Insights from 300+ Conversations with Marketers & Founders at SXSW

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At SXSW this year in Austin, I spent a 4 days at Lumos House, an exclusive event we put together at Blindspot together with Andrew Yeung. This is the 6th Lumos House we’ve organized over the past year and I couldn’t be more grateful - it’s a great opportunity to meet and connect with authentic people.

Over the course these long days (and longer nights), I had conversations with more than 300 marketers, founders, and curious people trying to figure out what’s next.

And they all reminded me of a very good lateral answer to this question:

An answer, as usual, at the end.

Back to SXSW: certain themes kept coming up in conversations. Here are five that stuck with me.

1. Everyone and their mother is building an AI wrapper

Almost every other person I talked to had some kind of AI tool in the works. Most of them were wrappers around ChatGPT, Claude or open source models. Same tech, different skin.

But a few stood out. What separated them wasn’t the model or the prompts. It was domain expertise and distribution. The founders who really understood the problem space could build tools that felt less like a gimmick and more like a superpower. And the ones with a clear path to distribution (through existing communities, channels, or partnerships) are the ones that had a shot at real traction.

At this point, LLMs are commodities. The moat is who you’re building for and how you’re getting to them.

2. Social media is getting weird(er)

A lot of people admitted they’re posting less. Some said they’ve fully stopped. But they just meant they’re not posting stuff themselves anymore, because their feeds are more active than ever due to AI is filling the gap.

A shocking number of people are using GPT to write LinkedIn thought pieces, marketers are generating entire Twitter threads without typing a single sentence, and even investor updates written and formatted by bots. Some folks just batch everything, schedule it, and never look back.

There’s something deeply off about it, especially on networks like LinkedIn and X cluttered with sales people selling to other sales people, but no one’s quite sure what to do next.

3. The best tools are unapologetically niche

One of the clearest signals from this week: the most loved products weren’t trying to do everything.

They were solving tiny, specific problems. A note-taking tool just for therapists. An AI that writes cold emails, but only for logistics companies. A dashboard for indie CPG brands tracking retail placement.

It’s easy to dismiss these as “too narrow,” but that’s the point. Niche tools can speak directly to their users. They don’t need onboarding guides or clever branding. They just work.

If you’re trying to build something that matters, “niche” might actually be your biggest advantage.

4. People want real conversations

There was this moment on the second day where I realized how relieved people looked once the small talk dropped. You could feel the shift when a conversation moved from pitch mode into something honest.

A lot of people said the same thing: they’re tired of being sold to. Tired of the LinkedIn jargon. Tired of pretending they have it all figured out.

The best conversations this week weren’t about products. They were about what’s hard right now. What’s confusing. What no one’s talking about. There’s a real hunger for unscripted spaces. It’s probably why Lumos House worked. Even on panels people were genuine and talked about things that mattered.

5. Founders are bootstrapping by default

This one surprised me. A growing number of early-stage founders aren’t raising money anymore. Not because they can’t, but because they don’t need to.

With AI tools, no-code platforms, and open-source everything, it’s possible to go from idea to MVP to first revenue without ever taking a call with an investor. A few folks I met had hit meaningful revenue with no team, no funding, just a laptop and some grit.

It’s a reminder that capital is no longer the starting point. For a lot of people, it’s a later-stage decision. The real constraint now isn’t money. It’s attention.

And before we end, gotta give a shout out to today’s sponsor, Morning Brew: if you aren’t subscribed already, what are you waiting for?

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Answer: Be a billionaire.

Just a reminder that it’s important to take into account where you started, not only where you ended up.