We have a hard limit on self-promotion to at most 3 slides in your entire deck. We believe that’s enough for people to understand what you do presently, the bulk of the talk should be showing people why you do the thing you do now and what makes you uniquely good at it.

LinkedIn exists, Wikipedia exists, ChatGPT exists, we believe those are the best places to share curriculum or X 101 style lessons of the basics of your field. If there’s an objectively correct answer to the problem, sharing is probably best done in a mass medium. We’re interested in the messy problems with many or no one right answer, how you solved them and, more importantly, *why* you chose that path of tradeoffs vs the many that could be chosen. The reason we want you on stage is to deliver content only you can deliver. 

You’re not competing with other Fractionals, you’re competing with apathy and “why can’t I just do it myself”. So lean into it and teach people how to do it themselves! We believe the best way to convince someone to hire you is to teach them to the best of your ability, how they can do your job without you. It’s only after doing it themselves that they understand why it’s worth paying money for someone to take it off their hands and the person who taught them is a natural person for them to reach out to. Thus, we want you to focus on what the scrappy version of your job can look like and how people can DIY.

Your approach is not everyone’s approach, that’s what makes you, you. Give people a clear sense of your particular view of the world that is distinctive. Some blog posts we feel embody this type of approach:

• How I ship projects at big tech companies

• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

  Notice these two posts could have only come from these two authors because they draw on specific life experience and present a view not everyone would agree on.

We get the natural instinct to want to cram too much into one talk, think about this talk as the first in a series of 3 and, if you’re popular, we will be looking to help you develop the 2nd and 3rd talk in the series to keep your content fresh.

We believe a tight 40 minutes is the right length for a great talk before people’s attention starts flagging. We highly encourage you to rehearse your talk with a stopwatch before you submit it and we will push back to trim the talk if we believe it can’t be delivered 

A talk that is the same every time you give it could have been a Youtube video. We want you to take advantage of the talent in the room to make sure each talk only could have been delivered to the people in that room. Think about ways to build in interactivity into the talk, use simple “raise your hand if” questions to help get the people warmed up but use it as an opportunity 

Think about the takeaways you want people to have. We expect the majority of your leads aren’t the people in the room, but via word of mouth, your ideas and reputation can spread. Figure out a way to distill your lessons to be memorable and catchy.