Thanks to everyone who replied about last week's tech stack post. More of you raised you resonated with the deep dive than I expected. And few of those responses have already influenced what I'm working on.

If we haven't connected yet, reply with "first" and I'll give you a first look at what I'm building plus a say in where it goes next.

Let’s get started.

Last week I counted the twenty tools I use to run one event and admitted the whole setup is overwhelming. Some of you wrote back echoing similar sentiments. Glad to know others are dealing with tech-stack overload as well.

I've been vibe coding an application that pulls a chunk of those tools and workflows into one place. It's early and I'm adding features as I figure out which ones are actually worth having.

This week, I listened to a podcast episode that confirmed I was working on the right features.

Creator Science founder Jay Clouse and his wife Mallory recorded a full recap of the second year of The Lab Offline, the in-person event for members of Jay's paid community.

The episode is worth your time even if you never run an event at that scale. They walked through everything. Attendee ratings, the breakfast score climbing from a 4.8 to an 8.1 after a brutal first year, the seating charts Jay built by hand, the $860 the hotel charged them to keep coffee out during the day. They lost about $8,300 on the event this year, down from roughly $9,100 the year before. Very few organizers will talk about their numbers that openly, and I appreciate their transparency.

But the part that made me stop and rewind was Mallory talking about the people who walk in not knowing anyone. She planned both years, and she mentioned an insight that I've also been thinking about:

Then she named the thing many of us extroverted planners forget:

When they got to the section on what they want to test next year, her first idea was this:

I've been thinking on the same problem for a while. I've hosted pre-event communities on WhatsApp and Circle for my events, and people genuinely like them. A handful of attendees and sponsors would reach out to me before the event and ask a version of the same question: who are the two or three people I should connect with before the event?

Sometimes I'd make connections manually. I'd go through the attendee list, think about who was going for similar reasons, and make the intro. But it didn't scale past helping a few people, because I was the one doing it, and I had a hundred other things to finish before the event. Plus everyone who didn't ask never got the same opportunity to connect one-on-one.

So I'm building a solution into the application.

Here's how I'm thinking about it: when you confirm your ticket, you opt in to pre-event connections and say who you are and why you’re coming. Business development, partnerships, finding a potential co-founder, hiring, whatever the real reason is. The platform surfaces a small set of attendees whose stated reason lines up with yours. You send a request, they accept or they don't, and only after both people say yes does a call get scheduled.

It's going to be double opt-in. You have to say you're open to this before anyone can reach you, and the other person has to agree before anything gets booked. Nobody's inbox turns into a target because they bought a ticket.

And to avoid inbox fatigue, it would be capped at a certain number per event. This stops one aggressive person from trying to meet the entire attendee list, and more importantly, it forces everyone to be selective. I want it to be enough that you walk in with a few real conversations already started, but not so many that it turns into a numbers game.

The reason I think this may matter more at medium and large events than small ones is that more people counterintuitively leads to fewer deep connections. At forty people you could meet everybody before the event is over. But at four hundred you could spend two full days surrounded by exactly the right people and still go home having talked to six people, none of whom were the ones you needed.

Mallory and I have never spoken. But we both landed on the same insight from different perspectives. If two organizers get to the same idea from vastly different events, I'd guess a lot of other organizers have been thinking about it too.

There are more features that I'm building and I'm still deciding which ones create immediate value for organizers, attendees, and partners.

If you run, sponsor, or speak at events and you want to see it early, reply with "early." I'd rather show it to people who'll tell me what's wrong with it than sit on it until I think it's finished.