Thought 1
I went by
’s breakfast for her (very soft) collaboration with Linnea Lund the other day and we had a quick and nice chat. We talked about our substacks (requisite) and she mentioned that she liked my anti-capitalist rants which now has me in a spin (not her fault, it’s just my brain) about my newsletter foci.Do I rant? Yeah. Do I love writing about my struggle with capitalism as a consumer and business owner? Sure. It hit home harder when I went to a retail conference this week and was confronted with a sea of people I didn’t relate to and an endless churn of tips to sell more stuff that we absolutely don’t need. I had an existential crisis! Is this what building a successful company in the eyes of our capitalist overloads amounts to? Sales for the sake of sales and algorithm hacking to breach some unassuming potential customer’s subconscious, convincing them they do actually need to buy 5 pounds of meat (this was an actual example)? To be kind, everyone was really smart and the topics were interesting and show the potential for people to work less at doing boring stuff (streamlining tasks with AI, optimizing marketing methods, etc) so they have time to ideate and create.
I am quite sure there are conferences where I would feel more, uh, fine. The unease I left with was due to the accepted expectation that successful companies that generate many millions of dollars a year are correct, are #goals, regardless of what they’re selling and how, exactly, they’re infiltrating the inboxes and psyches of their targeted demographics. It’s all quite Machiavellian. But what if we took these smart people and put them in service of, I don’t know, not selling stuff they don’t care about? Perhaps, because the panels had 30 minute limits, there’s a tacit understanding that they do care about their products, their customers and that pointed explanation just eats up the time slot. I hope they believe in what they’re contributing to the world.
By the way, I did do the thing you’re supposed to do at these things and I networked. Not a lot because, panic, but resale wasn’t a topic at the event so I wanted to see if anyone there was familiar and maybe we could be mutually helpful. No one was thinking about resale as a branch or even a twig of their ecomm stacks.
Should I start a resale conference? This is the only one I’ve found on google and boy does it look deeply uncute.
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