Dear founder,
Should software founders attend tech conferences?
The answer is a resounding yes.
If you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have completely disagreed.
So today, I'll share my journey from skepticism to enthusiasm about tech conferences — how they can be invaluable for entrepreneurs in ways that go far beyond just keeping up with the latest trends.
🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.
Let's go back in time, to before the entrepreneur in me had awoken.
A couple of 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. I'd been to many developer conferences, mostly in front-end and functional programming, JavaScript, Elixir, that kind of stuff. I went to AngularJS conferences and, when I got involved with functional programming, I attended ElixirConf.
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 time. That was my thinking then.
So I stopped. It just wasn't worth it to fly around the world for tech conferences.
Fast forward to recently: I've become more active as both a developer and an entrepreneur, building in public and growing an audience. I've started attending conferences again, and my experience is completely different, this time around.
The most significant change isn't just that more people recognize me now (which has more to do with me building an audience than anything else). It's the tangible outcomes and massive benefits I get from connecting with other founders that make a difference. At industry conferences in the software entrepreneurship space, I learn from people further along in their journey and get exposed to ideas that work in practice — reliably, and intensely.
The focus at these entrepreneurship conferences is on building a business, growing it, and making money – a practice shared by every founder attending. This common ground makes the impact always very tangible.
For comparison, when you look at tech conferences, there are a lot of niche subjects being tackled that likely don't matter at all to most attendees. But founder conferences? We all run into the same challenges, no matter what business we're trying to build. So most knowledge is immediately useful.
But it's the relationships forged at these events that are truly impactful. When I was a developer attending tech conferences, the relationships were based on curiosity about cool technology. Many of those connections scattered over time as people moved to different fields or programming languages.
I haven't experienced this with entrepreneurship conferences. The relationships feel more stable because entrepreneurship is an adaptive field that constantly changes. People are okay with learning new things every day, changing lanes all the time, and that there's no silver bullet for solutions. New approaches and experiments are always welcome because they're needed to solve new problems.
This creates a conference atmosphere and visitor regularity I hadn't experienced before as a dev. Now, as a software entrepreneur, I benefit more from entrepreneurship conferences than a developer would from a tech conference. Entrepreneurship is so broad that you'll learn from every talk, while tech conferences can be so specific that you might not benefit from a significant portion of the information.
Just this week, I've been pondering whether tech conferences like Laravel's Laracon are valuable for indie hackers. My initial thought was "no", given my limited recent experience with tech conferences. But, after watching the live stream of Laracon this week, I saw something I didn't expect.
Laracon felt different from the tech conferences of my past in some ways and similar in others. There was still a lot of interesting tech being demoed – nitty-gritty stuff about Laravel, PHP, and web development. There was a drone on stage at some point. You know, nerd stuff. But there was also a strong focus on community and relationships, which I hadn't seen much in tech conferences before.
And it reminded me that I, too, have changed over the last few years, and my shift in perspective warrants re-thinking my old assumptions.
As someone who now runs a podcast and media properties around entrepreneurship, I found an exciting overlap between the technology and its business potential. Laravel itself has a fascinating, self-monetizing ecosystem. While the core framework is free and open-source, there are paid hosting services, licensed packages, and training portals like Laracasts.
This business-oriented approach attracts a different kind of developer – one who understands how technology can be used to make money. Laravel has always focused on facilitating the building of applications worth paying for, including easy-to-install libraries for payment systems, user logins, and other features expected in paid applications.
From this perspective, I now see the people on stage not just as good coders, but as business people. They've found success to a level that allows them to be paid speakers at a conference. For an entrepreneur, that's an accomplishment worth noting and learning from.
Connecting with these speakers and the attendees who "get business" is incredibly valuable. It's how you build relationships that can lead to Twitter follows, DM exchanges, and future opportunities as a founder. Conference interactions, real chats in real rooms, create awareness among the conference leaders and speakers about who you are and what you're working on.
Many times I've experienced the hallway chat at a conference buzzing with talk about the amazing project of some attendee. You have to be there to hear this, and you certainly have to be there to be buzzed about!
For founders like us, who are often disadvantaged when competing with highly capitalized companies or fighting incumbents, any meaningful connection to someone successful or on the path to success is valuable. It's a potential partnership or business relationship.
Conferences are probably the best opportunities to create these initial, real, human connections. They cause others to consider if there's something in the relationship for them as well — it's much harder to walk away from someone excitedly talking to you than it is to ignore a Twitter DM. 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. Your mileage may vary depending on the tech you're building with, but there's always an opportunity to connect with people who make things move, who are leaders in their community. With leadership comes opportunity, and attending a conference is a chance to tap into that opportunity and build up some leadership potential for yourself. Or at the very least, some awareness among your fellow nerds.
I highly recommend it. Next year, you'll likely find me at Laracon, because that's what I'm working with, and that's where I'm building a business and trying to build a legacy. Seeing people building the tools with which I build my tools, connecting with them, learning from them, and having an open communication channel with people who are proverbially "moving up and to the right" – I think that's extremely valuable.
I'll share a few updates about my SaaS on the pod, and if you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, please check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!
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