This is Part 3 of a four-part series on the Stanford Consumer Health Conference. Part 3 is a step-by-step guide to building a conference from nothing, the lessons I took away, and where this goes next. Read Part 2 (what the industry told us) here.
When I started planning this conference, I had no playbook. No team, no budget, no confirmed speakers, and — for a painful stretch — no venue. What I had was conviction that the conference needed to exist and a willingness to figure it out as I went.
What follows is the playbook I wish I’d had. It’s organized as the steps I actually followed, with callouts for the specific moments that taught me the most. If you’re thinking about building an event, a community, or really anything from scratch — I hope there’s something useful here.
Step 1: Define your vision — and find your niche
I started with a broad question: what does the next decade of consumer-empowered care look like? But broad questions don’t sell conferences. The turning point was hearing “we don’t need another conference at Stanford” from faculty members who already ran their own events. That rejection forced me to articulate what was actually different about this one.
The niche turned out to be three things no existing conference combined: the growing consumer wellness industry, an audience that mixed students with industry (founders, VCs, researchers, legal), and a focus on the intersection of business and science — not pure research, not pure venture, but the space in between.
Callout: Your vision will get sharper through rejection. Each “no” is a forcing function. The pillars of this conference — Perform, Connect, Extend — never changed. But the pitch for why it mattered was rewritten after almost every conversation.
Step 2: Secure your venue and date — expect this to take longer than you think
At Stanford, only faculty departments or clubs can reserve campus venues. I missed the GSB’s deadline for school-sponsored events and was told there was no path through a club. That left the faculty sponsor route — which took 50 emails, 13 conversations, and a month of hearing “yes to everything, then no.”
I secured the date of February 21st, 2026 in July of 2025, which gave me lead time. One tactical note: be aware of other conferences. The Connected Fitness conference took place in LA the same week, giving speakers already flying to California another reason to say yes. There were pros and cons to launching this at an academic institution, and one of them was that the venue could easily be set up to accommodate the conference. In a separate situation, more time may be required to build stages, set up AV, bring in seating/networking spots, etc. Book the venue as far out as possible.
Callout: If the venue requires institutional approval, build in extra time. Things that would take two days in a startup took four weeks at Stanford. Understanding that from the outset is critical to your sanity and your timeline. Plan that things will take 3 times as long and cost twice as much as you expect.
Step 3: Build your target lists — speakers and sponsors in parallel
I worked on speakers and sponsors at the same time, because each reinforced the other. Confirmed speakers gave sponsors confidence. Confirmed sponsors were required to move forward with the event.
For speakers, I outlined the companies and individuals who would be incredible to have, identified specific leaders at each company, and secured emails via Apollo.io, LinkedIn Navigator, and warm introductions.
For sponsors, I looked at who was sponsoring similar events and conferences, built a sponsorship deck with tiered packages, and categorized potential sponsors into buckets: service providers (law firms, advisory firms, wealth management), CPG/product companies, investors, participating companies (speakers with marketing budgets), and media partners.
Callout: Finding your first keystone speaker is the unlock. For me, it was my keynote (Daniel Kraft) and my first major CEO (Bryan Myers). Once they signed on, every subsequent outreach became dramatically easier because I could reference who was already committed. The momentum snowballs.
Step 4: Outreach — it’s a volume game with a personal touch
Cold emails were customized for each person — their role, their company, their interests, and the specific value of attending Stanford and participating. I never sent a generic template. With AI tools today, customizing the outreach is a must and a lighter lift.
Warm introductions came from two channels that mattered enormously. First, my classmates at Stanford who had investments in or personal relationships with the companies I was targeting. That’s how I got connected with people at WHOOP, Oura, and others. Second, people found me through LinkedIn because I’d been posting consistently about consumer health for months. They reached out, offering to connect me with the right person or support the event. That was a revelation about building in public: it creates inbound warm intros you could never have planned for.
Everything was tracked in Notion. I targeted tier-one people first, then fast-followed with additional folks if I couldn’t secure a speaker. I prioritized company representation over the individual’s position and was lucky to secure C-suite representation from most companies.
Callout: 180 outreach attempts produced 10 sponsors. 200+ emails produced 30 speakers. One sponsor came from a classmate. Two sponsors were also speakers who believed in the vision. Following up relentlessly matters — I reached out to Andrew Huberman’s team 17 times. Most busy people won’t respond to the first email. Each follow-up should make the ask feel more worth their time, not less.
Step 5: Build a lighthouse — your website, brand, and landing page
As I started getting traction with speakers and formalized the pillars, I built a central hub that everything pointed back to. I used Lovable to vibe-code a website and kept updating it throughout the process.
Having Stanford Medicine associated with the conference was both an advantage and a constraint. Pro: It’s an incredibly well-known brand, and having it attached drummed up interest. Con: I could not use trademarked logos or words, and had to be extremely careful with how I communicated Stanford’s involvement.
Callout: If you have access to a powerful brand — a university, a company, an institution — use it as much as possible to get buy-in. But understand the rules before you start, not after. I learned about trademark restrictions the hard way and had a genuine legal scare that kept me up at night.
Step 6: Generate interest before you can sell tickets
We couldn’t start selling tickets until January 2026, but I knew that if I waited until then to build an interest list, I’d be too late. I used a simple Google Form to capture interest starting months before tickets went live.
I also made sure to note cheerleaders and well-connected people I met along the way, marking them as priority invitees and sending them the ticket link ahead of public release. This served two purposes: it curated the right audience, and it created champions who helped broadcast the event as we got closer.
The posting strategy was deliberate. I committed to posting on LinkedIn at least four times a week — not just about the conference, but about wellness content in general. A podcast, my own industry analysis, a market map, and planning updates. The goal was to establish myself first as someone genuinely interested in the space, then as an entrepreneur launching a conference. When I started in May, my LinkedIn impressions were around 10K. By the time the conference happened, I’d crossed 1 million.
Callout: The viral post that drove 600+ sign-ups in 48 hours was the culmination of months of groundwork, not a one-day trick. It worked because the concentration of tier-one speakers was so high that people saw the lineup and felt they had to be part of it. But without five months of consistent posting and community building, I don’t believe it would have spread the way it did.
Step 7: Sell tickets and manage registrations
We used CVENT for event management (as required by Stanford). There are other ticketing and event platforms that I don’t have a formed opinion on. Use one that you like/are familiar with. The key decisions were registration types and pricing tiers — I allocated tickets across VIPs, speakers, media, founders, students, and the general public.
My perspective was that ticket prices could be increased but not lowered once set. This turned out to be the right instinct. We sold out of all 400 tickets within the first week, driven by the email list from the interest form (1,300+ people notified that only 400 tickets were available) and LinkedIn awareness.
Callout: The interest form effort earlier in the process is what made ticket sales possible. I leveraged those 1,300 emails to create urgency around a limited number of tickets. That, combined with organic social awareness, is what drove us to sell out twice.
Step 8: Prepare the content — moderator docs and prep calls
I created individual moderator documents for each panel: roughly three topics, with three to four questions each, along with the focus and goals of each topic. I got all panelists onto a prep call ahead of the event, which gave them a chance to build rapport and gave me a chance to vet the topics. The specific questions and topics on the moderator panel docs were not what mattered. Familiarizing the panelists with one another, building rapport, and discussing what they found exciting or interesting were important parts.
After each prep session, I cleaned the moderator documents and updated them with the revised topics. The moderators were entrusted with conducting a final run-through and adding any additional changes they personally found relevant.
Callout: Prep calls were where some of the best ideas surfaced. They also prevented surprises on stage and proactively built rapport. I highly recommend them for any event with panels.
Step 9: Coordinate the day-of operations
We had roughly 23 volunteers split across roles: check-in, ushers, overflow room management, timekeepers, speaker management, and floaters. The volunteer team met weekly in the four weeks leading up to the event.
Three things were essential: a detailed run-of-show document, clear delineation of responsibilities, and flexibility. I put one volunteer in charge of managing all the others so that I could focus on MC duties without getting pulled into operational fires.
Callout: Small details shift motivation. One volunteer updated our volunteer t-shirt design, and it drove a surprising amount of pride and buy-in from the rest of the team. Don’t underestimate the power of making people feel like they belong to something bigger.
Step 10: Capitalize on the momentum after
For the seven days post-event, I reposted, shared, and commented on as many conference-related posts as I could. I posted my own recap on the following Monday morning. I created a new Google Form to capture interest for next year’s event, because I knew the momentum wouldn’t stay top of mind for long. I set up WhatsApp groups (recommended by an attendee) to keep the community alive. And I emailed every sponsor and speaker to thank them.
Callout: The post-event window is short. If you don’t capture the energy within the first week, it fades. Have your follow-up plan ready before the conference happens, not after.
Managing costs throughout
Putting on a 400-person conference is not cheap. Throughout planning, unexpected costs kept coming up: lunch tables, livestreaming, extra linens, weekend fees. I maintained a P&L and kept a minimum 20% buffer at all times. When unknown costs arose, I added a 20-30% contingency to expected expenses and worked to raise that amount through sponsorships + ticket sales. Being overly conservative on known costs provided a buffer for the surprises that inevitably came near the end.
Top-line revenue came from both sponsorships and ticket sales (was a six-figure event). All funds went toward event expenses, and any remaining balance is going toward next year’s event.
The lessons that stayed with me
On vision and momentum: Pick a clear mission, then talk about it loudly. The more I clarified the “why” and shared it consistently, the more the right people self-selected into the conference. Just start — small early moves create compounding returns over time, even when it’s not obvious where they’ll lead.
On breaking bottlenecks: When each dependency blocks the next — event needs a date, date needs funding, funding comes from sponsors, sponsors need to see speakers — push on all fronts in parallel. Leverage your differentiating advantage. Stanford was real leverage, and using it intentionally unlocked credibility and access. And one keystone “yes” changes everything: the first high-signal supporter creates a cascade of trust.
On outreach and relationships: Make the value obvious in the first message, then follow up. It is a numbers game — sometimes the only strategy is volume and consistency. Warm introductions are disproportionately powerful: a single warm intro can shortcut weeks of cold outreach. Find champions and design for their incentives. Know each stakeholder’s “why” — speakers, sponsors, faculty, volunteers, and attendees all value different things, and the work is translating the same vision into their language.
On team and experience: Empower a strong support team with real ownership. Small details — a t-shirt, a gift bag, an invitation to a planning meeting — can shift people’s sense of belonging and motivation in outsized ways. Below is an example, where a volunteer made a much better t-shirt (bottom) that drove such belonging and excitement amongst the team. My first pass at a t-shirt is on the top.
On risk: Choose optimism, and pair it with a plan. Confidence without structure is fragile. Go slow on legal and reputational risk — when something high-stakes comes up, the right move is to pause, get counsel, think through all angles, and then react.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor E. Frankl
The Resources & Tools
Vision & Mission statement: This was a living and breathing document that I constantly updated from conversations with speakers, sponsors, mentors, and volunteers throughout the journey.
Rolodex of potential speakers
Rolodex of potential sponsors
Run of Show: An outline of the day, broken into 5 minute segments, noting where volunteers should be, what actions should be taking place, etc.
Flow of Venue:
Speaker Tracker
The tools
Below are the tools, applications, and services that I consistently used throughout the event planning.
Notion: My central hub for everything. From managing the rolodexes of speakers/sponsors to my general task management platform. I also operated my social media hub from Notion to track posting on socials
Superhuman: Email platform with user-friendly UI that helped me stay on top of emails through reminders and snippets.
Granola.AI: Call transcriber that helped me follow up with emails post-calls, track action items, and remind me of context across conversations
Apollo.io: Lead optimizer that helped me collect emails for a majority of speakers and sponsors
LinkedIn: Main social media platform that I posted and built community on. Also leveraged LinkedIn Sales Navigator for messaging and outreach, but was not as successful through this channel
AI (ChatGPT / Claude / Stanley): AI tools for content generation, drafting, research, summarizing, etc.
Google Suite (Sheets, Docs, Slides, Forms): Managing P&L, moderator sheets, Media tracking, volunteer organization, keynote presentation, creating/tracking interest forms, etc.
Lovable (initial website for interest): My first website was built on Lovable to serve as a central site outlining the vision, mission, and confirmed speakers. This was replaced with an official site through CVENT later on in the process.
CVENT (managing ticket sales & event website): Stanford’s approved vendor for event management through which we handled registration, tickets, event website/app, check-in process via Event-in-a-box, agenda and all backend logistics of the event.
What’s next for the conference
For the conference at Stanford, the Health and Well-being club at the Graduate School of Business will host it. Stanford has a formal process for student-led events, and the club will apply through this process for 2027. Given the reaction and demand from this year, I’m confident we’ll make it happen.
Beyond Stanford, the vision is still taking shape. It could expand to other universities or be held at a single flagship location. It could grow into a broader platform — events, content, community.
What’s next for me
My goal is to be at the forefront of this industry. That means supporting the thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives who are pushing this space forward — helping them build and scale businesses that matter. It means working to drive this industry from early adopters across the chasm to the early majority, and from there to real, population-level health improvement. That could take the form of event planning, community building, capital investment, or building my own company. The specific vehicle matters less than the mission: building great teams and businesses that create joy, purpose, and health in people’s lives.
A final thought
If you’ve stayed with this series for four weeks, thank you. Here’s what I want to leave you with.
After finishing this series, I hope you’ll consider joining this space. Not just as a founder or investor — although we need more of those. We need people working on the policy, science, research, and regulation sides. Because the work that’s being done cannot stay in Silicon Valley echo chambers or coastal conversations. It needs to reach the rest of the United States and improve health for all of us worldwide.
We are still at the precipice of this industry. We have not yet changed the way we take care of ourselves. And when I say “take care of ourselves,” I don’t mean just physical health. I mean holistic health — physical, mental, social, spiritual. When we take care of ourselves holistically, we find our purpose. We live a more loving, joyful life.
That is the goal of this entire effort. Not a conference. Not a market category. The goal is to help push people toward their most joyful life. And that starts with their health.
If you’re interested in attending, sponsoring, speaking, or getting involved in next year’s conference, sign up here: https://forms.gle/tBqzqdGgdrW9qEtj9
You can find me on LinkedIn or subscribe to this Substack for more on consumer health, entrepreneurship, and building things from scratch.
so good!
this is so good and very insightful.
i totally agree that nailing down your mission, vision, value proposition, client avatars, and other brand/business strategy components is crucial for any project!!!!