Hypergrowth has almost locked up its final schedule and lineup of speakers. The first annual conference of software company Drift, which produces a messaging platform for marketing and sales, will take place on September 25 at the State Room. The main focus? Personal and professional growth.
“It’s less of a conference about ‘Hey, here’s five ways to get better at marketing’ or ‘Here’s five ways to target Facebook ads,’” David Gerhardt, director of marketing at Drift, said in an interview. “It’s all about people who have grown brands and being responsible for growing movements.”
Gerhard said that confirmed speakers at Hypergrowth have one thing in common: they’ve grown something from nothing and turned it into a big movement. The list of the marketing executives, storytellers and artists who will be taking the stage at Hypergrowth includes Olympic medalist Nastia Liukin, who restarted her career as an entrepreneur - and is now building an app for gymnasts called Grander - after retiring from professional artistic gymnast, and Brogan Graham, who started a free fitness movement that has spread to 41 cities around the world in four years.
“We want people to be there to learn, as opposed to being on their laptops all day,” Gerhardt added.
Since Drift basically spun out of HubSpot, the fact that Hypergrowth partially overlaps with HubSpot conference Inbound - scheduled for four days starting September 25 - may not be considered a mere coincidence.
Gerhardt said that there’s no particular reason for the scheduling conflict. “We know that there’s traditionally a lot of marketing and sales people in town that week,” he said.
However, Gerhard and his former boss at HubSpot Mike Volpe (now CMO at Cybereason) made a bet about the number of people attending Hypergrowth. If Gerhard gets 1,000 people attending, Volpe will do Gerhard's job for a day, he said.
Asked what he would say to Volpe about the bet, Gerhard said he can’t wait to have Volpe coming to the office to do his job. “He’d be really helpful in starting to help plan Hypergrowth for 2018… He can even help me set a goal for the 2018 conference, since we’re going to get 1,000 people.”
The full price ticket for Hypergrowth 2017 is $699.
