I do, you do, we do, the power of distributed responsibility, and other lessons from Writer MBA Con 2025

We spent 2 years building a conference, making this the most expensive article I have ever written.

Apr 02, 2025

∙ Paid

Hi,

I’m starting this article sitting in my new Hello Kitty bathrobe on the day I leave our first full conference to fly back to Los Angeles, and people have already been asking me about what I learned and when we will do it again.

So, I’ll first say that we have no date for the next event, but we also aren’t saying this event will never happen again. It was very, very, very tough and the expense made it so that whenever anything went wrong, we had to turn back to it, even if we were planning other launches.

Our businesses are so much more than this event, and yet all our resources are brought to bear on this event only. It’s a lot of energy expended for 1/52 of the year. That said, I had most amazing time, and honestly this was exactly what I envisioned when I set out to make a show. We did not compromise at all (though maybe we should have).

So, here is a bunch of lessons and pictures and awesomeness.