Every September my LinkedIn feed fills up with show floor photos and someone's blurry shot of the Main Stage, and every September I think: maybe, next year. Then a client needs a migration finished by the 30th, or I've got three integrations half-built, and next year becomes the year after that.
This year I bought the ticket.
Tomorrow morning I'm driving into Boston for UNBOUND.
If you've been heads-down for a minute: INBOUND got a new name. Fifteen years as INBOUND, and this year HubSpot rebranded. Same event, new sign out front. So really, this year is everyone's first time at UNBOUND...
A room full of people who do what I do. Solo consulting suits me. I pick my clients, I set my own rates, I make my own coffee. The trade-off is that nobody sits down the hall from me. When I hit something strange in a portal, I don't turn to a coworker, I turn to Slack and hope someone I've never met in person is awake. For four days I get to have those conversations out loud, with faces attached.
The roadmap, before a client forwards it to me. A real chunk of my week is answering "can HubSpot do this?" I would rather hear what's shipping from the stage than from a client's email with a press release pasted into it.
The show floor. I spend a decent amount of time cleaning up after tools that promised a two-click sync. Standing in front of the person who built the thing and asking where the data lands, what happens on a merge, and what breaks at 50,000 records -- that beats every demo video I've ever sat through.
Clients I've never met. A handful of mine will be there. I've worked with some of these people for three, four years and we've never met face-to-face. That's a funny thing about this job, and I'd like to fix a few of them this week.
Three rules, because I asked around and everyone gave me the same advice:
So if you're at UNBOUND this week, come find me! I may even have a little gift for you!