Episode 830 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Zero-Click Marketing, and More from MicroConf 2026 (with Derrick Reimer)

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Rob Walling (00:57): ysecurity.io/startups. That’s the letter Y, security.io/startups. Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, Derrick Reimer and I talk about breaking through plateaus, Zero-Click marketing, attribution, being an AI doomer, and more takeaways from MicroConf 2026 that happened just a week and a half ago in Portland, Oregon. If you listen to this episode and you’re feeling FOMO because you missed it, you’re going to want to join us here in just a few months in September of 2026 at MicroConf Europe in Iceland. Going to have, I don’t know, 175 of your favorite bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founder friends, along with Derrick and I. microconfeurope.com. Check out the dates, September 21st through the 23rd and to buy your ticket. And with that, let’s dive into our conversation. Derrick Reimer, back for another MicroConf recap episode. 

Rob Walling (02:11): Thanks for joining me today. 

Derrick Reimer (02:13): Yeah, glad to be here. 

Rob Walling (02:14): It’s exciting. So we just got back, as you can tell from my voice, we just got back from MicroConf US in sunny and only partially rainy Portland, Oregon here in 2026. We had about 235 attendees from 12 countries and a really good turnout once again of folks with real businesses. I said from stage when I opened up, this room is different than any other startup room you’ve been in for a few reasons. One is that I think we do value freedom and purpose and relationships more than a lot of other startup conferences, but we also have a lot of folks who are really getting it done. And there was almost 25% of attendees doing seven figures, had at least $100K of MRR and that still blows me away. Look, pre-COVID, that wasn’t the case. And somehow after COVID, I think people that are really serious show up. 

Rob Walling (03:11): Now on the same token, I think it was 15%-ish had no revenue, 15 to 20. So it’s like still a chunk. So you get this wide swath of conversations from folks, again, with no revenue up to, I mean, there were several eight-figure founders that I spoke with. So as someone who’s come to 14 of these or whatever it is, you can’t even keep track anymore. What was your take this year coming into the event and meeting the attendees? 

Derrick Reimer (03:37): Yeah, I think it’s sort of been this compounding thing over the years where it feels like the caliber just keeps increasing. A lot of people having kind of deep conversations about gnarly problems in their business that happen at a later stage. I remember the earlier days of MicroConf, it was a lot of us just getting started. We were talking about how do you get from just writing code to actually marketing? And it was more early stage type conversations. And it always impresses me how now I can walk into the room and feel a little bit intimidated, even though I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, in a good way. I’m saying it kind of pulls you up as opposed to the opposite direction, I guess. So I was impressed by all the conversations that I got to participate in. 

Rob Walling (04:22): It’s a mix each year in terms of first time and returning attendees, is probably the better way to say it. There were, I think it was around fifty-fifty, if I were to guess. We have that number. I didn’t look, but it is a nice mix. Getting new blood in there is interesting. There’s a lot of old timers. There were different waves of MicroConf. The first three or four years had a very similar attendee base. And then there was a shift to a second generation almost because in entrepreneurship, it seems, at least in SaaS, every three or four years there’s kind of a new generation coming up. And it definitely feels like that has been the case over the past few years, especially, I know I keep bringing up COVID, but it was such a watershed moment for events. 

Rob Walling (05:07): So many events went out of business. We didn’t do the US event for two years. And coming back, it was half the size. I mean, we had like 140 people the year after COVID. So it really has kind of built itself back. I won’t say from nothing, but from almost nothing. And so it’s got its own unique feel each year. And I will say this year, I came in the room and I just felt a lot of positivity. A lot of founders trying to help other founders was the thing that kept coming to me. And that’s been the gestalt of MicroConf forever, but I just really did feel it. I mean, when I got up on stage for the very first time, there’s always a little bit of nerves of like, “Well, here we are in a room. How’s the room going to feel?” And I was like, “This just feels good.” The welcome reception, a lot of positivity. 

Rob Walling (05:50): And that was something I kept hearing from first timers was like, “I can’t believe how helpful everyone is. I can’t believe how nice everyone is. I can’t believe so and so who I’ve idolized on Twitter for years. I just met them and they gave me great advice. I didn’t think that would happen.” And it’s like, well, in my head, I’m like, “Well, what do you think we do here?” That’s such a good description of MicroConf. But at the same time, if you’ve never actually been there and felt that, especially if you’ve been to other events, it can be pretty shocking. 

Derrick Reimer (06:15): Yeah. I think something you mentioned too, you talked about how you guys are experimenting with having some tickets for people who are there to provide services, right? But there still is this sort of special code of conduct, I guess, that everyone sort of agrees to around not pitching because I think that’s something that can happen a lot at a startupy type event where everyone’s kind of there to either sell their product or do networking in the more slimy kind of LinkedIn way. And I think there’s just this DNA in the MicroConf crowd that even if someone who comes in with those motives starts out that way, you’re not going to get very far trying to approach the room in that fashion. And I think it feels nice because of that. 

Rob Walling (07:01): Yeah, there’s that cultural momentum. 

Derrick Reimer (07:03): Where… 

Rob Walling (07:03): Everyone around you is being cool and not pitchy. And so it feels weird to be pitchy. Yeah. You mentioned this was something we’re experimenting with in MicroConf Connect, which is our online community. Folks can go to microconfconnect.com if they want to check that out. And also in the in-person event is like, have a ticket because we get asked constantly for service providers to come in, folks, both investors and folks who provide marketing services or whatever, SEO copywriting. And the reason we’ve kind of reconsidered this is we’ve actually had requests from folks inside the community saying, “Hey, it would be nice if there were some,” whether they’re vetted or whether they’re at least trusted that I can meet them in person and get a feel for them. You and I know a ton of service providers that are TinySeed mentors that have been coming to MicroConf for years that are great people that I actually do want to work with. 

Rob Walling (07:50): And so just having an arbitrary like, “You can’t come if you’re X, Y, Z,” I think is not the way to do it. So yeah, we experimented with it and it was a success. We had no issues, no complaints. And we did limit the number of tickets for that too because we don’t want it also to, and by limit, I mean, I think we sold eight out of 235 attendees. So it’ll be in that range, right? If we get to more than a couple percent of the attendees being service providers, it’ll obviously feel different. So let’s dive into some of the talks I want to talk through. We obviously can’t talk through all of them. I think there were like, was it five-ish main stage full length talks? There were a couple 20-minute talks and then a couple attendee talks. So what is that? 

Rob Walling (08:29): Maybe eight or nine talks, but attendee talks are 10 minutes and the 20 minutes obviously are shorter. So we packed the days not only with a few talks, but we really had excursions in the afternoon. The entire afternoon of the first day was us going out and about. And then we had workshops and round tables the second day to break things up. But I want to dive into our opening keynote by MicroConf favorite, Jason Cohen. He hasn’t spoken at MicroConf, I believe the last year was probably 2015. So I think it’s 11 years-ish, maybe 12. And he of course is known for the best talk about bootstrapping that has ever existed called “Designing the Ideal Bootstrap Business.” You can search for that in YouTube and watch it. Half a million views on my YouTube channel. And it is the number one video on my own YouTube channel, which Jason gives me no end of grief about how he dominates my YouTube channel. 

Rob Walling (09:19): But he was talking about breaking through growth ceilings and calculating plateaus and then how to think about breaking through them. So what were your thoughts and takeaways from his talk? 

Derrick Reimer (09:30): Yeah, it was great to see Jason back on the MicroConf stage. I feel like he’s always been a helpful guy, but now that he’s kind of moved on from day to day with WP Engine, he’s in his arc of like, “I just want to be around and help out.” And you can feel that. It’s genuine. And so yeah, it was great to hear from him. I think I always like reading Jason’s writings. He writes quite a bit actually on his blog and a lot of it is very, very rich with just ideas and he thinks a lot about strategy. I think most of his work and his career has been sort of around strategic frameworks and things. And it’s really hard to capture that in any given blog post or talk. So I feel like every time I get to hear him write or talk about this stuff, I get a little bit more understanding about how to think strategically, I guess. 

Derrick Reimer (10:18): So yeah, I think it was a good overview of like, this is the trajectory that you will see on revenue graphs of companies and it’ll show up in many different places, this sort of elephant curve as he calls it, where there’s the initial growth of things and then things sort of level out. And I think there’s a lot of us that have experienced that in our companies. So yeah, it’s just helpful to hear him sort of riff on different things you can do. He talked about optimizing your pricing. He talked about finding your ICP, people who love you for you. He was talking about making strategic choices and how ultimately that means closing some doors in service of other opportunities. And I got a chance to catch up with Jason a little bit in one of the mixers and I was just sort of telling him how personally this is something that I feel is one of the hardest things to do as a founder is actually having the confidence to say no to certain things or to hear certain advice and say like, “I understand that’s prevailing wisdom, but for specific reasons, that’s not for me.” 

Derrick Reimer (11:22): So I love that he gave a few examples of like, he talked about pricing and how the wisdom for 99% of people is to raise your pricing. Then he gave the example of Buffer who in service of their ICP lowered their prices in order to recharge their growth. So it was just a cool turn it on its head sort of example of like, “I just told you this is probably right for you, but then here’s what Buffer did.” So yeah, you need to be diligent in really analyzing what is true about your business and making the right calls for it. 

Rob Walling (11:53): Yeah. And one of the things I took away from his talk was kind of like learn the rules and master them so that you know when to break them. 

Rob Walling (12:01): Like he said, 99% of you in here are probably underpriced. And he did a whole little segment on that. You should probably raise your price. Now I’m going to show you one that just did the opposite just because it’s not 100%, maybe it’s 95, whatever it is. And I always like that about Jason’s takes. Every time I hear him when I have him on the podcast or just have private conversations with him, I learn something because he’s just so much horsepower in that brain of his. And so to have him up on stage talking about whatever is always just like, for me, it’s always like, oh, so that was the best talk I’ve heard on that topic just because he brings it and he’s thinking at the next level having built a couple unicorns now. But he’s still like a mostly bootstrap founder. 

Rob Walling (12:40): He raised money for sure, but he still thinks like one of us, like B2B SaaS, unit economics right from the start. Another great talk we had on Monday on the first day was Amanda Natividad and she has, I think, been head of marketing at SparkToro for a few years and she coined the term Zero-Click marketing. And that’s actually what she talked about, Zero-Click marketing and analytics. She talked about attribution and how hard it is these days. And with Zero-Click, there is basically no attribution. So folks listening, Zero-Click is, if you do a Google search and maybe at the top, whether in the AI summary or even in just a little box, it mentions your company, but there’s like no link or nobody clicks it, but they still have your company in their brain and maybe they go Google it or maybe they type it into the browser, the address bar or whatever. 

Rob Walling (13:31): She really dove into all of that stuff. And it was one, I went around asking attendees like, “Hey, what was your favorite talk?” And a lot of folks were mentioning hers. So what were your thoughts and takeaways there? 

Derrick Reimer (13:44): Yeah, I think hers was for sure up there among my favorites of the whole conference. I think the word attribution comes up so much at MicroConf and has over the years. And I feel like I’ve had many a conversation about that, like, how do we actually do this? Is it even possible? It was helpful to hear an accomplished marketer like Amanda just basically call out that attribution has been broken forever pretty much and is more broken than ever, and particularly because of this problem of search. The nature of search is changing, right? People used to type into Google something related to your website and you would show up in the search terms and then someone would click that. And now it’s dominated by AI summaries and ads and everything else. So the way that people go about searching and finding you and learning about you is in flux right now. 

Derrick Reimer (14:35): So it was good to see that called out from an expert and just the fact that all the platforms are penalizing outbound links. I think X/Twitter took a lot of heat for this like, Elon did this thing that’s like, what? Now everyone has to post the link in the comments below. But the truth is like they’re all doing that because all the platforms want you to stay on platform, which really makes sense if you think about it. They don’t want you to click an outbound link and go somewhere else. And so a lot of the strategy here now is to think about crafting native content, I think was the term she used, and think about like, all right, you’re posting for this platform in the way that the algorithm will reward this post. And you need to be thinking about kind of building awareness. 

Derrick Reimer (15:21): And ultimately the hope is that they will still land on your website, but search is generally the last touchpoint. So maybe if they see your native posts on the various social platforms, learn about you that way, engage with your content as they say, and then eventually search for you maybe as a branded search once they know your company name and end up landing on your site. So she talked a lot about the wisdom in building on rented land, which is, we’ve talked about owning your channels for many years. So it was interesting to think about how it’s probably wise to embrace the rented land and to maximize your benefiting from the algorithms, but then still keeping one owned channel, which is email. Email will never die. And so still trying to obviously keep at least one channel that you own, but also recognizing that you got to play nice with the algorithms if you want to benefit from them. 

Derrick Reimer (16:21): She talked about some practical advice on what a founder can do the next time you’re at your desk, what kind of habits you can start to build on, like pick two to three channels, publish one to two Zero-Click assets per week, review monthly. So she gave some high level notes on how a founder can think about applying these principles to their day-to-day, which I thought was helpful because a lot of times these things can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re a really tiny team. How do you go about producing these assets in a rigorous way that’s measurable and all that? So I think she brought it down to an approachable level even for the small team, which was cool. 

Rob Walling (17:00): Yeah, I really appreciated her take on all of that. I mean, it was just a very informative talk. It was a talk by someone who is in the trenches and you can tell and who thinks about this all the time. This isn’t a fluff talk. It was really a lot of nuts and bolts. And I liked her talk, the pieces especially about attribution because I still believe in attribution, but it’s just becoming less and less and less. They’re just signals. It’s kind of like sampling. When you want to poll or get a signal about the entire United States, you can get a statistically significant sample with, I think it’s a thousand or 2,000 people if you choose the right demographics. And I think of analytics that way these days. It used to be, especially before Google did not provide it, you could get like 80 or 90% accuracy, or at least that’s what I believed. 

Rob Walling (17:51): And that number’s just going down and down and down. But I always wonder, what is the sampling rate of that? And of course, there are certain things that fall apart and she didn’t talk about sampling, but she talked about how all this is kind of like it’s better than nothing, but also there’s, as you said, search is the last thing. And so you’re going to weight that a lot higher. Yeah. 

Derrick Reimer (18:12): And you’re going to recognize that if you think about the path that someone would take, and even if they say they go to ChatGPT and your name is surfaced there, odds that they’re clicking a link from ChatGPT to your site so that ChatGPT will literally show up in analytics is pretty slim. It’s generally like, see you over there, hop over to the browser, then maybe do a direct Google search. And she also talked about how a lot of the platforms are not even passing through referral data at all. 

Rob Walling (18:41): There was one attendee, MicroConf first timer, I was talking to her and I said, “Well, how’d you hear about us?” And she said, “I asked ChatGPT what events I should go to for entrepreneurs.” And I’m like, “What?” And that is just happening at this point. It’s not like we’re targeting it. So in the early days of MicroConf, we did a lot of talks, a lot of talks. We had 12 talks the first year, which was too many. And then we went to 10 and then we went to nine full length talks. And it was a lot of information because we were trying to get strategies and tactics. And what we realized in the late teens, it was around 2018, 2019, we started reworking the event and kind of had a MicroConf 2.0 moment where we said, look, half day in seats listening to these interesting talks, like the ones we’re talking about from Jason and Amanda, but in the afternoon of the first day, we tend to do these excursions where we get out and about. 

Rob Walling (19:30): And then the afternoon, the second day we do workshops and round tables. So you mix it up, there’s more interactivity, et cetera. The excursions each year depend on where we are. So in Dubrovnik, it was like sea kayaking and the Game of Thrones tour of the old city. But in Portland, of course, we had two hikes, not one, but two hikes. We had a pizza and ice cream tour because Portland has awesome pizza and ice cream. And then we had the retro arcade and you and I hung out at the retro arcade. Any games that brought up a history for you that you were like, “Yeah.” 

Derrick Reimer (20:08): Yeah, I played a little Mario Kart. I played some pinball machines. They had a bunch of cool kind of retro pinball machines, which was just sort of fun to zone out for a few minutes and stare at a pinball machine. It was good respite for the brain. Yeah. I did some other games where you just walk up next to a founder and you start shooting guns at a screen and you’re standing there for a while and then you start just kind of organically talking about business and… 

Rob Walling (20:34): That’s the point. It just gets us together. The speakers are just an excuse to get us together in a room. And I walked up and played Time Cop 2, the foot pedal. Yeah, you do the foot pedal to reload. And I was talking to a founder for a while there and yeah, I really enjoyed it. So it was cool. And I heard one of the hikes… So we learned what easy… Easy hike is kind of a term, easy, intermediate, hard. I don’t know what all of them are. But I guess what we learned in Portland, that easy Portland is like hard everywhere else because Tracy led a hike and was like, “This was six miles mostly uphill.” It was brutal. I had to chuckle at that. Classic Portland, right? 

Derrick Reimer (21:14): Yeah. It’s like spicy in Minnesota is not the same as spicy in California. 

Rob Walling (21:21): No. Got a lot of good feedback about the excursions, as we always have. I remember the first year launching them, I was like, “Oh no, this is such not a MicroConf thing. We’ve never done these,” and just have never received any feedback other than, “Yeah, let’s do them” or “Let’s do more of them” is what we get. And I’m like, slow down. We could do MicroConf excursions as just an event, but we do need some grounding content. So moving on to the second day, I kicked us off with my talk about AI and I had given it in Istanbul six months ago and then adjusted it. AI is changing so fast as we know and what I wanted to do… Okay, so I really didn’t want to do a talk about AI. I just didn’t, I don’t know. There was something about it. 

Rob Walling (22:01): I was like, there’s plenty of AI talks. We really need this. But when I asked on X/Twitter and in the TinySeed Slack, people were like, “How should I be thinking about this as a SaaS founder? How can I implement it in my app?” All that stuff. So I did put together a list of three different ways or tried to create categories of how you could use it. And then as I got more information from founders, I was like, “Oh, there’s actually five ways.” And I gave the talk in Istanbul and someone came up after and said, “Ooh, here’s a sixth.” And I’m like, “Oh man.” So I did this talk with six ways that you can be thinking about implementing AI in your SaaS. And there might be some folks in the Q&A brought up other ways, but I think most of them fit under the umbrella of the six. 

Rob Walling (22:41): I think it’s pretty mostly complete at this point, but it was a fun talk to give to that crowd and I’m glad that I did it and my next talk will not be about AI because I’m feeling just a little AI saturated at this point. 

Derrick Reimer (22:54): Yeah, no, I mean, I thought it was a good classic Rob Walling talk in the “let’s categorize this stuff” because that is always helpful. And I think you have a particular skill in kind of identifying how to bucket things so that it demystifies it a bit, right? I think you mentioned at the top of the talk, just thinking about how do I add AI to my product if I want to be a product that has AI can be daunting and you can, it’s like, where do I even start to think about this? So I think it was clear that this is obviously very top of mind for a lot of founders in the room and not in the room. I think the Q&A after your talk was pretty crazy. It’s… 

Rob Walling (23:35): Like 20 minutes. 

Derrick Reimer (23:37): Yeah. It… 

Rob Walling (23:37): Went long. Yeah, I know. And people were really thinking about it. Well, and could you feel the tide turning a little bit in a way that I thought was really fascinating? The gestalt, I think, of the way we’re all thinking about it started to be, what about should we maybe not do AI? What if customers don’t want their AI touching their stuff? They don’t want it in an LLM? Well, how can you… There started to be, I won’t say anti-AI, but counterpoints to this. And I was like, “Oh, let’s do this.” I wasn’t shying away from that at all like, “Well, let’s talk about that.” 

Derrick Reimer (24:07): Yeah, I think it’s like we’re still in the phase of it where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible. We should use this everywhere if at all possible.” And as an industry, we haven’t really stopped to slow down yet and think about like, “Okay, what are the negative ramifications of this stuff? Or where should we think about not applying this for X, Y, and Z reasons?” So yeah, I mean, this is the sense that I got from conversations in the hallway as well. Just a lot of people thinking about what’s the right way to use this? How do you get your team on board with it in the way that you want them to be? Should we invest in adding it to our products now? I mean, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a year and a half. I obviously want to be early on this stuff. 

Derrick Reimer (24:53): I want to use my bootstrapper advantage of being able to be nimble and do this stuff faster than the large incumbents, but also there’s a risk in being too early with it and implementing a bunch of stuff that is now obsolete or has become a part of the core Claude app or whatever. I don’t want to build something now that’s going to in two months just be a skill and now I don’t need it in my code. So I think it’s obviously an ongoing thing that people are spending a lot of mental cycles on and it was good to swap notes with people about AI. 

Rob Walling (25:26): That’s how I felt too, where it’s like, I think I said a few times in the talk, I’m trying to create a close to definitive categorization for how you can implement it in SaaS, but for sure this is not the whole conversation, especially not in 35 minutes. This is a starting point. Now, maybe it gives us all a vocabulary to talk about it. The categories I’ve talked about, several of them on here, but it’s like generation, like the AI can generate stuff in your app, right? It can categorize things, you can have a chat interface. We talked about it this time, I added MCP and CLI and just how muddy that is, how few even TinySeed startups that are like bleeding edge, almost none of them have MCP and CLI and the ones that do have two users, three users. It is not, we are not nearly as far as Twitter would have you believe, right? 

Rob Walling (26:16): We’re like, “Oh, just everyone’s building MCP and you’re behind if you’re not.” And it’s like, “That’s not what I’m seeing across the 209 TinySeed companies.” So that was part of the conversation. 

Derrick Reimer (26:26): Yeah. I think the number of times that Formspree came up. So Cole, founder of Formspree was in attendance at the conference and I got to talk to him a bit, but he kept coming up from the stage as an example of like, for example, I just signed up for Formspree from AI. I was rebuilding my website and I needed a contact form and AI, Claude was just like, “Use Formspree.” And they just basically provisioned the service really without looking at the marketing site. Now, maybe this won’t be everyone’s product, but it does make you wonder, okay, how much of this agentic commerce, or I don’t know what the right term is for it exactly, but basically agents doing most of the buying for you, how much of that’s going to be happening over the next year? And what does that mean for us as we think about building marketing sites and building signup flows in a way where an agent can just provision an account instead of a human typing in the box, really fascinating stuff. 

Rob Walling (27:27): And MicroConf wouldn’t be complete without a talk about jobs to be done. Gia Laudi, her title was “The GTM Moat No One Talks About,” jobs to be done. There was positioning and a lot about your customer and the job they’re trying to get done rather than who they are, because I do often think in terms of, we think of our ICP as like demographics, psychographics, and she was kind of adding more depth to that and being like, “Yeah, maybe it’s a little more.” 

Derrick Reimer (27:58): Yeah, no, I think that reminder of it’s why they buy and that’s not equivalent to who they are. So going too far down the path of thinking in terms of like personas or something can be limiting. I think she also talked a bit about how it’s easy for bad data to leak into the thought process as well. So I mean, I feel like the big takeaway was like talk to your customers, but of course, what’s much more nuanced around that on how to do it. And she talked about how the cascade of things is like growth at the top, then it’s messaging, but then it’s positioning, then it’s the customer, then it’s the data. So data needs to be the foundation of it all, but the devil’s in the details on how you go about getting that data. So it’s always helpful to hear kind of an expert talk about jobs to be done because that’s another topic that has a lot of nuance to it, a lot of contours, and it’s helpful to hear just examples and case studies that they have from real world client engagements and things as they help kind of fill in the gaps on that. 

Rob Walling (29:00): In the afternoon of the second day, we had our workshops and our round tables, and then we moved on to the final talk, the closer, Craig Hewitt, “AI Doomer.” That’s what I’m going to call him. He’ll appreciate I said that about him. No, it was cool because he and I both talked about AI and Anthony Eden had an attendee talk about AI, but Craig falls, I mean, he’s really, as he kept using the term, he’s cloud pilled, he’s token maxing. He started using these terms. I’m like, “Oh my God, dude.” It was fun to hear him. So his take is different than mine. I’m much more of an, what am I? I think AI is changing things, but not as much as most people are making it out. I’ve done enough of these hype cycles with crypto and these other things. I’m not saying this is like crypto, but I’m trying to be more moderate about it. 

Rob Walling (29:51): I’m excited. It’s changing a lot of things. It’s probably the biggest technological change I’ve ever seen since I’ve been an entrepreneur, so that’s saying a lot. But I try to be at the leading edge of the present. What is actually happening right now versus what’s going to be in a year or two or three or could potentially be? And so I appreciated his take, which is like, oh, he’s all in on it and his entire staff has a huge AI budget. Did he say it was $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month? He… 

Derrick Reimer (30:16): Said uncapped actually. 

Rob Walling (30:17): Uncapped. It’s like if you’re using AI, you can just all in, everyone on the team has to use AI. I mean, he was talking about, “Hey, if your folks on your team are not adopting it,” he’s like, “I would fire that person.” So just really interesting hard takes from Craig who traditionally has been, he’s pretty chill, but AI, he has strong opinions on this one. And I appreciated that. And the interesting thing about MicroConf is all the speakers don’t have to agree. The point is to get some perspectives on these things. And so yeah, I’m curious what you thought about Craig’s talk. 

Derrick Reimer (30:51): Yeah. I think he mentioned at the start, he was like, “This is as close as I’m going to get to giving a talk on religion or something because it’s that level of controversy, I guess, or just certainly not everyone’s going to agree.” And he sort of named that upfront that these are some hot takes. These are some things that are not necessarily universally believed. But yeah, he sort of dove into it. I mean, sort of the case on, I think he said he expects the next two to five years to be really tough for the economy. And he sort of cited the, Anthropic puts out a lot of stuff where they’re like, “Here’s the graph of all the industries that AI is going to be able to automate.” And it’s some shockingly high number, like 90-something percent of jobs or something like that. 

Derrick Reimer (31:37): So I mean, you have to take all that with a grain of salt and run it through your own filters on like, “Do I actually believe this? Is this just marketing from an AI lab?” But he sort of named the case of like, this is the worst case scenario of how things might play out. And then he promised the audience that it wasn’t going to be all doom and gloom. There was going to be some things we could do as bootstrappers. But I did find it really interesting. The kind of summary of the bootstrapper advantages he named were like speed, finding niches and relationships, like forging those human connections. And as I reflect on it, I’m like, “I feel like these have always been the bootstrapper advantages.” So in a sense, it’s like, even though so much is changing in our industry, I think ultimately what allows us to succeed and set ourselves apart is kind of staying the same as it’s always been, which I thought was a good thing. 

Derrick Reimer (32:34): It’s not like, even if you think about worst case scenario, how things might change, fundamentally we have been working on the proper skills and the proper ways of operating that are going to hopefully set us up for the most success in this new economy. 

Rob Walling (32:53): And we didn’t even talk about our evening receptions, hanging out, playing video games on the final night, throwing some bowling balls over at Punchbowl Social. And yeah, just a lot of time to get together in the hallway track, which is, I think, as valuable or more valuable than the talks and the information. It’s something, I mean, I come away with it as tired as I do sound and I feel right in this moment, my battery, my energy, my entrepreneurial battery gets charged up being around other ambitious founders, some of whom are crushing it, doing eight-figure businesses and some who are just getting started. But the energy is palpable. And you’re coming back for our Europe event here in a few months. 

Derrick Reimer (33:39): I am. I’m so excited. 

Rob Walling (33:41): Iceland in late September, I think it’s 21st through the 23rd. If you’re listening to this and you feel like, “Man, this event sounds awesome.” Derrick and I will both be there. You want to come hang out with two tall gentlemen? 

Derrick Reimer (33:53): Taller than I appear on the internet is what I like to say. 

Rob Walling (33:56): This is what everyone tells me. Yeah. People come up, “You’re taller than I thought.” And it’s like, “I’m not that tall.” But yeah. So we do still have some tickets, but it’s selling fast. I know it’s going to sell out, I don’t know, in the next month or two, I would guess, but microconfeurope.com if you want to buy a ticket there. And then we announced that next year, I think it’s, is it March or April? We didn’t announce dates. 

Derrick Reimer (34:18): I think it was April question, question. That’s what it is. Yeah. 

Rob Walling (34:20): We don’t have exact dates, but we’re about to sign in Austin, Texas for MicroConf US. So of course, if you’re interested in potentially coming to that, you should head to microconf.com and just enter your email. Find a text box and you’ll hear about it. I think microconf.com/emails or /subscribe. We’ll get you there. Derrick Reimer, founder of SavvyCal, best scheduling link on the internet. 

Derrick Reimer (34:42): You’re too kind. 

Rob Walling (34:43): Thanks for not only joining me at MicroConf a few days ago, but for joining me on the show again. 

Derrick Reimer (34:48): Of course. Thanks for having me. 

Rob Walling (34:49): Thanks again to Derrick for coming on the show and helping me recap MicroConf for you. And I want to send a special thanks to YSecurity whose ad was at the top of the episode. They also put on an excellent workshop at MicroConf around security and compliance and several other things that I know many folks attended and had good things to say. So if you’re getting serious about your cybersecurity and compliance, head to ysecurity.io. Thanks for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 830.