I have a story for you.

When my wife, Jennifer, and I started selling on Amazon in 2015, it was like going back to school. We consumed every podcast, watched YouTube videos, and scoured for any bit of learning we could find. It’s ultimately what led me to find Facebook groups that had entrepreneurs on similar journeys. I have to admit, school always came easy to me, so I didn’t have the best studying habits. I also struggled with buying knowledge from course creators.

My intelligence had made me arrogant and lazy. Jennifer changed my mindset. Even though she’s smarter than me, growing up in China instilled in her the mindset that knowledge is power. Paying an expert to skip the learning curve is far more beneficial than trying to reinvent the wheel or figure it out yourself. The hunger to constantly learn and improve came from the fact that we realized how little we knew.

Today, we still approach our businesses with this same mindset. The most exciting opportunities to learn came from our own products. Not just the winners, but especially the losers. For example, we made product decisions without understanding what keywords would drive sales. Some of these products failed and it led us to develop a process where we analyze keywords and data before making a decision to launch a product. We also developed expensive products in categories dominated by much cheaper, lower quality products.

Despite being able to push the product to the top of page one, we struggled to maintain ranks. This led us to a much deeper understanding of how CTR and CVR impact organic ranks. For the last two years we’ve been learning how to build and run a large organization. We hired a CEO coach two years ago, and have spent over $200,000 in professional coaching. In that same time we’ve scaled three businesses and gone from 6 employees to over 60 employees. The value of those businesses have increased from $10 million to over $60 million.

One of the reasons we never put on a large conference is because we felt the traditional conference was already being done as well as it could be by several other organizations. We couldn’t offer anything new in that format. Even 4 years ago, we would go to conferences mostly to network, with very little opportunity for us to learn from the sessions. Surrounding ourselves and interacting with other successful and hungry entrepreneurs has been massively beneficial to our growth. So we asked ourselves, if we were to throw an annual conference, what would it look like? And we wrote down the elements that would have the most impact on the businesses of the attendees.