You already know the feeling.
Three days at a conference. Dozens of conversations. A stack of handwritten notes. Business cards in your pocket. A WhatsApp group you got added to. At least fifteen people you told yourself you’d reach out to.
Then you get home. Luggage gets unpacked. Email is backed up. Meetings are stacked. And somewhere in the chaos, all that conference momentum quietly dies.
I’ve done this enough times that I decided to build a system around it. I call it the conference commando workflow.
The Problem: You Have Better Conversations Than Follow-Up
Most conferences generate a lot of raw material. At a recent 3-day event, I came home with:
- A PDF membership directory with over 100 pages of attendees
- Granola transcripts from multiple small-group sessions — 10-person conversations that I’d recorded throughout the event
- Six pages of handwritten notes
- Photos I’d taken of whiteboards and session materials
- A WhatsApp group with names, numbers, and context
In the old world, turning all of that into something actionable would require hours of manual work: going through notes, looking up names, adding people to a CRM, writing down what we discussed. Realistically, most people never do it fully. The follow-up is partial, late, and weaker than the original conversation deserved.
The Capture Everything principle is the starting point: recordings, notes, PDFs, photos — all of it is raw material that has downstream value. The problem isn’t capturing it. Most people actually do capture things at events. The problem is what happens after.
The Workflow
Here’s how the conference commando workflow runs.
Step 1: Centralize everything into Google Drive immediately.
As soon as I’m home, all the materials go into one folder: the directory PDF, the Granola transcript files, photos of my handwritten notes. The WhatsApp group chat gets exported too.
The reason for Google Drive first is that it solves the “too much for a single chat window” problem. When I first tried feeding a 100-page guest directory directly into ChatGPT, it timed out and crashed. Drive acts as the intake layer — the materials are accessible to agents without requiring you to paste everything into a prompt.
Step 2: Run the Lindy workflow.
The Lindy workflow does four things:
- Extracts every new person I met from across all the materials and adds them to Airtable (name, company, what we discussed, any notes)
- Pulls the key ideas and learnings from each session transcript
- Identifies project opportunities that came up in conversation
- Generates a task list of actual follow-up items with context
The output isn’t a summary. It’s a structured brief. Every person I met has a record. Every conversation that had an idea in it has a note. Every commitment I made or intention I stated has a task.
Step 3: Review and send.
I go through the Airtable records, make any corrections, and start working the follow-up list. Most of the heavy lifting is already done.
Why This Works: The 80-20 Principle for Agents
The 80-20 agent building framework says to automate the tasks that happen regularly and cause the most friction — not the impressive one-off use cases.
Post-conference follow-up seems like a one-off, but anyone who attends multiple events per year knows it’s actually a recurring problem. The same friction hits every single time. And the cost of not solving it is compounding: missed relationships, unmade introductions, project ideas that never got off the ground.
Building the workflow once means it runs every time. The ROI compounds.
There’s also a timing insight worth naming. The reason most conference follow-up underperforms isn’t effort — it’s lag. The longer you wait, the colder the connection. People remember you well right after the event. Two weeks later, you’re a vague memory.
With the conference commando workflow, I’m usually back in contact with the most important people within 48 hours of getting home. Not because I’m faster, but because the system is.
What the Output Actually Looks Like
For a three-day event with about 80 attendees, the workflow produces:
- An Airtable base with every new contact, tagged by conversation type and follow-up priority
- A project ideas document pulling the most interesting threads from session discussions
- A task list with specific actions (email X about Y, connect A and B, read the paper Z mentioned)
The whole thing runs in about 30 minutes once the workflow is set up.
Compare that to the alternative: hours of manual work, or — more often — a pile of notes that sits untouched until the next event makes you feel guilty.
The Real Insight
The conference commando isn’t about networking automation. It’s about not wasting the networking you already did.
You went to the event. You had the conversations. You exchanged contact information. All of that value is sitting in a pile of raw materials. The workflow just unlocks it — quickly, completely, and while the relationships are still warm.
That’s the thing most productivity advice misses about conferences. The ROI isn’t in going. It’s in what you do in the 72 hours after you get home.
This workflow uses Lindy, Airtable, and Granola. If you want to build something similar, the Two Hour Workday workshop covers the full agent design process including how to structure multi-source ingestion workflows.
