My Microconf Experience

After following Rob Walling's videos for the past few years, I finally (after a significant push from both Rob and my friend, Andrew) bought a ticket to Microconf.

And honestly, for weeks, I dreaded going. I worried about not fitting in (I felt like an agency owner going to a SaaS conference). And I felt nervous since this was one of the only conferences I've been to as an actual attendee with little to no sales goals (usually, I am sponsoring or meeting clients).

But after the first hour of the networking reception, I was so glad I went.

Finding a Tribe

Awhile back, I was complaining to Andrew, on our weekly catch-up podcast, about how it's quite hard to meet folks in a similar situation as me. Outside of the X and Bsky feeds, it's rare to bump into someone who runs a profitable bootstrapped internet company, let alone a SaaS.

As an agency owner, my day to day involves interacting with plenty of VC-backed founders which is usually the closest I get to finding likeminded folks. Unfortunately, they just tend to also be my clients, so it adds an extra layer of complexity to the relationship.

Otherwise, as a New Yorker, I've been to a few startup meetups, hackathons, and community events when I could find the time (rare). As vast as New York is, the majority of the demographic I meet are students or perhaps someone building their very first app. As awesome as it is to meet ambitious folks early in their journey, there's a few things missing in the connection.

It's probably the lack of of shared vocabulary, battle scars, information diet, and work-life goals between these two personas. In the rare moments, I do get to meet someone who is similar, we end up becoming incredibly good friends (ie podcast).

But these folks are hard to find, probably because they are also at home grinding it out like me most days.

And that's the beauty of Microconf. It's where we all crawl out of our desktop hidey-holes and go and meet each other. The ticket price means it has to be an actual commitment and the awareness of the conference itself means that we all probably share a similar info diet and set of goals.

I genuinely feel like I've made some lifelong friends and can't wait to go again.

Actual Con Experience

Besides the people, the conference itself is also extremely well thoughtout. There is a level of intentionality to it where we are essentially forced to talk to each other. The conference has talks and sponsors like most, but it also has "micro-excursions" which are smaller group activities where people get sorted by non-business interests.

There also aren't so many talk tracks that you are scrambling to go from one to the next. And the turnaround time on recordings and slides is fast enough that you don't have to worry about missing one.

The talks themselves are also genuinely helpful; I found myself taking copious notes during the pricing one. I think the litmus test of whether or not it was a good Microconf talk was how many attendees were discussing the advice as it pertained to their business. There were definitely a few that came up often: positioning & messaging, pricing, and exit strategy.

The nightly reception also allowed a better debrief session to hang out and catch back up with newly made friends or to meet new people. I definitely found myself in some starstruck moments after seeing a few folks I had only ever watched speak through a Youtube video player before. They say never meet your heroes, but maybe they are wrong about these guys.

Goals For Next Time

As we currently pursue a SaaS product on the agency side, I'm hoping that by the next Microconf Americas, I'll be able to share more about how my SaaS project is going and connect with folks on a deeper MRR level.

As someone who does messaging, marketing, and design for a living, I found myself often offering those ideas and advice where I could. But when it came to discussions around churn or growth rates, I couldn't empathize with it fully. While I can understand those concepts in theory, I don't know what it actually feels like to have x% of churn or y% of month-over-month growth.

Stretch Goal for Next Time

Because of my work history (sales engineering first, and then running an agency the past 4 years working with B2B tech/cybersecurity companies), my GTM experience has mostly revolved around enterprise sales.

Which seems to be fairly different than the experience of the Microconf crowd who are often building in more self-service freemium or trial models. Or if they do sales, it may be with more smb's.

So I wonder if there's merit to offering a talk on enterprise sales and what to think about as an indiehacker/bootstrapped SaaS founder.

I'll have to prove it out with my own SaaS first of course, but perhaps a presentation to put together over the next year!

Also, food in New Orleans is so good