Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

In the age of AI, your product is a commodity. Your community isn't.
When anyone can ship a working product by talking to an AI, product stops being a defensible advantage. Features get cloned in a weekend. What can't be cloned is a room full of people who trust you, use the thing, and tell each other about it. Distribution was always the hard part. AI just made it the only hard part. 

This session talks about how to use community as both the go-to-market and the moat, and shows how startups actually build one: choosing the room before the roadmap, measuring social and business impact, and treating every community event as part of the business plan.