A few years ago, Pablo Gonzalez walked into a trade-show hall with a camera, a few lights, and a big idea.
Instead of another boring booth, he built a podcast recording booth.
He invited attendees - competitors, clients, even skeptics - to sit down for quick interviews. No sales pitch. Just smart conversation about the challenges nobody wanted to admit out loud.
By the end of the event, he’d made more allies, more content, and more impact than anyone with a six-figure booth budget.
That experiment became Be The Stage, Pablo’s agency devoted to helping founders turn relationships into reach through what he calls digital word of mouth.
And it eventually powered the meteoric rise of Vendoroo, an AI company for property-management pros that grew from $1 million to $30 million ARR by turning a community into a category.
From Community to Category
In our conversation, Pablo shares the origin story behind his obsession with community, born from a deeply personal moment at his brother’s funeral, when he saw 1,200 people show up to support his family.
That experience taught him that community isn’t a marketing tactic; it’s a survival mechanism. And he’s spent the last decade proving that lesson inside businesses.
At Vendoroo, he and the team discovered a hidden pain in property management: endless burnout.
Instead of leading with features, they led with empathy: evangelizing the problem through conversations, newsletters, and a podcast filmed right from the trade-show floor.
The result?
A movement that reframed AI from “job-taker” to “career-saver,” and an entirely new category built on agentic AI: software that acts like a teammate instead of a tool.
A Playbook for Category-Led Growth
What Pablo built is a living example of category design in motion:
Name the pain no one is addressing.
Evangelize the problem through story-driven content and live conversations.
Create a stage, not an ad campaign—turn prospects into collaborators.
Compile the movement into a newsletter, a summit, and a book.
Let the narrative compound.
Within a year, Vendoroo had:
A podcast (Property Management Framebreakers) with 5,000+ newsletter subscribers,
A virtual AI summit that drew 700 attendees,
And a best-selling industry book that literally converts conference attendees into customers.
All of it fueled by one principle: relationships > reach.
Why This Episode Matters
If you’re a founder trying to break into a crowded market, Pablo’s story is a masterclass in how to turn content into connection, and connection into category dominance.
You’ll learn:
How to use events as content engines
Why POV comes before promotion
And how “digital word of mouth” can outperform any paid ad strategy
This episode sits squarely inside the Summit Strike track of the upcoming Strike Marketing Summit, where Pablo will deliver his talk:
“Hijacking Your Industry Conference Without a Big Budget”
🎧 Listen to the full episode: From Podcast Booths to Category Kings: How Pablo Gonzalez Turned Digital Word of Mouth into a Growth Engine - now on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Then ask yourself: What stage could you build that makes your market the hero?
