The Bootstrapped Founder

There was a drone on stage at some point. You know, the nerd stuff, it was great. But there was also a very strong focus on community and relationships. Hey, I'm Arvid, and welcome to the Bootstrap founder. Here's a question for you.

Should software founders attend tech conferences? The answer is a resounding yes, at least from me. And if you'd asked me 5 years ago, I would have completely disagreed. So today, I'll share my journey from skepticism to enthusiasm about these tech conferences and how they can be invaluable for entrepreneurs in ways that go way beyond just keeping up with the latest trends. Let's go back in time to before the entrepreneur in me had awoken.

Couple years ago, when I was still a fully salaried software engineer and hadn't started my business efforts yet, I decided that going to conferences wasn't worth it anymore for me. I've been to many developer conferences all over Europe, some even outside of it. I was still living in Berlin at the time. And I went mostly to front end and functional programming things like Java script or Elixir, that kind of stuff, those conferences. I went to an AngularJS conference in France and Paris, one in London, and then when I got involved with functional programming, I attended ElixirCon in several places.

It was great. And while it was interesting to meet people and learn about new tech developments, I felt it didn't impact my work enough to justify the cost and the time. And that was my thinking back then, that's why I stopped. It just wasn't worth it to fly around the world for tech conferences anymore. And now fast forward to very recently, this year, a couple of years ago, I've become more active as both a developer and an entrepreneur.

I added something. Right? I became entrepreneurial. And I'm building in public and I'm growing an audience. I've started attending conferences again.

I think as of 2019, just before the world exploded. And my experience has been completely different since then, this time around. And the most significant change isn't just that people recognize me now. I think that comes from me building an audience and being very, like, prevalent when it comes to being on Twitter and just producing and creating all of that. That kinda create some sort of awareness.

But what's actually different about the conference is that there are now tangible outcomes and massive benefits that I get from connecting with other people, other founders that are making a difference. At industry conferences in the software and entrepreneurship space, I learn from people that are further along in their journey, and then I get exposed to ideas that work in practice very reliably and very intensely. The focus at these entrepreneurship conferences is on building a business, on growing it, and making money. And I think that's the big difference to tech conferences in general. Like, tech conferences people talk about all kinds of things, but at an entrepreneurship conference, everybody is focusing on monetizing.

It's a practice that is shared by every single founder attending. And this common ground makes the impact always very tangible, whatever you listen to. My experience recently has been the the micro con conferences in the United States over the last couple of years, and every single talk I listened to over 2 days had something in it. That is just that is that is crazy. That is not the usual thing.

For comparison, when you look at like a tech conference, any any kind of tech conference, there usually are a lot of niche subjects being tackled that likely don't matter at all to some attendees. Some of them even don't matter to most attendees. But founder conferences, well, we all run into the same challenges. Right? No matter what business we are trying to build, we always have to deal with people, we always have to deal with churn, we always have to deal with money.

So most knowledge that people share along the way is immediately useful. But beyond that even, it's the relationships that are forged at these events that are truly impactful. When I was a developer attending tech conferences, the relationships there were based on curiosity about just cool technology. People were just talking to each other about stuff that they find interesting. And many of these connections, they were intense at first.

You talked a lot. You exchanged DMs and whatever, but they scattered over time. They kinda cooled down because people moved on to different fields. They work for different companies with different technologies, different programming languages, they just they just moved on. And I have not experienced this with my entrepreneurship conferences.

The relationships feel much more stable And I think that has to do with the fact that entrepreneurship is an adaptive field that constantly changes. But nobody wants to work with the same technology forever in entrepreneurship because that's just not how it works. People are okay with learning new things every day, diving into new tech, diving into new ideas, changing lanes all the time. And there is no silver bullet for solutions. People are aware of this.

New approaches, new experiments are they are always welcome because they are needed to solve new problems. And this creates a conference atmosphere and some sort of visitor regularity that I had not experienced before as a developer. And now as a software entrepreneur, where it's both developer and entrepreneur, I benefit more from entrepreneurship conferences than a developer would from a tech conference, or I guess that that me as a developer would from going to just a tech conference. Entrepreneurship is so broad that you will learn from every talk. And tech conferences, well, they're often very specific and you might not benefit from a significant portion of the information that is given to you.

You may think it's interesting, but you don't really find a use for it, right? It's some really really special version of some framework, a very particular part of this is really cool. Here, look at it. That can be a 45 minute talk at a tech conference and it can be super exciting to some. It is not to me.

And that's kinda how I went into this week because I've been pondering whether tech conferences like Laravel's Laracon that happened this week are valuable for not just me as a developer, but for me as an indie hacker and for other indie hackers. And my initial thought was no, which is why I'm not where the conference has been happening over the last couple days. I'm sitting at home. Right? So there's there's there's a reason why I didn't go.

And I think it has to do with my limited recent experience with tech conferences and my kinda denial of them being useful. But after watching the live stream that Laracon has so graciously provided on YouTube this week for 2 days straight, I saw something that I did not expect. Laracon, the stream that I saw, which I know is not the full conference, but just like a little glimpse into it, That already made it feel different from the tech conferences of my past or that the memory of the conferences of my past. In some ways was significantly different and was quite similar in others. There was similarities, I guess, there was just a lot of interesting tech being demoed.

Right? Nitty gritty stuff about Laravel, PHP, web development. There was a drone on stage at some point, you know, the nerd stuff. It was great. But there was also and that was a surprising part, a very strong focus on community and relationships which I hadn't seen much or at least not noticed much in tech conferences before.

Thinking about this reminded me that I too have changed over the last couple of years. And my shift in perspective warrants rethinking my old assumptions here. As someone who now runs a podcast and media properties around entrepreneurship, I found an exciting overlap between the technology and its business potential, particularly with Laravel. Laravel itself has this fascinating self monetizing ecosystem that Taylor Otwell has built with his team around it. It's really interesting to look into.

While the core framework is free and open source, there are paid hosting services and packages that you have to license to be able to use and paid training portals like LaraCasts. There's a business approach here. And this business oriented approach to building an open source product, which is already exciting, attracts a certain kind of developer. I think a different kind of developer, one who understands how technology can be used to make money and who also agrees that technology can be used to make money. There are developers out there who really just wanna solve interesting challenges and they don't wanna monetize it.

They they get their, like, salary from being paid to solve somebody else's challenges. They're fine with that. But Laravel, I think, attracts founder developers And they've always focused on facilitating the building of applications worth paying for in many ways. Right? They look good, they work well, all of that.

And that is because they include easy to install libraries for things like payment systems and user logins and other things that people just expect in paid applications. Those are first class citizens in the Laravel ecosystem and that is not necessarily true for many other tech ecosystems out there who have a Stripe library, so you can kinda integrate it into the system, but it's a 3rd party one. Not here. Here's a first party and it kinda tells you something about people who understand that money is a relevant part of the developer experience if you wanna build a business. So from this perspective, I now see the people on stage very differently.

I used to think, wait these are great coders and they're building these amazing projects. That is my kind of developer centric thinking of the past. But now I see business people there And the best kind. I see people who are great coders, who are great community leaders and who have a sense for business, for building something that is self sustaining and can produce wealth and meaning for people. They have found success to a level that allows them to be paid speakers at a conference.

Or sometimes they're just organizing the conference, so they they are on stage sharing something with others. And for an entrepreneur, that's an accomplishment worth noting and learning from already. That people made it up to the stage, that people want to be on the stage, and that they're organizing a thing that allows them to be on stage. And connecting with these speakers and the leaders of the conference and the attendees who get business is incredibly valuable. That's my mindset shift.

Going there and seeing them and talking to them and being part of it, well, that's how you build relationships that then lead to things like Twitter followers, DMs, exchanges, and future opportunities for you as a founder. These conference interactions, real chats in real rooms with real people, they create a level of awareness among conference leaders and speakers and attendees about who you are and what you are working on that you cannot get without being there, without consciously making the choice to belong to this group of people. And many times, I have experienced the hallway chat of a conference buzzing with talk about some amazing project of some attendee. So you have to be there to hear this, to be part of the conversation, and you certainly have to be there to be buzzed about and then share before people can buzz what you're working on. Right?

You have to be present and you have to be open and you have to be willing to communicate. And for founders like us who are so often disadvantaged when competing with these highly capitalized companies or we're fighting incumbents who are you're kind of you're trying to be better than them and but we have no money and they have all the money and they have all the customers and we're still trying to make something happen. Any meaningful connection to someone successful or on the path to success is a valuable thing. It's a potential partnership or a business relationship or even just being somewhere on top of the thoughts that they have in their mind when they talk to other people about cool projects or about somebody that needs help that needs to be supported. Conferences are probably the best opportunities to create these initial real human connections.

And they cause others, the people you talk to, to consider if there's something in them as a relationship. It's so much harder for them to walk away from you excitedly talking about some project that you have than it is for them to ignore your Twitter DM. Right? That's very easy, but proximity creates relationships and that's both expected and encouraged at conferences. So should you go to tech conferences as a software founder?

I think so. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the tech that you're building with, but there's always an opportunity to connect with people who are making things move, who are the leaders in their community, who are well connected, and who know people that can help you. And with leadership comes opportunity. And with presence around leadership comes opportunity as well. So attending a conference is a chance to tap into that opportunity and to build up some leadership potential for yourself or at the very least some awareness among your fellow nerds about what you are, what you're doing, and who you're doing it for.

So I highly recommend it. Next year, you will likely find me at Laracon. I certainly wanna go because that's the technology I'm working with and that's how I'm building a business and trying to build a legacy. So seeing the people building the tools with which I build my own tools and then connecting with them and learning from them and having an open communications channel to the people who are proverbially moving up into the right, well, I think that's extremely valuable. So let's all go to conferences now that we can again.

Right? It's it's just it's absolutely worth it. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter at abekaervadkhl, and you will find my books and my Twitter core stat too.

If you wanna support me and this show, please tell everyone you know about podscan dot f m and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder. Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. So thanks so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day and bye bye.