Brett Goldstein

speaker

141 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 9 Jun

Brett Goldstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Startup Ideas Podcast · The most profitable SaaS ideas I’ve heard in a long time · 1 Jul 2024 podcast

There's this negative selection bias where it's like the people who actually want to hang out are not the people you want to hang out with and like all of this stuff. But before we landed on the idea that I'm working on right now in stealth, we actually pursued something that is an iteration of this idea that it will actually work really, really well.

And the idea is that instead of focusing on nerdy loners in big cities that want to hang out and weren't invited to parties as your target audience, you focus on conference attendees. conference attendees.

And the idea is that if you've ever been to a conference, whether it's like Tech Weeks and Crypto Conference, whatever it is, you know most of the action is not actually the main conference events. all of the action is the side events. And actually maybe more of the action is in the private dinners and stuff like that. But really the side events are where the action is.

That's where all the cool people are hanging out. They're more interesting. They're in more interesting places. Like I went to one during Tech Week and Tiesto was there. So there are all these side events. But the problem with all the side events is that they aren't centralized in one place.

Usually what happens today is you have some poor soul who aggregates a spreadsheet of all these side events. They're cross-platform. It's Luma. It's Partyful. It's Eventbrite. It's all this stuff. And it's in this really shitty spreadsheet. And you have to go through and click through all the ones that look interesting, RSVP to them. You have all this annoying emails everywhere.

confirming and all this stuff. But I think the really important point to focus on is the spreadsheet. Like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody is using a spreadsheet, it should be like, you know, a light bulb going off as like, this is a startup opportunity.

There's countless startups that started as spreadsheets or took processes that were spreadsheets and then converted them into products. And so really the simplest thing is you go and you find these spreadsheets ahead of these conferences or during these conferences.

You build some scraper, some system to ingest all of that data, parse the dates, the times, the locations, other information, images about these events. And then you create a beautiful app that plots them on a map, one-click RSVP. And basically, that's your wedge. Your wedge is, this is the place you're going to go to see where all the conference events are. Right.

When we tried this at, I think we did it like NFT NYC or something. We built a very crappy version of this. People were just like loving it. People clamored for it. Like people said, thank you so much. Can I get my friend on it? All that stuff. But where does this turn into an app to find friends to meet up with? Conferences are designed for people to meet up and hang out.

Literally, the whole point of the conference is for professional networking to happen, for you to go and find that person who's at the conference and go grab coffee or whatever, or do business and stuff like that. So these people are very... Of anybody in the world...

These people are the most authentically interested in connecting and chatting and meeting up in person because that's what they're there for. And actually, unlike the social world, a non-professional space where you have negative selection bias of the nerdiest, weirdest people being the only ones who want to hang out. this is actually everyone, right? High status, low status, whoever.

So that's the first thing. That's the first solution or the first problem that you've solved is you have great people who want to hang out.

you know, in some digital property, you can add social features, right? Pretty standard operating procedure. You build an amazing one-player experience, which is what? It's the find any conference event, you know, side event at this conference.

And the two-player experience is suddenly everyone who's at that conference is available in a directory and you can DM them and you don't have to worry about sharing your phone number with some random, you know, professional contact if you don't want to. you may be able to share your location, which is something that has also failed miserably in the social world.

Like, what if you want to connect with somebody, but you guys are bouncing around between all these different events? It's a great opportunity to share locations and stuff like that. So the wedge is the one-player experience. The next step is the directory and the chat, right? You could even do some crazy AI features where you train an LLM on all the conference information. oh, where is check-in?

When is the speaker going? Or what's the status of this event? These are questions people are constantly sending conference organizers and stuff like that, but you can throw that literally in the same chat UI as everything else. And all this stuff is like, you could build this in a month or less. But yeah, what's nice about this is you have this group of people who are basically...

the power users of professional networking, right? So one of the things you want to, if you want, if you want to backing up, if you want it to compete with LinkedIn, you can carve off, the way you can be with any network is you carve off a section of it, of like extremely power users of some sort, some niche, and you build better features for them or something like that.

And so if you think about power professional networkers, The people who are on LinkedIn the hardest are probably the same people who are going to these conferences and dying to meet up. So suddenly you have this directory of people. They've added their work history. They've added their interests. Maybe you can search through, send DMs to people.

You sell ads in it, which is like, hey, come to the... Advertisers can be like, hey, come to this event or try this new thing or something like that. And yeah, obviously it works cross-conference as well. So once you're on this for one conference, if you're going to another conference, which most people do, you just open the app again and you see who's there.

Yeah.

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