What to do in the week after an event

You ran the event. It went well. Everyone said nice things on the way out.

Then Monday happens, you are behind on everything the event displaced, and by Friday the room has gone cold. This is the most common way founders waste an evening they paid for.

The 48 hour window

People remember an evening for about two days. After that it becomes a pleasant blur, and your message reads like a cold one.

Within 48 hours, send one personal message to every person you actually spoke to. Not a newsletter. Not a template with a first name merged in. One or two sentences that prove you were there:

Good to meet you on Thursday. You mentioned you were stuck choosing between two launch dates, I have been thinking about it, here is the thing I would look at.

Twenty of those takes ninety minutes and returns more than every other marketing activity that week put together.

Then the people who did not come

Half the list said yes and did not turn up. They are not a lost cause, they are warm and slightly guilty.

Send them something from the evening: the three things that came up, a photo of the room, the thing somebody said that surprised you. No guilt, no "sorry we missed you". Just the content, and an obvious way to be told about the next one.

Then the content

One evening is genuinely a month of material, but only if somebody wrote things down. The raw ingredients are:

• The question that three different people asked.
• The disagreement, if there was one.
• The thing you said out loud that you had never written down.

Each of those is a post. The disagreement is usually the best one, because it is the only one with any tension in it.

What not to do

Do not write a recap post that lists the agenda and thanks the speakers. Nobody outside the room reads those, and the people inside it already know. If you want a record, put it in the follow up email where it belongs.

Put it in the calendar before the event

The reason this does not happen is not that founders do not know. It is that the week after an event is the busiest week there is.

Block two hours on the first working day after, before you run the thing. Call it what it is. It is the only appointment in the whole project with a guaranteed return.