"I spend more time prepping for conventions than actually making art."
Packing lists in notes apps. Inventory tracked in spreadsheets. Sales data scattered across four platforms. And somehow creators had to show up to a convention booth ready to sell — every time.
I'm not a convention vendor. I'm a builder. But I kept hearing the same story from TTRPG designers, illustrators, and Artist Alley sellers: before every show, the scramble. After every show, hours manually entering sales just to figure out if the event was worth it.
The story that stuck: a creator undersold one product line twice at a three-day convention because they didn't know they were running low until they were already at the booth. No real-time inventory view. No idea which channel — online store, convention, wholesale — was actually making money. Running a business without being able to tell which parts of it worked.
So I built BoothKeepOS. A business manager for indie creators and convention vendors — TTRPG designers, illustrators, Artist Alley sellers, anyone running a booth while also selling online.
It handles convention prep — packing lists, booth inventory, pre-show summaries so you actually know what you're walking into. Then after the event, it pulls your sales data into a unified dashboard so you can finally see which channel is worth your time.
What's your current convention prep nightmare? The spreadsheet setup, the "I forgot to pack this" moment, the post-event accounting headache — I want to hear what's eating your time before you even get to the show floor. Really hoping to learn from people who've been doing this longer than me.
What caught my attention was that the story starts with packing lists and inventory, but ends with not knowing which parts of the business were actually working.
Those feel related, but not necessarily like the same problem.
Reading this, I found myself wondering whether convention prep is the thing people experience most visibly, or whether it's simply the place where a broader business-management problem becomes impossible to ignore.
That's exactly the distinction I've been sitting with, honestly.
Convention prep is where it breaks — it's the moment you're staring at three spreadsheets at midnight wondering if you even have enough stock to make the trip worth it. But you're right that it's not the root problem. The root problem is that most indie creators have no idea which channels are actually profitable, which products carry the booth, or whether last month was good or just busy.
Convention prep just makes that invisible thing impossible to ignore anymore. It's the forcing function.
That's why BoothKeepOS started there — it's the pain that's acute enough to change behavior. But the dashboard is meant to persist between events, because the inventory chaos and the "which parts of my business are working" question are the same data problem, just at different moments in time.
That's what I found interesting too.
Once convention prep becomes the forcing function, it's easy for the product to inherit the convention-prep framing even if the underlying problem is broader.
The reason that stood out to me is that those two interpretations can lead to very different decisions about what the product is actually becoming.
Happy to share the fuller thought if useful. What's the best email to reach you on?
Yes, please share it. I'd genuinely find that useful. You can reach me at [email protected]
Just sent you a note.