Hey buddy,

I also run a manufacturing business.

Every year, there are trade fairs and expos happening specifically for the manufacturing industry. Events where buyers meet suppliers, where deals get done, where you find out what's changing in your space before everyone else does.

The problem is finding them.

There is one website that covers this — 10times.com. It has 300,000+ events listed across 248 countries. 50 million users. Every B2B event you could possibly want to find.

It is also one of the most cluttered, confusing, hard-to-use websites I've ever sat in front of.

Filters that don't work properly. Pages that load slowly. Irrelevant results mixed in everywhere. A design that feels like it was built in 2014 and never touched again.

I use it because there's nothing better. Not because it's good.

That's the idea.

This one is personal. I am the customer.

I would pay for a clean, fast, niche-specific trade fair tracker tomorrow. No social network features, no ticket sales, no bloat. Just: here are the upcoming industry events, here's the date, location, size, and who's exhibiting. That's it.

10times tried to be everything to everyone. That's exactly why the door is open for something that does one thing well.

The product is a niche-focused B2B event discovery tool. Clean, fast, and built around the specific needs of professionals who attend trade fairs for business purposes — not casual event-goers.

Here's what it does and how it's different:

Niche-first design. Users don't see 300,000 events. They pick their industry — fasteners, food processing, medical devices, construction, textiles, whatever — and see only what's relevant to them. Filtered by date, country, size, and type (trade fair vs conference vs expo). Nothing else in the way.

Smart alerts. Set it and forget it. A user enters their niche, their country preference, and how far out they want to plan. The tool emails them when a relevant event is announced, when registration opens, and a reminder 30 days before. No more manually checking a cluttered website every few weeks.

Clean event profiles. Each event gets a simple, scannable page. Dates, location, expected attendance, key exhibitor categories, past editions, link to official site. No noise. Just what a buyer or seller needs to decide if it's worth going.

Exhibitor intel (the upsell). For premium users, show who exhibited at past editions — company names, categories, countries. This is gold for sales teams who want to know who they'll meet before they book the flight.

How it makes money:

Free tier — browse upcoming events, basic filters, up to 3 saved niches.

Pro tier at $49/year — unlimited niches, smart email alerts, full event profiles, exhibitor history. This is the tier every serious B2B professional pays for without blinking. They spend thousands on flights and booths. $49/year to plan better is nothing.

Enterprise tier at $99/month — team access, CRM integrations, exportable exhibitor lists, custom niche monitoring. Aimed at sales teams and procurement departments who attend multiple events per year.

The data problem — and how you solve it:

10times already proved people will submit and maintain event listings if the platform is useful. You start with a manually curated database for 5–10 niches, get the early users in, and let the community fill gaps over time. You also scrape publicly available trade association calendars — most industries have one — and industry-specific publications that list upcoming events.

You don't need 300,000 events on day one. You need 500 deeply accurate, well-maintained listings across 10 niches. That's enough to charge for.

Why Right Now

10times is unfunded. 41 employees. Built in 2014, never raised a rupee of outside investment. They've hit a ceiling trying to be a global everything-platform.

The B2B event market is enormous — global trade shows generate over $34 billion annually and the industry is growing. But the discovery layer is stuck in the past. Nobody has come in and built the clean, modern, niche-focused version of this.

The window is open specifically because 10times is too big and bloated to pivot, and too small to defend against a focused competitor who does one niche beautifully.

Start with one industry. Nail it. Expand from there.

The One Thing That Makes It Work

Data quality beats data quantity every time.

10times has more events than anyone. It doesn't matter because half the listings are outdated, incomplete, or irrelevant to what you searched for. The reason people leave frustrated isn't the volume — it's the accuracy.

If your tool has 500 events and every single one is verified, current, and exactly in the niche the user asked for — you win. Every time.

Obsess over data quality in year one. Everything else is secondary.

Go Build It

Pick one industry you know or have access to. Manually curate the next 12 months of trade events for that niche. Build a simple landing page. Charge $49/year for early access.

If 50 people pay, you have product-market fit and $2500/year before you've written a single line of production code.

Go.

Talk soon, Kris

P.S. — The best competitor research you can do is be the frustrated customer. I am that customer for this product. Every time I use 10times and want to throw my laptop, I think — someone should fix this. That someone doesn't have to be me. But it should be someone.