INBOUND’s purpose is to provide the inspiration, education, and connections you need to grow and transform your business. We attended this year, September 25th - 28th in Boston, to do some networking with our peers and to consult on various marketing strategies. TLDR we thoroughly enjoyed this year’s amazing speaker line up!
I drove in early Tuesday morning to my hotel and grabbed a Lyft to meet Alex and Sean. On the way, the driver told me several stories of other passengers who’d suffered the inflated prices that occurred as hotels started to sell out. Sean found a good deal not far away, which was cool.
I arrived during Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield’s session and, instead of going in, I browsed around the mostly empty Club INBOUND, which was basically a Sponsor Expo plus some eating and lounging spots. They had a booth doing free headshot pictures. There was no line and I was wearing a suit, so I went for it.
After a quick client meeting, I made it to The Art of Story Telling by Amal Kassir, then Blue babies Pink by Brett Trapp and Inclusion Begins with You by Avis Jones-DeWeever. I left these and headed to the Food Truck lunch thinking about how good story telling starts with listening and being vulnerable with our neighbors, building trust, as more of a Salad Bowl than a Melting Pot.
Wednesday involved leaving the hotel very early to make it through the extra security to see the former first spouse, Michelle Obama.
This was quite an experience. Michelle is very comfortable and confident as she says the most inspiring things. It felt really good being there, being a part of that conversation with so many others. She set the record straight with grace and humility and shared insight into what it means to be a strong woman, laying bare what still needs to be done, that we are all very capable of doing.
We spent the rest of Wednesday visiting some of our Boston clients in person, as it’s so important to do whenever possible. Additionally, that evening we even made it to an Atlassian User Group meetup and geeked out on Jira and Confluence with people from Akamai, Zipcar, and others.
We finished the week’s experience on Thursday with John Cena’s keynote about 5 Questions we should all be asking ourselves:
- What do you do?
- What does your company do?
- Do you know your audience?
- Do you ask enough questions?
- Do you love what you do?
His talk started with his recent short from the Ad Council: Love Has No Labels (video at top) after which he flowed through his 5 questions, exploring the self in relation to others, with consistent heart felt advice.
Interested in connecting? Reach out here
