In this documentary‑style vlog, Matt Ragland recounts his experience at the Industry product conference in Cleveland, Ohio. He explains why ConvertKit chose the event—high‑profile speakers and a desire to understand the full product lifecycle from ideation to scaling. Matt attends a fireside chat with Jason Fried, a workshop on Jobs‑to‑Be‑Done with Bob Moesta, and several other talks covering topics such as the balance between speed and quality, evangelism, and office politics. He shares key takeaways: the Jobs‑to‑Be‑Done insight that customers “hire” products to make progress; Jason Fried’s critique of fabricated growth numbers and his “no goals” mindset; the strategy of “underdoing” competitors by focusing on simplicity; and the value of sketch‑noting for learning and networking. Interspersed with footage of an Indians baseball game and reflections on Cleveland, Matt wraps up by describing his vlog’s purpose, upload schedule, and a call to subscribe. The video blends conference insights with personal narrative, offering both practical product‑management concepts and a behind‑the‑scenes look at a tech conference experience.
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Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome back to the vlog. This is more of a documentary episode. I've got maybe the best backdrop that I've ever had before. Soldiers and Sailors Memorial here in Cleveland, Ohio. At a product conference called Industry It's one that I've really been looking forward to. At ConvertKit, we get to choose one conference each year that we get to go and just learn from. Chose this one for two reasons. One, because of the speakers, so Jason Fried, Bob Moesta, Dan Olson. The other reason is that I do want to have a better understanding of like the full product lifecycle from ideation to development and building and then scaling. Scaling, because that's kind of where we are right now with ConvertKit. All right, here at Industry, just about to get started. First one is Jason Fried for a fireside chat. Not really sure what that is going to be like, but I'm sure it'll be really good. Let's get started. Heading into an Indians game. They've won 22 games in a row. American League record, might be a Major League record. Maybe that's what they're going for tonight. So really excited, haven't been to a Major League game in forever. Looks like a beautiful stadium, let's check it out.
Here it comes, a swing and a drive to deep right, down the line, base hit! Into the corner, around third, coming home, Ramirez. It's a game winner for Jay Bruce, and history marches on.
Leave the past! Leave the past! This is, they tell me, I don't really understand. It's the Fountain of Eternal Life. I don't know how it represents eternal life. I know I can see his butt, or her butt, or its butt. I don't know. It's a fine butt. I don't understand. Hold on. Alright, so that's it. Searching for— that's kind of cool. Searching for eternal peace. Rising up from the bronzeness and the superstitiousness. Superstitious, not even just a little stitious. Superstitious. Going into industry day 2. It's kind of day 2 and a half for for me since I was able to do one of the working sessions on Wednesday, but went really well yesterday. Lots of good sketch notes, made some good connections, learning a lot just about the whole product lifecycle. So yesterday was ideation and design, and today is build and scale. And so getting ready to hop into that first session. Cleveland has been great. I've experienced peak Cleveland, they've told me. Great weather, baseball teams crushing it, and good food. So it's been fun. It's been a great few days. I saw some great speakers. I was able to do a lot of sketch notes, which I enjoyed. I always love doing that at conferences. It really is a way for me to lock in some of these really critical things and just, yeah, it gives me something to come back to. Something that allowed me to connect with others really easily. I don't have a super hard time with that regardless, but with especially some of the speakers, some of the organizers reach out to me. It's really easy for me to reach out to them. They're like, hey, check out the sketchnotes. And I got a retweet from Jason, which was really cool. Couple of things that stood out to me. One of the main reasons I came, even though I was really excited to hear Jason speak, was that I got to do on Wednesday a full half day. That sounds wrong. I got to do a half day workshop with Bob and someone else from his team. And so being able to think through jobs to be done, and you should check out my video on that if you want any additional insights on it. I won't spend a ton of time on it, but basically the, the main takeaway of it is that people don't just buy products. They hire goods and services to help them make progress in their life. Like, what's the job of this phone? Well, the job— the phone has many jobs, but right now I've hired the phone to be a video camera so that I can get the vlog out. I hired the AirPods to make it easier for me to move around and have better audio. I can do things like this. I can do things like this. None of that messes with me. You know, when you vlog in public, you just gotta get used to people staring at you. That's okay. Man, it is so hot. So nice here. Going over that directly with Bob was, was fantastic. So there were a couple of things that Jason Fried said that stood out to me as well. I'd heard a lot of his content before. We work with a lot of it on ConvertKit as well. The thing that stood out to me on Jason's one thing is that he feels like a lot of growth and revenue numbers are made up. He's like, they're just fake. You just make them up for some reason to please someone else besides yourself. And to a point, that resonated with me because especially at ConvertKit, we do make up our own numbers because we are funded. We, of course, we have goals. I don't know if I fully agree with his no goal, with Jason Fried's no goals mindset. For us at ConvertKit, we don't have any investors. We don't have anyone saying like, you have to hit 10% month over month growth. You have to do this. No one is telling us that. That's something that we make up for ourselves. So that was an interesting thing. Another thing that he brought up, I don't think enough competitors try and underdo, underdo the competition. You think like, oh, how can we outdo the competition? No, I want you to be thinking instead about how you can underdo the competition because that's like, just take the 3, he's like, if anyone wants to compete against Basecamp, don't try and outdo us. Look at the 3 or 4 things that frustrate you the most about Basecamp and build your product to be the best at those 3 or 4 things. Like, people want simplicity. They want something that works really well, really quickly, not something that's super complicated. And that's something we've tried to follow in a way at ConvertKit as well. Like, we're underdoing, we're underdoing like Infusionsoft. No one wants another Infusionsoft. That's it. If you're thinking about products, if you're thinking about startup ideas, find something something that you maybe really like and try and underdo it. I even thought like, well, how could I underdo ConvertKit? And like, well, I could make it like just for broadcasts and maybe make it really cheap. So, you know, make it geared towards like the true beginner and like just send broadcasts and don't try and outdo ConvertKit or Mailchimp, but try and underdo them and make it really simplistic. So That's the idea that I came up with. Sarah, I forget her last name because I just heard it. She gave, I'll link it in the show notes. She gave a fantastic talk about the balance between speed and quality. Hers was a really good talk. Nancy gave one on the role of evangelism in a company, and that was really great. He at Facebook that gave a talk on the one sentence that will like help your office politics. And I was like, oh, what are you trying to optimize for? That's the, that's the sentence. So that's like the BuzzFeed title. She even called it that. But asking, asking people that maybe you're in conflict with, like, okay, well, what are, like, especially around goals or like projects, like, well, what are you trying to optimize for with this? And in that, something that we talked about a lot, which is diving into, I don't know why I'm doing this so much, going deeper into the questions. Like, oh, well, I'm trying to optimize for this. And that may be in conflict for what you have as a product manager, as a project manager, just as an employee. But understanding what that is, because you should pretty much be on the same team, but that doesn't mean the same teams have— different teams have the same goals inside the company. So hers was a really good talk as well. There were so many good speakers. Mike Belsito did an amazing job putting it all together. And Paul, I don't know how to pronounce your last name, name, sorry. Da Vinci? That's totally not it. He did— they both did an amazing job, and the whole team. But I also enjoyed peak Cleveland everything as I hung out with a couple of Cleveland people, and they're like, "This is peak Cleveland." So much fun. I have had great food. I think I'm gonna go for a run right now because— and the weather, it's just fantastic. So Cleveland, you really do rock. Thank you so much. I'm going to get this vlog out really quickly. Probably going to edit it on the plane home tomorrow. Appreciate everyone watching. Please subscribe below because that way you're not going to miss anything. I don't want you to miss anything. If you've been watching this, you're probably interested enough. Hit subscribe. You're going to learn about how I make side hustles, how you can create a side hustle. Those come out on Wednesday, and then on Fridays you get the documentary effect. Just me talking about like what, what's happening in life. And to be honest, well, I mean, the Friday documentary, I just think you're gonna find it interesting. Maybe I think too highly of myself, but it's really for me, it's for my son, for maybe future kids just to know like, oh, this is what dad was going through when he was 33. Am I 34 yet? Still 33. So I hope you enjoy it. Hit subscribe. There are gonna be new videos Wednesday and Friday. Peace out, everyone have a great weekend. See ya.
