This is what the Builder tier is for.

The Week 1 Numbers (Full Breakdown)

Let me show you exactly what happened:

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Nine.

I stared at that for a while. The essay was getting some solid reads. But almost nobody walked through the door I thought they would be excited to enter.

Here’s what I realized when I slowed down to give it some thought: I wrote something that landed as content, not as an invitation. The piece sold the idea that building business online as a solopreneur can be a lonely game but I don’t know if the invitation or call to action was strong, or compelling enough.

The 69 of you who found your way here anyway? Most of you came through substack notes, thanks to a handful of wonderful people here who were kind enough to restack that initial post. The platform and the generosity of others did the real work.

So. Lesson one, week one: write a clear invitation, not just “the why” behind it.

Let me try again.

WHAT WE’RE ACTUALLY BUILDING

September 2027. Montreal. Five hundred creators - writers, podcasters, coaches, artists, educators, anyone building something meaningful online - all descending on the city for four days.

Every morning, we gather in a historic theater to hear stories and be inspired by people who’ve built incredible things here on Substack. The real stories: the fears, challenges, the moments they almost quit. The parts that typically don’t make it public.

Every afternoon, the city becomes the venue. Attendee-led meetups scattered across Mile End and the Plateau — someone like hosts a writing circle at St-Viateur Bagels, someone else runs a hike up Mount Royal, there’s a podcast swap in a café, a watercolor sketch session by someone like in a park, a “failed projects” confessional on a bench somewhere. You don’t sit in breakout rooms assigned by track. You find your people between sessions.

No corporate sponsors. No booths. No lanyard culture. No name tags that tell you someone’s title so you know whether they’re worth talking to.

Just the people making a living from what they publish, together in one place, making magic together.

That’s what we’re building. Everything else - the venue research, the budget spreadsheets, the subscription tiers is just us sharing our journey towards making it real.

And Carolina and I will be building it in front of you, one week at a time.

THE PROGRESS REPORT

The Number This Week

69 subscribers. 3 Founding Builders. $750 in pre-production revenue. 4.9% of free subscribers became builders, which is pretty close to what our model predicted, but we need to find ways to grow the volume faster if if we are going to make this happen

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Venue: First Response

reached out to four Montreal venues. We heard back from the Rialto Theatre in Mile End - the neighborhood that makes the whole “distributed afternoon” model work. Main hall: 829 conference capacity. $10,000-$12,500 CAD per day depending on the day of week. Adjacent rooms available for breakout sessions. We’re going to keep that conversation moving forward as we also wait to hear from the other potential venues.

🗣️ What I’m Hearing

To name a few, DMed me saying he’d been thinking about something similar just the day before. and - two coaches I deeply respect both reached out saying they want to be part of this somehow. And I’m going live Monday with from Write Build Scale to talk about what we’re building. People are paying attention.

✍️ What We Worked On

Built the entire structure for how these weekly emails will work for the next 19 months. We are starting with a two-track communication model: this free update for everyone, and a deeper Builder Brief for the paid tier.

People’s attention is stretched, so I feel we need to get really good at having every email doing triple duty. We need to build community, create shareability, and move this thing forward.

So we have the starting point for that playbook. Now we’ll just follow it for a few weeks and see if we need to make any adjustments.

Here’s something I’m wrestling with, and I’d love your take.

A structural question:

Should this be a flat gathering where there’s no separation between speakers and attendees, where the only way to be “on stage” is to show up and host a meetup like everyone else? Or should we have a few paid keynotes who bring a certain draw to the room - someone whose name alone would make you clear your calendar?

The way we are currently thinking about it, the afternoons will already designed to be flat where you host, you attend, and you wander. But the morning theater sessions could go either way. Big names who draw a crowd, or community voices who live what we’re actually about. One thing I’m pretty sure we want to be clear about is that this event is for those who are actively creating on Substack, or at a minimum are Substack curious.

A deeper question:

I’ll be honest about something else. A lot of the people in my world that are part of the Sacred Business Flow community Carolina and I have been building for years are introverts. People who struggle with visibility. People for whom the idea of a conference might sound more exhausting than exciting.

A question I’ve been asking myself: am I building this for them, or am I building something they’ll have to talk themselves into attending?

Here’s what I believe, but I don’t know if I’m right: a gathering designed the way I’m describing where the afternoons are small, self-organized, and human-scaled might actually be the kind of visibility that introverts are willing handle if this is going to truly support their journey as a creator. Not “networking.” Not working a room. Just hosting a walk, or a writing session, or a conversation about something you care about. Showing up as yourself. Being seen by fifteen people who came because they wanted to be there.

I think there is a way this could bethe conference for people who hate conferences.

Or maybe I’m kidding myself.

What do you think? Drop into the comments or hit reply.

In This Week’s Builder Brief:

The actual email from the Rialto Theatre with pricing. The full first-week numbers broken down. And the strategic questions I’m not ready to publish here including whether we should add a lower-priced paid tier to this publication and an idea about streaming the main stage through Substack Lives.

→ Become a Founding Builder

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The 3-Person Challenge

This week, I’d like to directly aask every subscriber to personally invite 3 people who should know about this. Not blast your list, but to do it personally. DM them. Text them. Something tot the effect of “Hey, you should see this.”

Think of the writer, podcaster, or coach in your orbit who’s been doing this work alone and needs to know something like this exists. Especially if they’re an introvert. Especially if conferences usually feel like too much. Send them this issue and ask what they think.

We’re at 69 subscribers. If 20 of you do this, we double by next week. That’s not insignificant, and I never doubt the power of small actions taking my many who share a common desire or goal.

The people who find this in Issue #001 are the ones who’ll shape this thing.

Carolina and I don’t have all the answers. That’s probably obvious by now.

What I have is a vision that won’t leave me alone, a spreadsheet that says this is possible, and a small number of people who’ve already said “I’m in.” This week that group got just a little bigger. The Rialto responded. A few more voices said yes. posted a Note.

showed support.

We also got our first two recommendations!

We’re 581 days out. Nothing is locked. Everything is still a question. And that’s perfect for this moment because the people who show up in this phase are the ones who’ll actually hold this together.

If that’s you, reply and tell me: what would make this worth the trip to Montreal? And if you’re an introvert who usually avoids this stuff, I especially want to hear from you.

Phil

P.S. was technically our first Founding Builder, though I’m still not entirely sure how he signed up before we even sent the first email. came in this week after I sent him a voice note - just me rambling about the vision for close to ten minutes. And showed up too. Three Founders in the room. Their names are on the About page now. Yours could be next.

P.P.S - If anyone has the ability to personally connect me with , I’d love to try to get him involved. And - he’s created magic like this before and I’d love to glean a bit of wisdom from his path.

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Gratitude

Gratitude to these other supporters who have been helping to get the message out: , , , , , , , , , , , , , and many, many more ❤️

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.

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.

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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.

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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