Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

necessity is the mother of all inventions

26 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, the speaker explains how a lack of funds forced their startup to rely on community building and event hosting instead of traditional sales, advertising, or a dedicated marketing team. By inviting interesting people to their coworking space, they attracted large gatherings that eventually evolved into the Traction Conference, featuring high‑profile guests such as Jason Lemkin, the CEOs of Uber and Twilio. This event‑centric approach generated revenue, and the company grew to about $10 million in annual revenue with a lean team of roughly 30 employees, illustrating the power of frugality and organic marketing.

Chapters

Here's the thing, necessity is the mother of all inventions. And we didn't have the money to invest in sales and ads and all of that. So we're like, hey, let's build a community, right? We started hosting events and inviting people, cool people to our coworking space and that grew. And one day, 200 people showed up to our coworking space and the coworking space said, hey, you can't host like a conference here at the coworking space. It's not a 10, 20% meetup. And that evolved into the Traction Conference. And over time we've had like Jason Lemkin and CEO of Uber and Twilio and all these big names come. And so my philosophy was that, right? Like our philosophy is that our events made money, our marketing made money. And when we got to $10 million in revenue, we had no marketing team. We had less than 30 people or 30-ish people. And so that is what frugality does to you.