. And I, for the life of me, I can't actually remember what they were selling, but SaaS platform. And he said, and it was an expensive kind of thing. It was like $1,000 a month kind of thing. So it was a relatively priced, high priced one. He said it wasn't until the 5th customer that they had someone in Australia. And that tells us a lot. And so we see that when you're in the startup phase, you're typically very local. You're going to get your team sorted out. You've got to get the product sorted. You gotta figure out your first, at least your first go-to-market strategy. You've gotta get some traction, runs on the board. Once you're past that stage, well, the world is your oyster.
Yeah.
And so one of the things we really wanna see is foster a peer community across the world. I wanna see lots of entrepreneurs from Singapore meeting people in New York, lots of people in London meeting people in Sydney, or whichever combination it might be. And people in Germany meeting people in wherever. And the reality is that at the moment there is again, not a lot of places where they can do that. Yes, you can all, we can all go to LinkedIn, but the problem is that we don't have a common foundational base. So when I ping somebody on LinkedIn that I don't know and says, hi mate, you look like a nice profile, can we connect? Okay. Yeah. Now what? Right. And so part of this is really saying we need this global community. We are solving the same problems. But in different manners perhaps, but it's very much the same market problems and distribution problems we're solving, whether we are in Singapore, whether we are in London. So why not work together?
Okay, lovely. So really sort of collecting the wisdom of entrepreneurs without borders, which I think is absolutely true. And for most companies scaling up, geography isn't actually the number one issue anymore, is it? The internet has liberated us from that. I've got to ask one last question. How much does it cost to take part?
Jan, do you want to answer that? You've been very quiet the last few minutes.
We're handing over to Jan Koch over there in Germany. Jan, how much is it gonna cost for people to take part?
So we've got the free tier where you can access all the sessions. So if you just want to dip your toes into the water, there's nothing you have to pay for us. Then we have a couple of tiers for paid tickets starting at $295, I think. Yep. And then they go up to around $1,500 in the pre-launch. And that gives you more access to the event, like access to the speakers, networking, pitch competitions, getting in touch with investors and all that jazz. And depending on how serious you are, the right ticket is there for you. And we've tried to keep the pricing as competitive as we could.
That's wonderful. So people can take part for free, right? And then they can access that. And then as they feel more comfortable or see value, then they can invest it, which is very smart. way of doing it. That's perfect.
It's easy.
Yeah, that's wonderful. So, Mike, Jan, where would people find out more about Scale Fest? Give us a link of some kind.
scalefest.com is the best place to go there. And there you can enter your email address, get the free ticket, get in the know of what we're actually doing. That puts you onto the email list so you can learn more about the event and how you can make the most out of it. The last thing we want to do is we don't want to add more clutter to our already cramped calendars. Everybody has enough to do. We all don't have enough hours in our day. We are very mindful about that. Yet we see this need to distribute the real-world information from practitioners and business owners, just like you are doing on this amazing podcast, Jim, getting the word out from people who are in the trenches and who don't practice and, or who don't teach because they've read a book.
Yeah, just remind us one last time, what date should people put in their diary for Scale Fest?
April 27th.
April 27th. Okay, perfect. So I'll put this, of course, in the show notes and links to the show. So Mike Bourne, de Plena, sorry, in Australia, thanks for joining us. And Jan Koch in Germany, thanks for joining me on the show.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having us.
My pleasure. And of course, I'll put links In the show notes. And if you like this event, do please sign up and share it on your social network because that's how we as entrepreneurs can gain access to trusted information and communities like the ones being set up by Michael and Jan. Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James, here in the UK.
