Nobody Likes Event Matchmaking Apps. Not One Person. AgentConf Starts From That.

Before writing a line of code, Leonardo asked around: did anyone actually like event matchmaking apps? Not a single person said yes. Not attendees, not even the event organizers. The complaints were always the same three: too much homework, no memory of you between events, and boxes so crude the matches came out as spam. Most people would read that as a dead market. Leonardo, who'd just spent seven years building and exiting a company entirely about matching two sides of a market, read it as a solvable problem aimed at the wrong side of the equation.

How It Started

The seed was a simple daydream: what if you could send an AI agent to a conference on your behalf? To meet interesting people and see what's happening, without you being there at all?

The frustration underneath it was bigger than networking. "We were promised software that would help, that would do stuff for us," Leonardo says, "while in reality we end up busier than ever." Software, in his telling, has quietly become another employer we report to as every tool generates more follow-up work. AgentConf inverts the matchmaking version of that problem: your agent does the homework, not you. And it extends the idea past the room you're in. An agent that can network for you even when you can't attend in person.

Building From the Baltics

Estonia's advantage, in Leonardo's words, is that the entire ecosystem fits in a few rooms. If he needs to get in front of the top decision-makers at any company, he can directly. That access is rare and genuinely hard to replicate in a larger market.

The constraint is the exact same fact seen from the other side: the market is too small to be your market. "Estonia is maybe the perfect sandbox, but almost never your revenue base." He's sharp about the trade most founders misread as a small home market isn't a disadvantage, it's speed now in exchange for having to leave early. You move fast because everyone's reachable, then you export because you have no choice. Knowing that's the deal from day one is the advantage.

How It Works

AgentConf gives you an agent that networks for you. It can show up to the events you're attending and to the ones you can't make. Its only job is to filter the noise down to the one or two opportunities that are genuinely, meaningfully worth your attention.

Onboarding is deliberately close to zero. A user prompts their LLM with one click, and it generates a profile from that model's memory of them. That's all AgentConf needs to start working. The matching engine then collects feedback on every intro and improves from it. The perceived match quality is, Leonardo insists, the only number he cares about. What disappears for the attendee is the pre-event homework and the post-event amnesia: your profile persists across every event on the platform instead of dying inside a single conference app, and your agent keeps networking in the background.

Under the hood
FastAPI backend with a Next.js front end, where the real work happens through embeddings and LLM reranking. Every choice is shaped by a solo-founder constraint. There are no gaps between what he can build alone and what the platform needs, held that way until the business model and the right first hires become clear.

The early signal wasn't a metric, though he tracks one religiously. It was watching 20-minute user tests routinely stretch into two-hour back-and-forths, users genuinely enjoying exploring the idea with him. And one small, telling moment: hearing one user say "I found you on AgentConf" to another.

The Hard Part

AgentConf is only two months old, so Leonardo is candid that the truly bad chapter hasn't arrived yet. What's notable is how he frames the difficulty that is there.

As a second-time founder, he's on familiar terms with the fear, the negative emotions, the periodic urge to quit but he's learned they're temporary. "I just go for a bike ride or hit the gym, and I come back like nothing happened." The genuine weight is being solo: no one to lean on when things wobble, none of the shared emotional load a co-founder provides. His answer is simply to rinse it off and keep going.

The deeper lesson comes from the last company. "Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups," he says and admits he's made too many. At Promoty, one of those was ignoring his own instinct because he was starstruck by a fresh raise and impressive new people which cost the team a year and roughly half a million euros of runway. He's building AgentConf as the correction: zero assumptions, built in public, only measurable metrics telling him what users actually want. "The biggest learning is to always trust your guts," he says. He won't let anything silence that instinct again.

What's Next

Leonardo's three-year vision is not modest. A networking agent becomes a normal thing everyone has. LinkedIn goes extinct. The business world finds its meaningful connections on AgentConf simply by keeping an agent up to date and focusing on the high-signal intros it brings back.

It's a big swing, but it's the honest extension of the thesis. If the homework and the amnesia really do disappear, and the matches are genuinely good, the platform people network through changes. He's betting it changes toward the agent.

The Toolbox

The tool Leonardo can't build without right now is Wispr Flow, voice-driven, and, he says, a genuine game-changer for building at speed and getting the most out of brainstorming with LLMs. (He's put a referral link for a free trial month at the bottom of his site, leonardo.tech)

His reading recommendation is pointedly not a business book: Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan. It's a philosophy book, and a hard one to digest, but that, he argues, is exactly the perspective you need to build real resilience instead of hiding behind a business plan. His actual advice goes further than the book: close it, and go show what you're building to as many people as you can. "Mostly no one will care and that's the whole point."

🤝 How you can help: The single best thing you can do is sign up at agentconference.ai as it's free to set up your agent, and give Leonardo honest feedback on any intros you receive. AgentConf is deliberately tuned not to bother you unless there's something genuinely worth your attention, so if it pings you, that's the product working. Sign up and tell him where it's right and where it's wrong.