When you think about startup origin stories, most begin with accelerators, pitch decks, or ex-big tech founders. Milan Milutinovic’s story starts somewhere else entirely: on the road as a touring blues musician, burnt out, broke, and quietly teaching himself how to code on YouTube. In this episode of SaaS That App - Building Tech-Enabled Businesses, Milan joins hosts Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards to explain how that unlikely path led him to build Conference Cowboy, a progressive web app designed to rethink how events actually work.
From the Road to the Browser
Milan grew up in Australia in a Serbian household, skipping university in favor of chasing music. For years, he lived the touring musician life, recording albums, driving ten hours between cities, cold-calling festival organizers, and doing whatever it took to keep the band alive. It looked romantic from the outside, but the reality was constant sales pressure and razor-thin margins.
Programming entered his life out of necessity. His band needed a website, and instead of outsourcing it, Milan opened YouTube and started learning HTML and CSS. What surprised him was how natural it felt. Code clicked in a way music never fully did. It offered structure, creative freedom, and, eventually, income that didn’t depend on applause.
When COVID shut the music industry down, that side skill became his lifeline. Milan went all-in on software, landing a remote role at a small vertical SaaS company in Australia. For the first time, he experienced building something quietly, shipping features, and seeing them generate real economic value without being on stage.
Geographic Arbitrage as a Superpower
Remote work unlocked something else: geography stopped being a constraint. Milan moved to Serbia, then Southeast Asia, then South America. Living in places where the cost of living was dramatically lower changed how he thought about the runway. Instead of obsessing over burn rates, he focused on staying alive.
In cities like Da Nang or Buenos Aires, a modest income stretched far enough to cover housing, food, and mental space. That space mattered. It allowed him to think deeply, build patiently, and avoid the panic-driven decisions that kill many early products. When your expenses are low enough, you become very hard to kill.
The Problem With Event Apps
Community became the next catalyst. Attending digital nomad conferences across Europe and the Balkans, Milan found his people. Events opened cities, friendships, and professional networks. But the software powering those events consistently fell short.
Schedules were hard to navigate. Updates were scattered across WhatsApp groups. Apps were forgotten after day two. As both an attendee and an organizer, Milan felt the pain firsthand. So he did what he had learned to do: lock himself in a room and build.
Conference Cowboy emerged as an event companion app built for how events actually unfold. Not just talks in one venue, but meetups across a city, sessions created on the fly, and hundreds of people trying to coordinate in real time. The app drops users straight into what is happening now.
Why the Open Web Matters
One of Milan’s most deliberate decisions was to build Conference Cowboy as a progressive web app. For him, this wasn’t just a technical choice; it was philosophical.
Modern browsers can handle animations, offline usage, and push notifications. PWAs feel native without handing control to Apple or Google. There are no app store taxes, no approval bottlenecks, and no restrictions on payments. Organizers keep ownership of their brand, their users, and their revenue.
Milan sees PWAs as the web finally catching up to what it promised years ago. In his view, native apps no longer hold a meaningful advantage for many B2B use cases, especially when flexibility and speed matter more than platform polish.
Focus Over Feature Sprawl
With traction came pressure. As Conference Cowboy grew, customers asked for more: deeper community features, year-round engagement tools, and expanded management capabilities. Milan’s guardrail is a time-bound utility. Conference Cowboy exists for the lifecycle of an event: before, during, and shortly after.
That constraint protects the product. Milan has seen what happens when software tries to become everything. Core workflows rot while edge features pile up. By keeping the app centered on immediate attendee value, he avoids the slow decay that turns good tools into bloated platforms.
Brand plays a role. Admins are ‘sheriffs.’ The mascot, Banjo the cowboy yeti, adds humor to high-pressure environments. It sounds playful, but it lowers stress and humanizes interactions when things inevitably go wrong.
Final Thoughts
Milan’s story is about endurance. Conference Cowboy may still be early, but it already does something many products fail to do: it respects the people using it. He has built a product that reflects his own journey. For founders tired of gatekeepers, bloated software, and artificial urgency, his approach is a reminder that sometimes the most powerful strategy is simply refusing to die long enough to get it right.
Milan’s Background
Milan Milutinovic is the Founder of Conference Cowboy, a progressive web app designed to transform how event organizers and attendees connect at conferences and festivals. With a unique background spanning professional blues music, digital nomadism, and self-taught web development, Milan brings unconventional thinking to the event technology space. His expertise in building lean, focused products positions him as a distinctive voice on solving real problems in the events industry.
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