The last of these updates was in July (which I’m terribly sorry about), and quite a bit has happened since then.
I’ll do my best to collect my thoughts and give you the highest highs and the lowest lows. Still, I should preface this by saying that my wife constantly makes fun of me for how bad I am at reconstructing what has happened to me.
So, in no particular order…
It was called Experience-Led Commerce, and it was Nebulab’s first attempt at hosting our own events. On September 23 in Milan, we gathered some incredible speakers from world-renowned brands such as Puma and Venchi, along with a hand-selected audience of e-commerce executives and operators, to discuss questions such as:
Despite this being our first experiment, we had some pretty lofty goals: we wanted it to be relaxed but not shabby; sophisticated but not inaccessible; contrarian but not alienating. We wanted to give people something that would take them out of their tactical day-to-day, make them think about something bigger, and give them a new perspective, even if only for a second; we wanted something to remember.
The logistics were absolutely brutal. I had been pretty pessimistic when estimating how much work this would be. As it turned out, I had been conservative.
The main problem with hosting an event of any kind is the number of trade-offs and dependencies you need to juggle: the location must be just the right size; people must be invited just at the right time, you need to do just the right amount of overbooking, and on and on it goes.
Overall, it took us about six months from start to finish. Personally, I spent the last six/eight weeks before the event not really doing anything that wasn’t coordinating speakers, inviting people, and rehearsing my keynote. It was unnerving.
And it was a smashing success.
Everything, literally everything, from the location to the content to the vibes was just right. We talked, we ate, we laughed, and we learned a thing or two. Even though I don’t particularly enjoy big crowds, and even though I’d much rather write in public than speak in public, I found it beautiful and thought-provoking and exhilarating—in no small part thanks to the incredible speakers we had.
10/10 would do it again. 10/10 will do it again.
If you speak Italian, or you have the patience for YouTube’s subtitle translation, you can watch the whole thing here.
One day, I might publish an essay on the things I’ve learned about hosting events, but I feel like it’s a bit early for that.
Around the end of November, we had the privilege of pitching Nebulab’s services to one of the largest fashion conglomerates in Italy (and in Europe). I can’t share the name yet, but you’ll hear about them soon, if everything goes well.
We knew that they deeply cared about the aesthetics of the presentation, and that our deck would have to be absolutely flawless if we wanted to get our message across. With this in mind, I set out to make something that would wow and that we could (ideally) reuse.
In the process of doing this, I realized how much modern presentation software sucks:
Because I had some time to spare, I decided to try to solve these pains once and for all. Specifically, I wanted a presentation framework that would:
Not being a designer, I made a quick-and-dirty prototype in Figma Make to get the visuals right. Then, I painstakingly cleaned up the vibe-coded mess and wrapped it into a private NPM package I called Igniter—as in, it ignites the hearts of anyone who sees such a presentation.
Igniter is just a good old set of Tailwind-styled, React-powered components that allow you to build a Web presentation. It comes with a set of reusable UI components, slide layouts, and entire slides for common use cases we face at Nebulab, but it also allows you to build slides from scratch if you want. Plus, it lets you either export your presentation as a PDF or deploy it to Vercel+Cloudflare with a single command.
At the moment, it’s very specific to Nebulab, but I plan to make it more generic, open-source it, and write a proper breakdown at some point.
If nothing else, it made my life slightly better, so I’m hopeful it can do the same for others!