You closed your laptop and had no one to tell

Independent creation can be lonely work. We want to do something about that.

You publish something on Substack and it lands. The numbers look good. A comment comes in that tightens your chest because someone got exactly what you meant. You sit there for a second, wanting to talk about it. Not the metrics. The feeling. The relief that the thing you were afraid to say actually connected.

And there’s nobody in the room who gets it.

Your partner’s supportive. Your friends think it’s cool. But the person who would really understand is someone you’ve never met, three time zones away, who left a reply you’ll probably never respond to properly. Because what would you even say in such a few short words?

This is the part nobody talks about.

We talk about growth. Monetization. Flywheels. Audience building. The craft. But we almost never talk about the fact that independent creation is one of the most isolating things a person can do. And the isolation doesn’t get easier as it works. It gets stranger. You can have thousands of people reading your words every week and still feel like you’re doing it completely alone.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Not just the loneliness, but the shape of it.

Carolina Wilke and I have interviewed lots of entrepreneurs over the past few years on our Sacred Business Stories Substack Live show. People building courses, communities, newsletters, coaching practices from their kitchen tables and home offices. And the same thing keeps surfacing, quietly, underneath the strategy talk and the growth questions: they feel alone.

Even the successful ones. Especially the successful ones.

We’ve collectively built something here on Substack that didn’t exist ten years ago. Millions of people publishing their thinking, their art, their expertise directly to the people who care about it. No editors. No gatekeepers. No permission required.

And almost all of it happens through a screen.

The people whose work you admire most, the ones who challenge you, who make you sharpen your own work, you’ve probably never been in the same room with them. You might not even know what their voice sounds like.

There are conferences, sure. But you know the ones I mean.

You sit in a ballroom and watch people who are already famous explain how they got famous. There are lanyards and booths and sponsor logos on everything. You leave with a stack of business cards from people you’ll never email. And a vague feeling that the thing you were hoping to feel didn’t happen.

Nobody has built the gathering that independent Substack creators actually need. Not yet.

So we want to try.

September 2027. Montreal. Four days.

Five hundred independent creators in a historic theater in Mile End. Every morning, you will hear real stories from people who’ve built audiences and businesses in public. Not slides. The actual experience of doing it, including the parts that didn’t work.

Every afternoon, the city takes over. You host a meetup at a bagel shop on St-Viateur. Someone else leads a walk up Mount Royal for creators who think better when they move. A podcaster and a newsletter writer who’ve been reading each other for two years finally sit across a table and figure out what they should be building together.

No corporate sponsors. No panels. No lanyard culture.

Just the people who do this work, in one place, for long enough that something can actually shift. Something magical that simply doesn’t happen online.

I should be honest about where we are with this.

I have rough numbers. We have a venue in mind. We have a community of 25,000 people who might care about it through Sacred Business Flow. I’ve been running the math on what it takes to pull this off without going broke, and the math works. If the demand is there.

We don’t have it figured out. Not close.

And I’ve decided that’s the point. Something Carolina reminds me of constantly: how you build it shapes what it becomes. So we’re going to build this in the open. We publish before it’s perfect. We let people watch the process, not just the product.

This publication is the real-time record of building this gathering from scratch. Every decision, every dollar, every fear, every mistake, published as it happens. Not a polished announcement followed by a ticket link. The actual process of turning an idea into a room full of people.

If you read this and recognized yourself in it, I’d love you to come along.

Subscribe and you’ll get the building-in-public updates every few weeks. What we’re learning, what we’re deciding, what we’re getting wrong. You’ll be first to know when registration opens. And you’ll have a say in what this becomes. Who should speak. What meetups should exist. What this thing should feel like.

If you want to go deeper, if you’re the kind of person who wants the actual vendor quotes, the real P&L, the negotiation details, the spreadsheets, and builder roundtable calls where we make decisions together, you can become a Founding Builder. It’s $250 for the year, and when registration opens, that converts to a credit toward your ticket. But more than the money: Founding Builders are the people who shape this before it goes public. The speakers, the workshop hosts, the volunteers will come from this group first, because they’ll be the ones who’ve been here while it was being built.

I don’t know if this will work. I don’t know if enough people feel what we feel, that we need a place to be together in person, without an agenda beyond finding out what happens when we are.

But the only way to find out is to start writing about it and see who shows up.

So here we are.

If you’re here too, subscribe. We will be back in a couple of weeks with the first real update. The venue research. The budget math. What Montreal looks like as a city designed for exactly this kind of gathering.

And if you know someone who needs to see this, someone who closes their laptop after publishing something good and has no one to tell, send it to them.

That’s how this starts.

With appreciation,

Phil