A friend of mine has been attending MicroConf for years, and always thought it would be a good fit for me.
I finally made it this year. Portland, April 2026.
MicroConf is a conference for bootstrapped SaaS founders — the ones building without venture capital, without a hockey stick growth mandate, without anyone telling them what their business has to be. It's a room full of people who chose this path deliberately, and who take it seriously. That's the path I've been on for 22+ years, so the fit was obvious. I just hadn't made the trip until now.
After a few conversations, I understood what my friend meant. These are my people.
The Hike
MicroConf offered a choice of afternoon excursions on day two: a city walk, a pizza and ice cream tour, an arcade. I chose the hike to Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge.
I loved the conversations on the drives there and back — an hour each way, sitting with different founders, talking about our businesses, marketing, AI, and more. And the falls themselves were stunning. Dense forest, old-growth trees thick with moss, mist in the air, the sound of a 620-foot cascade filling everything. The Columbia River Gorge is one of those places that reminds you the world is big and beautiful and worth getting outside for.
What Stood Out
Three ideas from the talks are still rattling around in my head.
Your home page is now a Google search result or a ChatGPT answer.
Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro, gave a talk on what she called the zero-click problem that I keep coming back to.
The short version: more people are searching than ever, but fewer of them click through to your website. The places where your audience is actually forming opinions about you — Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, podcast mentions, AI chatbot responses — are almost entirely invisible to your analytics. Attribution was always broken. Now it's more broken.
Her point wasn't that content marketing is dead — it was that the job has changed. Your content needs to deliver real value in the feed itself, without requiring a click. The post that teaches something stays in someone's memory. The post designed to drive traffic usually doesn't.
She also made a point I found quietly liberating: stop optimizing for traffic as a KPI. Hubspot's traffic dropped 80%, and their 2025 revenue was at an all-time high. What actually matters is whether people who encounter your brand anywhere — in a search result, a Reddit comment, a ChatGPT answer — come away with a clearer sense of what you do.
That one has real implications for how I'm thinking about marketing at both of my businesses.
Knowing your customers isn't just about demographics.
Georgiana Laudi from Forget the Funnel made an argument I've heard before but landed harder this time: most growth problems aren't really marketing problems or messaging problems. They're understanding problems.
You can know everything about your customers' company size, job title, and tech stack, and still not know why they bought from you — what was happening in their world when they found you, what finally pushed them from passive awareness to active search, why they chose you instead of doing nothing.
Part of what she was pushing against are the standard frameworks most of us default to — pirate metrics, funnel stages, the usual conversion-rate view of the customer. Those aren't useless, but they reduce the customer's experience to data points. What she was describing is something more textured: the actual emotional arc of the journey. The frustration that finally became urgent enough to act on. The moment something clicked. The point where they almost gave up. Those milestones — the highs and lows along the path — tell you something that a funnel simply can't.
Her prescription is systematic: run ten to twelve interviews with your best, most recent customers — people who've actually gotten value from the product. Ask them what was going on before they found you. After that many conversations, you start to see patterns you couldn't have guessed at.
For HelpSite, this is something I know I can get even clearer on. I have real customers who are getting genuine value from the product. Understanding their story in more depth — what triggered the search, what made us the right fit — would sharpen everything from messaging to onboarding.
Developers don't write code anymore. They decide.
The AI conversation at MicroConf was everywhere — in the sessions, in the hallways, over lunch. But one thing Craig Hewitt said in his talk on SaaS in the agent economy stuck with me:
The developer's job has fundamentally changed. They don't write code anymore. They decide what needs to be built, they decide when the output is good enough, and they shepherd the process. The code itself is increasingly generated by AI.
That's a huge shift that not only improves cycle time, it blurs the lines between roles. If you're a founder with a technical team, the competitive advantage isn't in how many engineers you have — it's in how well they're using these tools, and how fast that feedback loop runs.
He also talked about team culture around AI: setting real expectations, making learning time non-optional, running weekly show-and-tell sessions, building a shared repository of what works. Not just giving people access to the tools, but creating the conditions for a team that actually uses them well.
That's the version I'm building in both UniHop and HelpSite. My to-do list coming out of MicroConf is long, but getting my teams into that rhythm — shared skills, shared learning, higher expectations — is near the top.
The Part I'm Still Sitting With
I went to Portland with a quiet question about HelpSite that I haven't fully resolved.
HelpSite is a simple, clean knowledge base tool — fast to set up, easy to use, genuinely useful for the customers who love it. But the landscape is shifting fast, and I find myself wondering about the right direction for the next version of this product.
I didn't come home with a clear answer. But I came home knowing where to look — in conversations with the customers who are already getting real value, asking what specifically they needed and why they chose us. The answer is probably sitting there. I just have to ask better questions.
The Roundtable I Led
I didn't just attend MicroConf — I also had the chance to contribute. One of the conference's formats is a curated set of roundtable discussions, four per conference, each led by a facilitator with relevant experience. I applied in advance and was selected to lead one.
Mine was on how to buy a SaaS business.
About 30 people joined for the hour. Most were exploring the idea of acquisition for the first time — curious about whether buying an existing SaaS might be a smarter path than building from scratch. A handful had already been through the process and came with more specific questions. Financing the deal came up early and stayed on the table: how to structure it, what SBA loans look like in practice, how to think about seller financing and earnouts.
We covered a lot of ground: how to find businesses worth looking at, what to actually evaluate before making an offer, and how to protect yourself in due diligence.
At the end, someone at the table told me it was the best session of the entire conference for them.
I offer consulting programs around exactly this process — helping bootstrapped founders acquire SaaS businesses with clarity and confidence, from defining your criteria through closing and transitioning into ownership. If that's where you are, I'd love to talk.
Why I'll Go Back
MicroConf provided every meal — breakfast, lunch, dinners at the events — and I'm convinced that's one of the reasons the conversations are so good. You're never hunting for a restaurant, never splitting off into smaller groups with half the conference, never losing an hour to logistics. You eat together. You talk. It sounds like a small thing and it isn't.
I met founders at every stage — some who'd been at this for over a decade, some who just launched. I talked with people about AI, about buying and selling businesses, about the particular loneliness that can come with this kind of work. I met a couple of people who'd spent time living in Bali and leading retreats — an unexpected overlap with my own past. I had a long conversation with a small group about time tracking and morning routines that went deeper than I expected. (I have a fairly extensive system — time, KPIs, values, routines — that keeps me aligned, and people seem genuinely curious about it. Probably worth its own post someday.)
These are good people doing hard, worthwhile work. Being in a room with them for a few days reminded me why I chose this path in the first place.
I'll be back.
If you were at MicroConf and attended the roundtable on SaaS acquisition — or if you're thinking about buying a SaaS business and want to think it through with someone who's been through the process a few times — let's talk. I also put together a free resource pack with the frameworks from the roundtable, available at brandonpearce.com/microconf.