My Charlotte Milemadness Summary: A Great DO!

Last weekend, we all flew to Charlotte for the first Milemadness DO. It was a smaller one-day conference of about 100 people and we presented different strategies for earning points.  I was scheduled to speak between Frequent Miler and Marathon Man. Both are extremely engaging, witty and great speakers. Needless to say, Frequent Miler was a tough act to follow and Marathon Man was a tough act to precede. I only wish someone had made a video of Marathon Man’s talk, although maybe it’s better this way. If you were there, you shared a completely, unique and non-replicable experience.

Frequent Miler announced me as the winner of the Milemadness March challenge and, in my talk, I aimed to cover the strategy that I took. Although I did bring up Paypal cards as something efficient I currently do, that was not the majority of what I did during the tournament. I actually just bought Vanilla Reloads, something everyone knew about. Of course, I scaled it and made it as efficient as possible and that was the point I tried to get across: that you don’t need a secret, complex, crazy strategy. Just scale the simplest thing you can and make it efficient – and, if you’re going to do anything at a drugstore, get a 5% cash back card! I cannot say enough how pleasantly surprised I was at the positive response I received to my talk, my blog (I had no idea I had such dedicated fans) and the kind words everyone had.

With that said, of course, I had a great time! But it sounds like everyone else did too. I think that the fact that the conference was small and focused really made it great. The topic was specifically earning points and everyone knew exactly what to expect. Moreover, everyone at the conference shared the same experience. I know that, when I was a mathematician traveling to workshops and conferences, we’d have the best meetings when we’d literally lock 50 people in a Polish castle for a week (I’m not joking) or strand them atop a hill in the Black Forest and see what we come up with.

Matt from Saverocity was the main organizer for the conference and I think he did an amazing job with it. At one point, we commented how good the food was and he said something like “That’s just luck! I didn’t come down here and test it!” After lunch, we had a number of talks with Tahsir and Amol from HackMyTrip giving a great presentation on various prepaid gift card tricks and other speakers sharing a few tricks of their own. Once talks ended, we had about an hour break before the cocktail party so Tahsir, Amol, Svetlana and I took an opportunity to take Tahsir’s nice rented sports car to Walmart and unload a slew of pre-bought gift cards. Svetlana and I pointed out we have “matching MS bags”, which are cute little cross-body bags we got from Juicy Couture (mine is blue and hers is pink)… to which Tahsir and Amol responded “We have matching MS wallets”. Can everyone join me in saying “Aww..”? :)

Matt has a very nice discussion of the planning that went into the DO, including fully exposed financials (to be clear, none of us made any profit from running the DO – it was mostly just fun – and the speakers and organizers all paid for their own travel and hotels). We’re already enthusiastically planning the next one and added Tahsir to the organizing committee along with Matt, MilesAbound, Frequent Miler and myself. Nothing is set at this point, but the one thing we do intend to do is to make the location more accessible to those on the West Coast. I really hope this will open up the possibility to attend for those who couldn’t make it this time and I’m sure we’ll have a complete blast!

I’d like to end by saying thank you for all who attended and it was great meeting each one of you that I had a chance to speak with. I also met a few other bloggers and Twitter personalities I am regularly in touch with, but have never met in person. I won’t start making a list as, no doubt, I’ll inadvertently leave someone out. I certainly hope to meet face to face many more readers in the future and I cannot thank everyone enough or say how rewarding it is to hear everyone’s positive feedback.