We humans are a funny bunch. By our nature, we’re both creators and consumers. You might even say those are the most basic instincts we act on for our survival. But, even though we’re both, when we’re in one role, we tend to do a pretty bad job of considering the other role. To wit, in the capitalist society that most of us live in, many businesses have been built around exploiting our own penchant for consuming for the sake of profit and not necessarily the betterment of the consumer or our society (broadly, “survival”).
Generally, those businesses are built on the idea that the business can most successfully extract maximum value from a customer by minimizing their costs, and by doing this they’ve met their requirement for existing.
This can create some success, but what creates long-term sustained success, for both the company and society? We strongly agree with the many people who are much smarter than we are, who say that it’s making a connection with your customer/client/consumer/user.
At &yet, we fundamentally believe that goods and services can be created in such a way that first and foremost creates a human connection between the person that uses or buys a product or service and the business that created it.
“We make software for human people.”
This is precisely what we set out to do with our own products (like Talky, our software consulting services, and, perhaps most specifically, the product and prototype development we’ve done for our clients over the years.
We’ve met amazing people at businesses, both huge and tiny, who share that same belief with us. We know there are others like us out there and we know there are more who would feel the same way if they could apply that way of thinking to what they’re doing. We love talking to our friends about these things, we love meeting and talking to new people about these things... so that’s what we’ve decided to make our conference about.
This year’s &yetConf will be a gathering of old friends and new, an effort to provide excellent conditions and environments for discussing and learning about connecting with people. Our aim is to gather anyone who shares the desire to make our world a better place by creating something, whether through art, technology, food, or something else. We strongly believe that the most productive conversations we have on this topic are in-person, and this is the essence of why we decided to put on the conference.
To our fellow technologists — no, this is not your typical tech conference. Sure, we could talk about this JavaScript framework or that, WebRTC, realtime messaging architectures, etc. (and maybe some of that will happen!), but the aim of the conference is not to anoint a technology or tool or methodology as “The Way”.
Instead we’ll talk about how you can make a connection with your user. You’ll walk away with extremely valuable context that you can add to whatever it is you’re doing.
So.
Are you creating something you want to be successful?
Do you want your creation to be loved and talked about by its consumers?
Do you want the service you provide to stand out?
We’d love to have you, your team, your family, or anyone else who wants to talk or learn about connecting with people via our creative instincts to come do that with us at &yetConf, October 6-8.