Hi {{First Name|friend}}

Warren Buffett's annual shareholder meeting is the most valuable & famous event in all of finance.

Kenny Katzgrau just started something similar for his industry: local news.

Kenny is the founder of BroadStreet, a SaaS ad platform that helps small local publishers compete with Google & Meta in selling ads to businesses in their local community.

Like every B2B SaaS startup fighting in a crowded space, he & his team were busy as hell.

But amidst all that craziness, Kenny decides to host this outlandish TED Talk style gathering for his customers to attend in-person.

Not to sell them software, but to champion & celebrate local news.

This might sound insane, given the amount of effort it requires & the delayed ROI, but Kenny was adamant.

He was taking a page out of one of his inspirations: Charlie Munger.

As a public company in the 1970s, Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger were obligated to have annual gatherings for their Berkshire Hathaway stockholders.

But these two did something nobody else in corporate America had done. They sat on a stage for 6 hours & answered every question, unfiltered.

No PR handler. No time limit. No pre-screened questions - just real talk on the state of their businesses, how their value investing philosophy works & why it works.

For 20+ years, it was a small event, consisting of a few hundred stockholders.

Then it tipped.

Suddenly, 40,000 people were flying in from every continent & hotel rooms in Omaha booked out months in advance. Major business leaders like Bill Gates started attending & financial journalists timed their year around it.

But here’s the thing: Buffett & Munger didn’t host this to sell more stock.

This wasn't a marketing event.

It was a gathering to celebrate the ethos that built the company.

It's where the investing weirdos, who spent 51 weeks a year being told they were crazy, got to look around & realize they weren't alone.

For the true believers of value investing, this was their pilgrimage & a chance to meet their spiritual leaders.

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That's the same move Kenny ran for his niche.

He called it "Born to Run the Local News."

He sent out a signal to his community in the most New Jersey way possible:

If Springsteen wrote a song about the passion behind community news, who & what would he write about?

And 600 local news publishers, reporters & journalism supporters from all over the country answered that call.

140 of them actually showed up in person to the Stone Pony bar at the Jersey Shore, the iconic venue of Bruce Springsteen & one that gave birth to so many other rebellious rock stars.

Some attendees flew in from Florida. One took a bus from Michigan. Heads of billion-dollar local news funds showed up.

They all straggled in on a Tuesday morning to see Kenny dressed up in a '85-era Springsteen outfit and watched him give a marathon all-day presentation on the fight to protect local news, interspersed with publisher interviews, irreverent comedy sketches & Bruce Springsteen sing-alongs.

It was one of the zaniest non-corporatey events for a B2B SaaS startup to host.

But after seeing it, I am now convinced every ambitious founder needs to do this

Most founders make the mistake of chasing an audience.

But Kenny understands the mechanics of cult customers better than most SaaS founders I've seen.

He deliberately designed Born to Run the Local News to attract his raging hot fans first.

Because who the hell else would ride a bus from halfway across the country & wave a Long Live Local News flag in a cramped dive bar on a sweaty Tuesday afternoon.

Only the true followers will pay that price. And they’ll do it to prove their commitment to the cause, mostly to themselves. And once they do, it activates them. They go back out into the world & start making noise to attract the masses.

They're like CrossFit members — obsessed with their gym tribe & bringing it up in the first 5 minutes of any conversation.

In an AI arms race era where every firm competes with 10 identical products, this cult customer loyalty is the center that will hold.

Their devotion is one of our last real moats.

Protect it.

The event had incredible editing, pop culture references, publisher interviews & Springsteen music. Kenny even wove in his own story of building RedBankGreen, a hyperlocal news site he runs.

The team also inserted funny sketches from spoofing an arrogant tech giant’s strategy meeting to doing a It’s a Wonderful Life parody for a new leader who joined them. They had him re-create the scenes from the movie, except this was about him trying to get into local news.

It was quirky, entertaining, and most importantly, it was on brand for them: epic & playful.

This combination of meaning, spectacle & fun is not just window dressing - it’s world-building.

And world-building is how loyalists become lifers.

Because our truest customers not only want a reason to come together, they also want to be wowed when they do. They want to feel the full spectrum of human emotions and become part of a great big story.

In some ways, they want a religious experience.

We’ve got to give it to them.

If we’re truly going up against the Goliaths, we have to use the only real slingshot we got:

The stories of the people in the struggle.

Throughout the entire event, as Kenny was speaking, he’d often intersperse his talk with interviews of editors, journalists & newspaper owners speaking about their personal experiences in running a local community news business.

It was fun, real & so many of them were deeply moving.

They shared the hows & whats, the highs & the lows, but most importantly they shared why they chose to do this. Why even after being in such an unappreciated, low-paying job, this work still matters so much to them.

For someone who doesn’t know much about this world, I found myself deeply invested in their stories. I actually teared up at certain points watching the livestream.

I am now convinced that supporting local news is one of the surest ways to save our democracy.

That is the power of a true underdog story.

We all have an underdog story nested deep inside our customer base. We just have to find that note and play it over & over again, until it tugs at our heartstrings.

Because that’s what sparks a beautiful movement.

One that will burn long after the event is done.