I've been heads down recently looking at every tool I use to run an event. It wasn't a fun exercise, but it was a necessary one, and I think a lot of you will see your own stack in mine.

Today's deep dive is less "here's a framework" and more "here's what I found when I finally counted."

Let’s get started.

I've spent the last couple weeks examining my event stack, and it revealed something I probably should have noticed a long time ago. I use too many tools, and most of them don't talk to each other.

I actually sat down and mapped out everything I touched across my last few events, and the list got long fast:

20 tools to pull off one event that lasts a day or two. There may be more but that's just what I can remember.

I like most of them on their own. The problem is that most of them don't integrate with the others. Attendee info lives in Ticket Tailor and also gets copied into Google Sheets so I can actually work with it. Sponsor deliverables get tracked in Notion, but the decks themselves live in Google Slides. A testimonial collected in Senja then has to get copied into a sponsor recap. Someone, usually me, has to do all the reshuffling.

Every one of those small gaps is a task. And for a one or two day experience, I'm spending months living inside these tools before I ever get to the actual event. Building spreadsheets, chasing signatures, moving the same piece of information from one platform to another so a different platform can understand it. The part I actually care about, the room full of people, ends up being a small fraction of the total hours I put in.

So I started asking around. Over the past few weeks I've been interviewing event friends, past attendees, clients, and sponsors, not to pitch them on anything, just to understand how they interact with the tools on their side of the table.

A pattern is forming, and it's not flattering to any of us. Most event operators are running some version of the same sprawl I just listed above. Several tools, each one good at one job, none of them built to talk to the others, and a person stitching it all together behind the scenes.

I've also been talking to Claude more than I'd probably like to admit about what my next move should be here. Between the interviews and those conversations, I've got a working hypothesis for how I could consolidate a real chunk of this stack into something built specifically around how B2B events actually get planned.

A few years ago, an idea like this would have needed a dev team, a spec doc, and months before anything usable existed. Now the idea could get vibe-coded into a working tool using AI in the same day or week I land on the direction. That gap between having a hypothesis and having something real to test has basically collapsed, and I don't think enough of us running events have clocked what that means for how we build the businesses behind them.

I'm still early here. I don't have a finished answer, just a sharpening hypothesis and a growing list of the friction points worth solving first. But I wanted to share where my head is at, because I'd bet most of you reading this have a version of my 20 tool list sitting somewhere in your own stack.

So I'm curious. Is your setup as embarrassingly long as mine, or have you already found something that brings more of this together?

And if you want an early look I’m building to potentially solve this overwhelm, reply to this email with "Early" and I'll make sure you're one of the first to see it.