How to Absolutely Destroy a Conference (Before You Even Get There)

I was talking to Lucas Siegel about how he was preparing for HR Tech. He runs Yuna — an AI mental health platform, $30M valuation, trying to crack the HR software market. HR Tech is one of the biggest conferences in his space, with 7,800 registered attendees.

I asked how his team was approaching it.

He walked me through a pipeline. And then he summed it up: “That’s how you absolutely destroy a conference.”

I’ve been thinking about that line ever since.

What Most Companies Do

Most companies treat conferences as networking events where you hope to meet the right people.

You buy a booth ($20-50K before you factor in flights, hotels, and staff time). You show up. You stand there. People walk by. Some stop. Most don’t. By day two you’re exhausted and wondering if it was worth it.

The problem isn’t the conference. It’s the approach. Waiting for the right people to find you in a crowd of 7,800 is a bad strategy whether you have AI or not.

The Conference Domination Pipeline

Here’s what Lucas described instead.

Step 1: Scrape the attendee list.

Every conference app has a directory. Most are searchable and, with the right tools, extractable. You pull every name, company, role, and profile from the app.

7,800 people. You’re not going to contact all of them — but you can filter to your ideal targets and end up with a list of several hundred high-value contacts.

Step 2: Research each person.

Run every name through a research workflow. Lindy, n8n, or a custom agent setup can pull this automatically: company size, the person’s role and background, recent news about their company, relevant LinkedIn activity.

The output isn’t just a data dump. You’re building enough context to write a message that doesn’t feel generic.

Step 3: Send personalized outreach before the conference opens.

Here’s the move that makes this work: the conference app itself. Most people ignore the messaging feature inside these apps. But right before a conference, everyone is in there checking the schedule, browsing the agenda, finding their sessions.

If you message someone through the conference app a week before the event, you’re reaching them at exactly the right moment. They’re thinking about the conference. They’re in discovery mode. They’re far more likely to read and respond than they would be to a cold LinkedIn message in February.

You send through both channels — conference app and LinkedIn — with the same personalized message, slightly varied.

Step 4: Post-meeting follow-up — handwritten cards.

For anyone you actually meet in person, the pipeline continues after the conference. Feed their contact info to an automation that sends a physical handwritten card. Companies like Handwrytten automate this for around $5-8 per card.

Not an email. Not a LinkedIn request. A handwritten note that arrives a few days after the conference when everything else is already a blur.

Why the Pre-Conference Outreach Works

There’s a psychology to why this works.

When you walk into a conference cold, every conversation starts from zero. You introduce yourself, explain what you do, try to find common ground. It’s tiring and inefficient.

When you’ve already messaged someone before they arrive — and they’ve read it and maybe responded — you’re not strangers. You can open with “Oh, you’re Lucas — I saw your message, I wanted to find you.” That’s a different conversation.

The pre-arrival window is also genuinely less competitive. Most vendors show up to the conference and then start their outreach. If you’ve already been in someone’s inbox the week before, you’ve already won the attention game.

I’ve Done a Version of This

When I needed press coverage for one of my events here in Austin, I ran a smaller version of this pipeline.

I used AI deep research to identify every journalist who covered relevant topics — productivity, business, technology, local Austin business. Built out a contact list with emails, recent articles they’d written, and what they typically covered. Wrote personalized pitches for each one that referenced their actual work.

That research would have taken 20+ hours manually. It took a few hours with AI. And Austin Business Journal covered the event.

Same principle: do the work before the room fills up. Know who you’re reaching. Say something specific.

The Underlying Idea

There’s a concept I think about a lot: the difference between reactive and proactive outreach.

Reactive: show up, see who you meet, follow up on what happens.

Proactive: do the research, front-load the relationship work, walk in already warm.

Conferences get expensive fast. Between the booth, the flights, the team time — you’re easily into five figures for a serious presence at a major event. If the ROI depends on who randomly walks by, that’s a risky bet.

The pipeline Lucas described changes the math. Instead of hoping, you’re planning. Instead of networking randomly, you’re running a system.

One last note: you don’t need to do this at Lucas’s scale on your first try. Even pulling the attendee list and reaching out to your top 20 targets before the conference is miles better than showing up cold.

Start there. See what happens. The conference will feel different.

Thanh Pham is the founder of Asian Efficiency. He works with business owners and operators who want to use AI to work smarter, not just faster.