My First Indie Hacker Talk

I got invited to speak about “How to become an Indie Hacker” at the Future Works conference. It was my first talk at a “real” conference and all because of my work in the WBE. 🎉

How to get invited to be a speaker in a conference?

There are multiple ways to be invited to speak at a conference. In my case, I was invited by Miguel Muñoz, the co-founder of IMatch, which was one of the top sponsors of this conference.

Miguel found me through the WBE Podcast and liked the bootstrapping spirit.

How does it feel to be a speaker?

It feels amazing 😀 I was so proud to have a “VIP” badge that gave me access to the speaker’s lounge and private lunch.

Besides all of these vanity perks, being a speaker really helped with the networking possibilities. I got to talk with a lot of the other speakers about exciting topics like metaverse, hiring, music, etc…

How did the talk and panel go?

Both my talk and discussion panel went really well 🎉 I was able to relax and enjoy the event without being too stressed. I only started feeling nervous about 30 min before my time to talk.

I asked Twitter for tips on how to be less nervous before my talk and got back a lot of useful information.

Open Tweet

The panel of discussion consisted of three participants and one moderator that asked questions to the group. The topic was “Cultures and Timezones in Remote Teams”. The panel was interesting and I got to share my opinion with the other three members and the audience.

My talk was special because I got to talk about Indie Hacking, which is a topic that I am very passionate about.

My posture could definitely be improved, I did not know where to look. 🤣 Besides that everything went well and in the end, I even had a few members of the audience approaching me. The best comment I got was:

Wow Tiago, I did not know I was an Indie Hacker until now! 😍

How to promote yourself in a talk?

Like in any promotional content your main focus must be to create value and then find a way to mention your products as a possible solution.

To promote the community I showed a slide telling people where they could meet other makers and the WBE Space was there too.

To promote my Twitter account I offered every member of the audience a free copy of my Bootstrapper’s Guide.

To claim it they would just need to send me a DM telling me that they were in my talk and wanted the guide.