The CFP tool organizers have dreamed of for fifteen years.
Then we did something about it.
24 conferences over 12 years, on five of some of the worst tools on the planet. We know exactly what conference organizers hate — we have personally gnashed our teeth about these problems for over a decade.
Everything we hate about CFP tools
- Reviewers can't actually talk to each other — opinions go to die in silos
- Committee members forced to log in to yet another tool just to leave a comment
- Form-filling, forever. It turns the best part of running a conference into a chore
- Deciding and notifying smeared into one terrifying button
- Your program, trapped — export means copy-paste
- Exhibit A of our desperation: Trello boards, Zapier glue, one Google Sheet running the schedule for ten straight years, and an entire front-end we built by scraping our own CFP tool
What we're proud of in this one
- Review is a conversation — every score and comment on one shared page
- Committee members click one link. Speakers never make an account at all
- Zero to open CFP in ten minutes — the acceptance test is a stopwatch
- Decide quietly, then tell everyone deliberately — and it remembers who's been told
- sessions.json, speakers.json, calendar.ics, a real API — your site drinks directly
- Append-only ledger: nothing is ever deleted, everything can be rewound
Run the whole call on one calm page.
Built from 20,000 committee Slack messages' worth of scar tissue, after swyx dared the internet to kill his SaaS bill.
Open your call for papers →The easiest submission you'll ever make.
One page. No account until you press submit. A half-typed abstract that survives anything. Edit until the call closes.
See a live event CFP! Gene Kim's Enterprise AI Summit (Oct 7-8, 2026) →Start as the organizer. Open the CFP, shape the form, bring in the programming committee, review hundreds of proposals, decide without accidentally notifying anyone, build the schedule, and publish the program. That is the job Curtain Call is here to make calm.
The other roles are not costumes worn by the same superuser:
- A reviewer gets the talks and shared conversation they need — not event settings, communications, or publishing.
- A speaker gets their own proposal, profile, tasks, files, and schedule — not the conference back office.
Those boundaries are part of the product. curtaincallcfp.com is the durable system running our real Enterprise AI Summit call, and its history is meant to last. Its demo controls create clearly labeled simulations alongside real work so a new organizer never faces an empty screen. For the judging walkthrough, a separate resettable sandbox lets you cross the same season as organizer, reviewer, and speaker — including hundreds of submissions accelerated through a time machine — without putting a live conference at risk.
Fifteen years, five tools, one lesson: never lose the work.
Curtain Call is an append-only ledger wearing a friendly face. The story of how it came to exist is best told the way the tool itself would record it — and everything on this tape really happened.
Fifteen years, five tools I've been so frustrated with: thanks to vibe coding, I can finally build the tool I want.
On August 9th, swyx — curator of the AI Engineer conferences — dared the internet to kill his SaaS: write, in one weekend, the CFP and agenda tool he pays for every year. A $10,000 prize — which I'd donate to charity — judged on a single question: would his team actually use it?
I couldn't resist. IT Revolution has run 24 conferences over 12 years on five tools we mostly hated — 20,000 committee Slack messages of scar tissue, a Google Sheet we still need for some parts of our process, and a wish list nobody would ever build. When someone finally said “build it in a weekend,” I already knew exactly what it was.
So we pointed our AI agents at fifteen years of frustration, and Curtain Call existed by Monday — the build log tells the whole story, agents and all. After five tools, the lesson was never about their features: the only fix for a tool you hate is to finally have the one you want.
Our own call for speakers is live on it right now: the Enterprise AI Summit — Charlotte, October 7–8 is accepting proposals. We have an amazing program planned and just a few open slots — if you have an amazing story to share, submit one.
