Tyler Wagner dropped out of college with $80,000 in debt, then attended dozens of conferences free by offering to work for organizers. He got backstage access to Tim Ferriss and others, then wrote Conference Crushing, an Amazon bestseller on how to prepare, network, and follow up at events for maximum ROI.
Chapters
My first book, it's called Conference Crushing. When I dropped out, I started going to all these conferences and I actually was going for free. I would reach out to the coordinator and I would just tell them the truth. I am a dropout in college, aspiring entrepreneur. I'm $80,000 in debt. I'd love to come to your event, but I don't have $5,000 to pay for the ticket. So is there anything I can do to help you in exchange for coming? Dozens to like 100 said yes. And what started happening is I started going and I was like behind the scenes. So like, you know, 6 months later, right, I'm at this conference called Mastermind. Mastermind talks and I'm like backstage with Tim Ferriss and I'm like a fanboy to Tim Ferriss because that book changed my life. So either way, the book Conference Crushing, what that's about, how to maximize your ROI at these networking events. The issue I saw is most people that go there, they go for the content. Nothing wrong with that. I think the more of the value is this is a time where you have like 2 to 3 days typically, or 1 day where there's all these people in one room and you should connect with all of them. Either way, I wrote this whole book of like, how do you prepare you there for a conference? What do you do at the conference? What do you do after the conference to maximize that time? It ended up becoming a bestseller on Amazon. Long story short, I figured out how all the bestseller lists work after that, and then Authors Unite was born, and we focused on that, and then we built out from that foundation.