In this talk, Lloyed Lobo shares a step‑by‑step playbook for building a conference and bootstrapped startup from zero budget to several hundred thousand dollars in revenue. He begins with a personalized drip‑email system using Streak, emphasizing hyper‑personalized subject lines (e.g., “Hey, Zenefits and Traction”) and a cadence of follow‑ups every few days. He stresses warming prospects through social engagement—commenting on blogs, sharing content, and mentioning them multiple times—before the first email. Lobo then describes how short, advisory‑request emails can secure 20‑minute calls that often expand to an hour, during which he validates the problem, uncovers the ideal solution, and recruits beta users, effectively creating a list of 100+ early adopters. He applies the same outreach to assemble a speaker lineup for the Traction conference, achieving near‑100% open rates by using “RE:” subject lines and casual greetings like “How’s it going?”. For event attendance, he leverages FOMO‑driven email campaigns with subject lines such as “Are we meeting this Thursday night?” and limited‑quantity early‑bird tickets (e.g., 25 tickets at $299, then $399 tier), driving rapid sell‑outs and scaling ticket sales through tiered pricing and urgency cues. Lobo advises bootstrapped entrepreneurs to pursue paid validation—selling to early customers for real feedback—rather than relying on free beta users. Finally, he outlines a low‑cost retargeting strategy using RetargetLinks, a URL shortener that drops cookies, allowing him to monetize content shares (including influencers like Tim Draper) and generate 20‑30% of revenue without creating original blog content. The overall narrative demonstrates how disciplined, non‑scalable tactics (personal outreach, scarcity pricing, and smart retargeting) can be systematized to achieve rapid growth.
Chapters
Then send personalized emails to them on a drip campaign. So I use something called Streak. And download Streak. It's a good way to reach out to people, and you can really personalize your message. So you could do interesting things like— if you blast everyone, they start going to spam. So you could personalize your subject line, like saying, hey, Zenefits and Traction, right? Or Traction— Zenefits Parker Conrad at Traction. You can personalize that and send really, really short emails. With some value-add for them. And you could do interesting things like get into Twitter conversations, comment on their blogs, share their content, like mention them 3 or 4 times so you're top of mind already, and then you send them an email. And you might not get a hold of them the first email, so you want to send an email every other day or every couple days with new information to see what resonates with them. And so this was This is a simple email I send. I'm doing the next traction now in 6 months, and this email worked very well for me. Simple, quick, easy, right? Some of the other email, I can share other email templates for product. So if I'm trying to validate a market, I'll send an email like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm working on a product that uses artificial intelligence to make customer service more productive and efficient. I'm not looking to sell anything, but given your experience, I'd love to get 20 minutes of your time for advice. And then end with, are you available on this date or that date? And then follow up a couple times, and people respond, right? You're an entrepreneur, you're young, you're looking to get some advice, you're an expert. Like, they feel flattered. And then when I go through that process and they've given me— when I say When I say, give me 20 minutes, 15 minutes, they end up giving me like an hour. And then at the end of the conversation, I try to walk away with one or two things, right? One is, am I really solving a problem? Like, what is the problem? What are they cobbling together because my solution doesn't exist? And in the perfect world, what would be the right solution for them? And at the end of that, I ask them, what if I could deliver the solution to you? Would you be my beta user? Would you test it out and give me further feedback? I spent like 45 minutes or half an hour with you, they're like, yeah, heck yeah, I'll do it. At the end of that exercise, you've got now like 100 people who are your first potential beta users, right? Like people talk about like growth hacking and like how to get massive viral usage, but it all starts with doing things that do not scale, because that will— if you can please 100 people and do it really well, then— and that 100 people is a subset of a giant market, Then you know you can scale it, right? So that email essentially got me my big list of speakers. Some of the things from that email was, if you notice this email, I'm emailing— I don't know any of these guys, right? Like Parker Conrad or any of them. They're not my friends. But an email like this, I'm like, hey, how's it going, right? That how's it going literally quadrupled my email response rate. Wow. Because it's the Bay Area. I'm saying, hey, how's it going? And they just assume that we've met somewhere. And then many of them after, when they come speak at my conference, they're like, hey, where did we meet? Right? And I'm like, no, we never met. But very rarely will somebody say, where did we meet? Because they're thinking now, oh, I must have met this person for this person to take this approach. So that how's it going worked very well. And then the power of RE. So when I send— a response, or like a follow-up email. I don't send a new follow-up email. I respond to the original email. So when they see RE: subject line, they think that we've had this conversation before. So they're forced to open it. And I've got like 100% open rates on my email. Wow. Well, I was doing an event. It was a sales event. And I wanted a couple hundred people to come to that event. Who I could sell to, right? And it was just an evening bar event at a conference that I didn't sponsor, but my target market was there. I couldn't afford to sponsor that event, and so I said, I'll pay the bar tab, couple grand, but how do I get these people to come? So I did the same process, mined the list, and then I sent them an email that not only got 100% open rate, out of the 200 people, almost 150 showed up. showed up. Basically my subject line said, are we meeting this Thursday night? And everybody opened it, and then they saw this awesome party with open bar, and they showed up, and I got a ton of clients from it. Because if like a couple people show up, then they— at the conference the buzz was, are you going to this person's after-party? It looks pretty interesting. Right? So anyway, so how do you maximize that response rate? And this is what I— I told you about— this was another event. Are we meeting this Friday? Right? And that was the email I sent. And are we meeting this Friday? So follow up regularly. Get responses. And then double down on what's working. So that's how I built the speaker lineup for Traction. Now once that speaker lineup was built, now I know that these founders will pay a few hundred bucks for it. I got the speaker lineup. Why not just launch it to them? So I had this already list of founders built up. And I launched early bird ticket sales. I built a landing page myself over the weekend, used Eventbrite, put the widget there, put in a pricing, connected it to my PayPal, and sent it to them. And I said, super early bird. So the FOMO is very important. Every time I do a full FOMO, fear of missing out, offer, like it's exclusive, it's limited time, capitalize on it right now, it just sells out, right? So my FOMO email to them was, thank you for your feedback. We've launched this conference. Super early bird tickets are now on sale at like $299, right? And deliberately I only set an amount that was 25 because I know I'll sell that out in a couple of few hours. And the next tier was $399. So I set it to 25, and within an hour that sold out. But I only put 25. I wanted to sell 500 tickets for the conference. But when that sold out, I had around 250 tickets for the early bird. That sold out in like a week because everyone's like, whoa, their super early bird sold out in like within less than a day. So there must have been like a couple hundred super early bird tickets. So let's just get on it. Let's get on it, right? And that led to us selling out the conference, just like FOMO every time. So I'm like, okay, this is selling. And every time, like, price is going up, or in the subject line I'd put number of tickets left, or quantity left, or limited time offer. I'm testing it now, the same model at Speakeasy, for example. We just rolled out pricing tiers. And I feel like every Thursday if I send an offer saying, This, we have a special offer, 2 for 1, it ends on Friday. People just buy, right? At the end of the day, what I was trying to do with Traction is I had no money. I wanted to build a conference, and I had zero budget. So when you do that, how do you validate the market with real money? At the end of the day, people say they love your product and they'll use it for free, and you'll get like tens of thousands of beta customers maybe. But very few people will pay for it, right? So I recommend if you're a bootstrapping entrepreneur, you have not raised money, build something that people will pay for or else you can't sustain yourself. And paid validation is, in my opinion, the best because they will give you actual feedback. So you get the first few hundred people, you actually refine and build your product or your service for them. And then I can talk about some of the other things we did at Traction. Really, the email, dedicated email blasts to lists with specific offers, fear of missing out, that was by far like 80% or 70% of the revenue that came in. The other thing what we did was retargeting, which can, which is cheaper than running ads. So we share a lot of content because we don't have our own blog. And we got all these big influencers, we share their content. So when you share people's content, you can't monetize that. So how do you monetize that? There's this tool called RetargetLinks. And it's a URL shortener that drops a cookie when anyone clicks on that link. And so now I can share everybody's— I could share Tim Draper's content. If like 100 people click on that, after they click on that, they'll start seeing ads for my products. Right, so I don't really need to write content. I could just sign up for retarget links and do that. So that drove like around 20-30% of the revenue. And that was the story of like how we went from zero to a few hundred thousand in revenue in like 3 months, essentially. So
