MicroConf: The Conference for Misfits

Why this was the best conference I've ever attended in my life.

Just flew back from Microconf 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm still smiling from how satisfying the last few days were. It was, by an order of magnitude, the best conference I've ever been to in my life, coming from someone who utterly hates conferences.

I've been to several giant conferences before, AWS re:Invent, Google I/O, etc. They crammed in thousands of attendees into these giant convention centers. Keynotes were supposed to inspire, but didn't say much of anything. Workshops provided surface knowledge. And I never met anyone I stayed in touch with— I honestly never got much value out of meeting employees at other tech companies, except maybe once every 4 years when I was looking for a new job.

But Microconf was different in every way.

The People

This was the main reason why I decided to come.

I didn't look at the agenda or the workshops or the speakers at all. All I knew was that Rob Wailing hosts a conference, and I got a lot of value from his appearances on podcasts, and I kinda like the guy and what he stands for. So I assume he put together something I'd like, and people similar to me would show up, and that would be cool. That was pretty much the entire expected value in my head of attending.

I didn’t realize how much this would matter.

I've just never been in a social setting in my life, where there was such a high hit rate of meeting a person, and having a really interesting genuine conversation, with high likelihood of value exchange.

Basically 95% of the time that I talked to some random person, one or multiple of the following would occur:

• we talk about our businesses, and they realize they have the exact problem that I solve, and might want to be my customer. Or I offer some expertise that helps them out.

• we talk about our businesses, and I realize I have the exact problem they solve, and I might want to be their customer. Or they offer me some expertise that helps me out

• I realize this other person is doing something super unique and interesting with their business or their life, and I want to know more

• they realize I'm doing something super unique and interesting, and they want to know more. Usually when I pop the phrase "I bought an X figure SaaS 3 months ago", their eyes widen and I start telling my story.

• we happen upon some random topic, and go into a 1 hour rabbit hole conversation about all our explorations on the topic

• we'd met online previously and we're meeting in person for the first time. Or we'd forgotten we'd met online and both of us are surprised to realize we're now meeting in person.

• as we're talking animatedly about one of the above, another person overhears what we're talking about and joins in, and adds one of the above to the mix

The first day when we picked up badges, there was a 2 hour happy hour. I usually dread these things. Loud, crowded, hours of exhausting small talk. And to my surprise, I was just constantly meeting cool people and having genuine conversations with mutual value exchange. I later told Rob that in the first 2 hours, I had already recouped the entire value of the event! If I had left that night, I would have been happy after one founder gave me tips on my landing page conversion, and another founder wanted to learn more about being a new enterprise customer of mine.

By the end of it, I’d connected with, and gotten the contact information of a handful or two of new great people, and I think I’ll actually stay in touch with many of them!

The Content

I've honestly fallen asleep to 98% of workshops I've ever been to. At Microconf, there were only like ~6 speeches, and many (though not all) were so useful that I struggled to pay rapt attention while jotting down notes about what I need to do for ImprovMX.

Rob Wailing talked about SaaS growth plateaus. ImprovMX isn’t at a plateau yet, but certainly will hit one eventually. It was very useful to hear from someone experienced about what I’m about to run into. This was amazing, I’m definitely going to read The SaaS Playbook by Rob after this talk. I actually purchased this eBook last year, but put it down immediately because I was in the 0-1 phase, and the book is more for growing 1-10 (which I’m at now!).

Marcos Rivera talked about pricing your SaaS properly.

This was extremely interesting to me because I’ve been struggling recently on how to think about pricing.

ImprovMX has a freemium -> basic -> pro -> enterprise pricing model. This is just the pricing scheme I inherited from the acquisition. But I have no idea if it's actually good, which probably means it’s bad. But I have no idea on whether to raise, lower, or change the nature of pricing.

Marcos provided a framework on how to think about it. He described a few styles of value delivery:

• value based on usage, i.e. Amazon EC2, the more a customer uses compute, the more value the customer gets, this should have usage based pricing

• value based on work done by employees, i.e. Slack, the more employees, the more the SaaS provides value, this should charge by headcount

• fixed value, fixed effort, i.e. a newspaper subscription. It’s a fixed value and it’s passive, so this should be a fixed cost

Clearly, ImprovMX is usage based, so I should stick to and refine usage-based pricing.

Then he explained that you should estimate how much value you’re providing, and divide it by a ratio depending on if you’re dealing with SMB or Enterprise. Counterintuitively, the amount of value relative to how much you charge is much HIGHER for SMB than Enterprise, because SMB tends to be far more price sensitive than Enterprise.

Victor Purolnik talked about offshore hiring. This gave me some good ideas on the rates that different regions charge, and which regions I was most likely to find quality technical talent.

The Format

I was quite impressed by the intentionality of MicroConf's format. As mentioned before, I hate conferences. They're exhausting because they’re:

• too long

• too many long boring keynotes and speeches

• too many useless workshops, and too many workshops to pick from

• too sprawling

• networking events don’t have any underlying theme, so I never get any value out of those conversations

I feel like MicroConf was designed with the introverted SaaS founder in mind, which makes sense because Rob is probably of that type.

It was only 2.5 days long, which felt perfect. I still had fun and got value the last night, but I didn't want to stay any longer.

The venue, the Higgins Hotel, was a nice, fancy, and contained space, perfect for the number of people and the types of events. It was impossible to get lost, and you knew where to go without having to consult maps and apps.

There was a good pacing of sitting listening to keynotes and breakout sessions, meals, workshops, and excursions, so you never felt like you'd been sitting around too long.

Each evening was kicked off with an early happy hour, followed by unstructured evening time, which meant founders usually grouped up to head to dinner for some deeper conversations.

The Quirkiness

Very often we'd call ourselves a "group of misfits". Which we really were. Everyone was a bootstrapped SaaS founder or adjacent. It's already unique to be a founder, and being a bootstrapped founder gave us even more shared tribal identity. Yet at the same time, there was incredible diversity in hobbies/interests, because bootstrapped founders tend to have quirky interests (the one expected lack of diversity was gender, it was mostly men).

This reminded me a ton of the good old days of Firebase. We were a group of quirky tech people wearing bright yellow shirts showing up at hackathons. I miss that vibe, and this was the closest to experiencing that in years.

The Resulting Mindset Shift

So by the end of the conference, due to all learnings absorbed from workshops, and conversations I had with founders both further and earlier along in the journey than me, my mindset about ImprovMX shifted entirely.

I was previously in a mood of fear & defense. I was afraid of many things:

• infrastructure going down and customers getting angry

• competitors stealing my customers

• changing something about the product that annoys many customers

• not being smooth or knowledgable enough to close an enterprise contract

• our product not having all the features I think we need

• customers/enterprise clients thinking I didn’t know what I was doing or talking about

Before MicroConf, I had this base assumption that ImprovMX has been growing steadily and organically for the last several years. So it's “working", and I shouldn't mess with the formula too much. This probably has a lot to do with my prior utter failures to find PMF. This led to me focusing my first few months of owning ImprovMX on:

• improving reliability & automation around the infrastructure

• bug fixes and UI polish

• cutting server/subscription service costs

• getting legal/financial/tax ducks in row

These were all very safe, no risk minor improvements.

But MicroConf gave me the feeling that ImprovMX is actually terribly un-optimized! There's a blue ocean of untapped revenue (and customers I could be helping!) in front of me. It's my job to find out who my best customers are, position my product for them, and get it in front of their eyes. I need to stop feeling constrained by "what's working", and make bold moves to discover "what's best".

Honestly, it's perfect timing. It was probably important to spend some time putting the house in good order before enacting on a massive remodel. But I was definitely starting to feel antsy about not making big enough changes. And MicroConf came at exactly the right time to get me amped up about taking great risks with the company.