Frontside Goes SXSW

In the spirit of learning and connecting, this year I popped into Austin, TX to attend SXSW. I focused mostly on the Business & Entrepreneurship talks and here are a few takeaways:

AI is Everywhere

You pretty much couldn’t spit without hitting someone who wanted to talk to you about AI. Nearly all of the business talks covered some AI-related topic. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of substance here. It really boiled down to the fact that AI is making productive people and builders much more productive. We use plenty of AI-powered tools at Frontside Consulting and it’s not much of a surprise.

My takeaway here was essentially that there’s a lot of hype, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Very much like the dot-com boom in the ’90s and 2000s, everything has AI slapped onto it. Just don’t get sucked into the hype and invest in some fancy-pants startup. Many ideas are getting introduced to the market and only a handful of practical, valuable ideas are going to stick around. Similar to the dot-com era, it’s also going to create entire industries.

I’ve come to the conclusion that AI is like gunpowder. If you don’t adopt it, you’ll get taken out by someone who does. We’re spending a lot of time and energy learning and building AI into our workflows. For some additional insight on how we’re using AI in performance marketing check out our blog “Best Practices for Prompting AI Image Generators to Create Stunning Marketing Assets”. And stay tuned much more AI-related content is on the way!

Creators are Businesses

This one might be a little obvious for some of you, but viewing online content creators as businesses is a unique perspective for me. Mr. Beast might be obvious, but there’s an entire industry and playbook on how your favorite YouTube personality expands and grows their business. The YouTube channel is just the customer acquisition part of the game. Similar to how many startups will burn millions creating their userbase, content creators can do the same with sweat equity in producing engaging content on their platform of choice.

Again, it’s actually nothing new, but the ability to acquire an audience and then expand into relevant products and services is an age-old gameplan. One of the O.G’s: Martha Stewart:

Her user engagement channel? Television. Then she expanded using her personal brand into every kind of product on the market. Famously partnerting up with another great content creator

…brownies with a side of insider trading?

The playbook of building an audience and finding the revenue stream afterwards works in Silicon Valley, YouTube and Television.

Technology Will Be Everywhere

Yes, AI was the talk of the town, but the general sense that technology is here to save the day was definitely in the air at SXSW 2025. This is the town that has fully autonomous Waymo taxis driving around, so it stands to reason that Austin would embrace this kind of attitude.

Whether it’s robotics, electric trucks, biotech medicine and even education the attitude that technology is here to save the day was palpable. Personally, I fully welcome it. I can’t wait for a robot to do my laundry.

That’s it for now - stay tuned for more insights from my time at SXSW. We’ll definitely be returning to Austin for more.