Y’all, I am typing this from my couch, still recovering from a whirlwind few days in Las Vegas at the 2026 TpT Forward conference. Every year I come home with a notebook full of scribbles and a brain full of big ideas. This year was no exception. I’ll admit, this trip felt a little different. It was my first time leaving Gem* for a work trip, and let’s just say Matt earned some serious husband points holding down the fort while I sat in sessions taking notes like my life depended on it. Sometimes, the mom guilt is too much, but it also serves as a reminder that I’m building something for my family!
Twenty years of TpT this year, which is wild to sit with! I’ve watched this platform grow right alongside my own little corner of it. This conference always leaves me equal parts exhausted and lit up. Here’s what stuck with me most this year!
Lesson #1: Draw your line before the flood comes.
Ayo Jones opened the conference with a session that hit different than your typical “hustle harder” keynote. Her framing was that we’re all facing some kind of flood, whether that’s burnout, grief, or just the slow creep of overwhelm. The key isn’t avoiding the water; it’s deciding ahead of time what you will and won’t accept. If this happens, then I will do that. She talked about only carrying what matters for the next leg of the journey and trusting yourself enough to actually honor the line you drew. I walked out of that room with my own THINK statements scribbled in the margins: what am I chasing, and what am I building now that the flood cleared some old footprint away? If you only take one thing from this post, let it be this: draw your line before you need it.
Lesson #2: Stop telling. Start showing.
Diego Napoles’ session on social media was hands down one of the most practical hours of the whole conference. His big point was that most teacher content on social gets ignored because we tell people about our products instead of showing them the transformation. Nobody wants to hear about your “20 full color posters;” they want to feel what it’s like to stop repeating yourself 50 times a day because you can just point to the visual. The four-part formula he shared is something I’ve already started weaving into my own posts: lead with a “what if,” share a real classroom moment, frame the before and after, then make it stupidly easy to take the next step. Facts tell. Stories sell. I keep coming back to that line!
Lesson #3: Your email list should work even when you can’t.
This one felt like it was written specifically for what I’ve been building lately. Ashley Wright and Erin Waters walked through what they called the Evergreen Email Marketing Machine, and it completely reframed how I think about my own sequences. Instead of asking “what should I write this week,” the better question is “what should happen next for this specific subscriber.” The goal is to set up interest tags, attach rules to those tags, and let my email list start guiding itself based on what people actually click and buy rather than blasting the same email to everyone. The idea that a subscriber isn’t locked into one lane, that they can show interest in multiple topics and get routed accordingly, THAT was the piece I didn’t know I needed. My poor notebook is covered in arrows and tag ideas from this one session alone! Ashley was super sweet and helpful during the collaboration lab; I was able to set up one of my pillars in a days’ time.
Lesson #4: You don’t need more time. You need better systems!
Lisa Holladay’s “Stepping Into CEO Mode” session was the gut check I needed. Her question stopped me cold: if you stopped working on your business today, could it still run without you? Hustle mode has us doing everything reactively. CEO mode means planning, batching, and eventually delegating the tasks that drain you so you can spend your limited hours on the things only you can do. I don’t have a contracted VA or OBM yet, but this session gave me a real starting point for what to hand off first (hello, uploading and formatting) versus what stays firmly in my hands for now (hello, actual product ideas).
There was SOOOO much more packed into these few days: panels on relationship marketing, a deep dive into Meta ads, a whole session on the small data moves that actually move the needle on TpT. My notebook is full; my brain is fuller. If I’ve learned anything from four TpT Forward conferences now, it’s this: trying to implement everything at once is a fast track to burnout. This year, I’m picking my one bite at a time: building out that evergreen sequence, one tag at a time, and letting the rest simmer for later.
ACTIONABLE STEPS: If you were at TpT Forward this year, I’d love to hear what stuck with you most! And if you’ve never been, is this the year you finally go? ICYMI: TpT Forward 2027 will be in Philadelphia!
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