315: MicroConf Atlanta - My Biggest Learnings

This episode revolves around the key insights and experiences shared by Arvid Kahl from his attendance at MicroConf 2024 in Atlanta, focusing on entrepreneurial strategies, mental health, and networking among founders.

1. MicroConf provides a unique blend of professional development and personal connection.
2. Founders of all success levels openly share and engage with each other, creating a supportive community.
3. Motivational drivers among entrepreneurs are diverse and can change over time.
4. Psychological insights into motivation can profoundly impact an entrepreneur's approach and self-understanding.
5. Networking extends beyond the conference, with founders continuing to connect and support each other throughout the year.

1: Conference Atmosphere

Arvid Kahl begins by setting the scene at MicroConf, describing the conference’s balance of professional advice and personal warmth. He emphasizes the instant connections made with fellow entrepreneurs.
Arvid Kahl: "I couldn't even reach the reception counter without being among my friends and my peers."

2: Diversity of Founders

Kahl reflects on the diverse backgrounds and success levels of MicroConf attendees, highlighting the community's openness and mutual support.
Arvid Kahl: "You will not find that everybody is open to conversations with every single other person out there."

3: Motivational Insights

A significant focus is on a talk by Dr. Sherry Walling, which delved into the psychological underpinnings of motivation, revealing various motivational archetypes among entrepreneurs.
Arvid Kahl: "Dr. Walling presented a category of seven different archetypes from which people draw their motivation."

4: The Hallway Track

Kahl describes the informal ‘hallway track’ of the conference as a crucial component, where spontaneous conversations provide deep insights and practical advice.
Arvid Kahl: "The chats between founders...are incredibly open and supportive."

1. Engage actively in community networks to gain diverse perspectives and support.
2. Reflect on your motivational drivers and how they influence your business decisions.
3. Foster a supportive environment in your ventures, encouraging open sharing of challenges and successes.
4. Prioritize mental health and psychological insights to better understand yourself and your team.
5. Attend industry conferences not just for formal learning but for the invaluable informal interactions.

I went to MicroConf 2024 in Atlanta — here is what I learned. Literally. My brain just absorbed this. I recorded this episode minutes after waking up the day after the conference.
And if you're wondering why my voice is so deep: I've been yelling SaaS stuff at nerds for 3 days straight.

People

Arvid Kahl, Dr. Sherry Walling

Companies

None

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Arvid Kahl
Welcome to the Bootstrap, founder. I am recording this still from the hotel where Microconf 2024 just wrapped up. I'm on the road in Atlanta, so to say, and I wanted to share my impressions from this conference and the things I learned, the things I'm taking home with me to work on my software as a service business, my media brand, and just my involvement in the community. This episode is sponsored by Acquire.com. More on that later.

As usual, after two and a half days of Microconf, and this is the third one that I visited, my mind is overflowing with ideas. The conversations that I had with new friends and old friends, and all these reprioritized tasks that I'm just taking home with me. This conference is something extremely special, and I really mean this. I don't think I've ever been at a conference that is so incredibly professional and so heartwarmingly personal at the same time. Microconf just strikes the perfect balance between the founders and entrepreneurs teaching each other strategies and tactics for their business building journeys and providing motivation and insights, and the deep relational connection between people who all have the same dream and who become friends while chasing that dream.

It's quite incredible. I didn't even finish checking into the hotel before I saw the first person that I knew from the conference, and I just chatted with them. I couldn't even reach the reception counter without being among my friends and my peers and my colleagues. And from there, it was a whirlwind in the elevator. Every single time, reliably, I would meet another founder, and they wouldn't just give me the elevator pitch about their business.

That tends to be how most conferences work, right? But they would just talk about something entrepreneurial or even something personal. Really, really cool. We're all on the same level here. It's very noticeable, which you don't see at most other conferences.

There's like some stratification there. But people who visit Microconf come here as micro entrepreneurs or small SaaS founders, every single one of them. And it was pointed out during the initial presentation at the conference that almost 30% of people that came here have like six figure MRR. It's crazy. It's quite substantial, and it kind of should indicate some kind of difference between people's success levels and how to treat each other.

But you cannot see this. You will not find that everybody is open to conversations with every single other person out there, no matter where they are on their journey, no matter if they just started being an entrepreneur, if they still want to be one, or if they've been running a successful business for decades, already making millions, whatever. People just chat, every single one of them. It's like you can talk to speakers all the time. They just hang out.

They just don't just come in and do their talk and run away like they are part of the conference. It's really cool. And I've met several very inspiring entrepreneurs to whom this was their first Microconf, who didn't even know if they belonged here or not. But they very quickly noticed that they were embraced with the same level of respect and adoration as people who've come to this now 24th microconf dozens of times before and are running businesses that are the dream of those who come here for the first time. Its an incredible place and an incredible community to be in.

And its almost remarkable to feel that even though the talks and the workshops of this conference were powerful and insightful, to the point where you cant even take notes fast and deep enough to capture the essence and the extent of how helpful these things are, the actual selling point of this conference for me has been and will probably always be what they call the hallway track. The chats between founders, the chance exchanges, and the little deep dives into somebody's issue or somebody's challenge. All of these little chats that happen between the talks and outside of the regular time slots. If I were to summarize it, I think I may have had 50 to 60, maybe 100 distinct five to ten minute conversations and around all kinds of topics, all SaaS related. Some revolved about my own topics, own projects, but most revolved around general concepts and other people's projects, the challenges that they were facing, technical issues, business stuff, customer service things, relationship issues, maybe partnership issues, legal issues, all kinds.

And people are incredibly open with them. People here are willing to share their fears, their hopes, their dreams, the stumbling blocks and the barriers in their path, just as much as they're eager to share their little tricks, their tips, the strategies that help them along the way. Resources and insights here are very easily and very quickly shared. It is a family, and I don't use this term lightly because most things that are called family often have ulterior motives. But in this community, people are incredibly open, helpful, and supportive of their fellow founders.

It really feels like there's a close bond between people. I'm gonna quickly dive into what is likely my favorite kind of topic at these conferences, and it's a talk by Doctor Sherry Walling. An interactive talk kind of around a mental health issue, motivation something that I guess is super relatable for every single founder here and every founder out there. What is the source of motivation that you have? Or how does motivation lack?

Like, what's the lack coming from? What kills motivation and what rekindles it if you need it? What reasons do we have to be motivated, and what vectors play into the things that motivate us and what things don't like? There's a lot of deep psychological insight that was in that talk. And it's always very noticeable that mental health topics like this have been a substantial part of the microconf roster of talks.

Not a single microconf goes by without a talk that either mentions this topic significantly or is centered on a mental health issue from the start. It's always part of the conference, and I really appreciate that. And I think in that lies the secret to why Microconf is so successful and so enticing for me. It doesn't just chip away at the surface. It's not like these general bird's eye view, high level talks about stuff.

Microconf goes very deep to the point where actual knowledge, when applied, has a meaningful impact on every single founder journey. So the motivational talk here was not a motivational talk as you know it, right? It was about motivation, the psychological underpinnings of motivation. And it had several interactive components, which I really enjoyed, and I just want to talk to you about them. I was seated at a table with several of my Twitter friends and people that I already knew, a couple that I didn't.

It's more like people that I already knew, or thought I knew because we chatted about stuff, things came out. It was really interesting. It was fascinating to have a conversation with them during the talk for like ten ish minutes or so about the things that motivate each of us. And doctor walling presented a category of seven different archetypes from which people draw their motivation. And I want to introduce that to you.

Maybe it's going to help you along your own journey. One of them is the craftsman, the maker, the person who just relishes in building a product. I think a lot of people can probably relate to that, but there's just one of seven categories. Another one is the moneymaker. A person for whom money and the security it provides is a big motivating priority in their lives.

The third one is a people person, like somebody who thrives in building a culture for others to succeed in, and who really gets motivated when they see this culture thrive. Then there's the power broker who's kind of a person that wants to be at the table and make decisions, like being present in the room where decisions are made. That really motivates them. That's the thing they want to accomplish. And then there is the list checker, somebody who gets motivated by tiny dopamine hits.

Like somebody who needs to check yet another thing off the list to keep motivated. There's another one called the time Traveler. Like someone who is focused on the vision of what the world should be in the future. And they're so focused on this that they have a grand idea. And I'm motivated by slowly chipping away at it, like accomplishing that mission in their future.

That's kind of why it's called the time traveler. And the last one, the 7th, is the hard driver, somebody who's motivated by showing others that they can do it. Oh, you think I can't do it? Well, now I will show you. That is the kind of motivation that also works for a lot of people.

And it was so interesting to see that everyone around me, every single one of those founders who I thought would be motivated by similar things, had a very different, very strong primary motivator. It was on my table. I was sitting with people who were motivated by showing other people that they could do it, who had experienced a lot of resistance and hardship in their path leading up to entrepreneurship. That's something I don't have. I always had a very supportive surrounding.

I never felt like I needed to prove myself or show anyone that I could do it. But I was sitting next to people who did and for whom this was one of the most potent motivating forces. I mean, they also care about making money. That's kind of part of entrepreneurship for all of us. But which product to build and who they built it for was not that important.

Important to them was to show the people who showed resistance to them going into entrepreneurship that they could do it. And I was also saying to people whose vision being a time traveler, knowing precisely what they wanted the world to look like after they had built the thing, what's the strongest motivator? Also something that I don't really have. I have some vision, but I'm not kind of orienting myself along that, right. I'm more kind of, yeah, let's just build this and that and see where it goes.

But those people, they didn't care much about making money in the process. Or, again, the products that are needed for the first couple steps, they knew that they wanted to change a significant part of the world, and that was the motivation that kept them showing up every single day, trying to make small, incremental steps towards that. It was such a strong realization for me to see how motivation is so wildly different, and I reconsidered what I believe I am motivated by just in thinking about it. I tried to figure out how this changed over time for me because I think my strongest motivator at some point was making money, because I was aware that my financials were not very stable for most of my life, and money was obviously the way to stabilize it. So that was my strongest motivator.

And it didn't really matter much what I was building at the time or how good the product was as long as I could reliably build financial security and independence. And I noticed that when I reached that, and having built and sold feedback panda back in 2019, my motivation to make money became much weaker. And it was supplanted by the motivation to build a better product, build something that I think is a high quality product, something that people relish in using that makes their lives easier. There was a shift and it's really cool to see, right. Looking at it now, I see myself somewhere between building a great product, being a craftsman for great people, being a people person that I want to help.

So that is my combined significant, strongest motivator. It's a mix of these archetypes, which is also something that Doctor Sherry Walling said. You can mix. We all have multitudes in us and are motivated by multiple things in different ways at different points in time. But it was just so interesting to see that my motivation changed over time.

I never thought about this before. So motivation shifts because my resources shift and my priorities shift, and the strategies that I have to tackle the challenges that I face shift. Obviously, my motivation shifts as well. So that was the first half of the talk, and it was already highly insightful. Within like half an hour, my whole perception of the founder as an abstract concept changed into something that was way more nuanced, something way more driven by.

I guess you could call it a path dependency. The consequences of the things that happened in our lives step by step, that caused us to develop a certain track record of motivation that now drives a lot of our actions. And if we don't think about it, the old motivation might still inform our actions. And it's always good to reflect on, well, do we still need this? Right?

Is this still serving us? That's what this talk gave me and kind of helped me understand in the second half of the talk. Yeah, we're not even done. We talked about the things that actually kill motivation and the things that rekindle motivation, which, again, started the conversation on the table around me. And, well, what does keep you from staying motivated, and what do you do to be motivated?

Again, what I realized is that most founders struggle with structuring their work, structuring their time without it being overwhelming. That's a common problem. They have a really hard time with pacing their work. I was talking to an old friend who has the rule that he cannot open his laptop after 09:00 p.m. Because if he does, he will work and he will keep working until very late, like two or three in the morning.

And that creates a conflict with his ability to take his children to daycare. And that is a problem. And it was a common problem, a story that I heard from lots of people. People indulge in work. They forget what time it is.

They forget to eat. That happens to me all the time, and that impacts and often ruins the day after. So that inability to pace your work and stop is something that a lot of founders have. It's kind of a perfectionism where you really want to get it done, you want to finish it up, you don't want to leave things hanging in the balance. And over an extended period of time, this can crush motivation and drain a lot of energy.

So what's the way out? For so many people, it's physical movement. Apparently they were all talking about how they were running or dancing or going on walks with their dogs or just walking by themselves to reset their mind and their motivational sources. And for many people around my table, physically, activity or physical activity pulled them out of the mental loop of lacking motivation, physically shifting your perspective in the world by taking a walk or removing yourself from the place where work happens apparently is a really good idea. So you make a physical loop around your neighborhood to reset your internal loops, the narratives, and you recuperate your motivational energies.

And I still find it so surprising that this talk was the biggest thing for me. At a conference where great sales tactics and marketing funnels are being discussed, I gravitate to the psychological underpinnings of running a calm and reflected operation. And what I really take away from Microconf is just the diversity of thought and reasoning and decision making that all these founders experience and learning about people's motivation, their willingness to fight their inner demons and how they fight them, has been a spectacular insight just from a 45 minutes talk at this conference. And that's one of like eight of these things I can only highly recommend looking into coming to Microconf next year or this year in Europe. There's one into brothel and Croatia later this year.

It was a great conference. There were like 20. What is it, 220 people here this year? And Microconf used to be more like 350 people or so before the pandemic. Now it's balancing out at 220.

I believe a couple more people could come and benefit from all these incredible founders and what they share and learn from each other in the hallway track. I've talked to so many founder friends from Twitter, LinkedIn, the Indie Hackers forums, and so many other virtual places. There were even listeners of this very podcast and users of Podscan, my software that I'm building there. I literally for the first time met people who listened to my work or using my product in real life here at this conference. And I got to hang out with them and old friends and new friends and have a lovely dinners or lots of dinners and lunches full of sass talk and even some nerd chat about Warhammer and the gathering too.

It was spectacular. I even got to play ping pong with Corey Haynes, something that I always kind of wanted to do. I figured out it was a lot of fun. If you can make it to the next one, it'll be fun for you as well. And I highly recommend in between going to just looking into Microconf Connect, which is a slack channel where everybody who comes to the conference hangs out for the rest of the year as one of the strongest and most impactful, supportive, and meaningful communities that we have as indie hackers.

It's the only conference that feels like I'm meeting old friends. And then they teach me something really cool that helps me build a better business. It's spectacular. So yeah, that's me sharing my immediate impression the morning after the last day of Microconf 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Highly recommend it.

And that's it for today. I want to briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. It was pretty interesting at the conference. A lot of people obviously want to sell their businesses, and a lot of people are looking into buying businesses. There was even a session where somebody's business was evaluated on stage, and the people who did it, they talked about just the many different reasons that people sell their businesses.

It's not always because you are done with it or because you hit your ceiling. Sometimes you just need the money or you want to do something else. And I think we all have different reasons that we might want to sell our business, but if we don't act on it, in the end, our attention, our motivation for this whole thing just wanes. And that is a problem, because over time, that means the business just gets less of our attention, we care less about it, and it becomes less and less valuable. And that's the problem.

Because in the end, that leaves us with a completely worthless business that nobody wants to buy. If you want to prevent that, you can act now. Look into acquire.com dot. Just check what your business might be worth today if you were to sell it. If you want to sell it, great.

Get started with that. And even if you don't, look into what you might want to do and need to do to make it valuable so that other people want to eventually buy it when that time comes for you. So it's always good to prepare for these things. It's always good to think about what you could capitalize on with the business that you already own or that you're in the process of building. And acquire.com is free to list.

They've helped hundreds of founders already. So go to try dot acquire.com arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you today or if it might be in the future. And yeah, just thank you so much for listening to me, like, babble on about my experiences here. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Bootstrap founder today.

You can find me on Twitter at avidkall arvidkahl and you find my books on my Twitter course. That too. If you want to support me in this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder. It really makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds and this really helps to show. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day and bye bye from Atlanta, Georgia.