People are incredibly fickle; moods and motivations seem to ebb and flow and there's no way to predict whether people will buy tickets even when they look you in the eye and swear that they will. That's because we've been trained from birth to tell people what they want to hear.
Our first conference was sold out and highly-lauded, with GOAT being thrown around. So we did a second one that aimed even higher and while we still managed to break even without sponsors - assuming we donate our time as organizers - we actually only sold about 60-70% of the available tickets.
I remember asking a guy who had said that our first conference had changed his life why he wasn't coming to the second one. "The economy, man." (ooohkay)
Doing these two conferences was a lot of fun, and encapsulate some of my proudest memories. They really helped cement our credibility at the time. However, it probably cost my partner and I half a year of productive time. Not only did we not make money for the hundreds of hours we poured into our labour of love, but that was hundreds of hours that we didn't spend building our actual business, which more than defeated whatever growth goals we had when we started.
All of which is to say that running a conference is a vanity flex, and it's basically all but guaranteed to lose money unless you have such a large social following (see: XOXO) that it literally doesn't actually matter if you lose money because your YouTube check that month could pay for everything.
So, would-be conference organizer, you have ask yourself two potentially awkward questions: why on earth do you actually want to run a conference, and why do you think anyone would pay to come?
Remember: the easiest way to get $100k running a conference is to spend $200k.
These days in particular, it's incredibly likely that the market is conferenced out. There's just so damn many events people can go to. At some point, a lot of people seem to realize that they don't need to make any new buddies. Invent a way for them to get an uninterrupted weekend of hacking time and you'll be rich.
So, you seem dismissive of the reason for not attending your second conference, but in general people go to conference their employer will pay for them to attend, and if companies aren’t paying you will see a drop in attendance.
There are a few conferences I love, but I’m unlikely to use up holiday and pay my own registration fee and travel to attend them. If it’s on my own dime I’ll probably watch the talks on YouTube.
Edit: I should clarify that this about work related stuff. I’ll happily pay my own way for hobby related things, and have helped organise a few such things and volunteer to help at them. Even more strongly than work events those are affected by the economy. They depend on people have enough spare money and wanting to spend it on attending your event. If it’s a really good event they may scrimp and save money so they can go, but your event is a luxury they will cut if money is tight.
I agree with the factual basis of your comment; it's true that lots of conference attendees have their tickets covered by employers. That was true for about 50% of our attendees, but it was a real mix - and I'm pretty sure that everyone was happy with their investment.
However, there's another dimension to this, which is that there are different kinds of conferences and of course, different kinds of attendees. We were very up-front in our marketing that our event was catering to a certain personality profile; specifically, people who understood that the talks were the thing that happened between hallway conversations. This was pretty radical in 2008.
The vast majority of conferences have a cookie-cutter vibe, and I agree with you that most solo devs would cut those out of the budget in leaner times.
We wanted our event to act as a force multiplier, whether that meant elevating smart ideas or meeting the people you wanted to work with or for. It was carefully designed and high touch.
I think the only professional conference I've attended on my own time/dime (because of travel budget restrictions) I was comped for the conference pass and it was in a location/at a time that was perfect as part of a vacation anyway. Yeah, a lot of companies are very tight on non-essential business travel right now and most people aren't going if their company isn't covering it.
I've also paid for professional conferences (or volunteered to get them comped) in situations between jobs or other cases where the event's networking is more important and you don't want the conflict of interest in networking for possible future employment on the dime of your current employer.
> "Not only did we not make money for the hundreds of hours we poured into our labour of love, but that was hundreds of hours that we didn't spend building our actual business, which more than defeated whatever growth goals we had when we started."
We're in the same boat (you can read my in-depth comment below), and an early takeaway for us is 2 fold:
1. In light of having to sacrifice our primary businesses to throw this conference, is there a way to leverage the exposure/in-person experience/connections made/relationships built/etc to disproportionally grow our primary businesses? Another way to look at this is whether or not there's a way to "invest" in your conference for the greatest ROI of all the sponsors? To be seen if we'll be able to pull this off after next weekend, but if you can't answer this question in the affirmative then I don't know if throwing a conference is anything other than a labor of love.
2. Much like any other business/startup advice - is there a way to hire/inspire a team to run this conference on your behalf?! If not then continuing with the startup example you're choosing to invest sweat equity into this conference, and if you can't answer #1 in the affirmative then it may not be the best investment of your time and energies.
I don't know your business and we didn't have sponsors, but the calculus for us was "can we curate speakers, audience and events that will be greater than the sum of all parts?" and we felt we could. Thus, could we then convert that into material value?
If our goal was to be recognized as awesome at a certain time by a certain group of developers, we succeeded. A huge number of connections were made, and a huge number of reputations were bolstered.
Did that translate into paying customers for our consulting business? Maybe, indirectly, but I can't remember any direct referrals. Not to say that we had a leads board on the wall... if that had been our conscious objective, that would take the prize for least efficient pathway to new clients ever. More Rube Goldberg than Business Development.
So yeah, for us, the "sponsor" by virtue of the fact that we were unpaid volunteer organizers, it was probably a crazy thing to do. We worked our asses off and lost a lot of sleep and brought a lot of amazing people together. 15 years later, I'm super glad that we did it in the same way that I'm glad I toured in a rock band that you've never heard of.
I would suggest that while I'm confident that you can hit Google and find someone happy to say the right things and take money to run your event, this is worse than not doing it at all. YC teaches us to not outsource our core competencies, right?
All of the things that make a conference memorable and impactful come from passion and sweat by true believers. To hire someone to just plop out an event is to boil fruit. It's like spending money to guarantee that nobody has fun. Don't do this.
In our case, my then business partner turned out to be a brilliant event organizer. She had amazing logistic chops and work ethic. Every hour I put in, she put in three. It was in our founder DNA, you could conclude.
Now, you could hire someone to organize events large and small, if you're at that stage of your companies' growth. If that's not where you're at, then it's too soon and I wouldn't recommend it when it would come at the cost of not hiring a great designer or something. We got lucky because one of our partners discovered a hidden talent.
YMMV in all things, of course. Either way, I really do hope that your event goes smoothly and helps everyone involved connect the dots.
> "If our goal was to be recognized as awesome at a certain time by a certain group of developers, we succeeded. A huge number of connections were made, and a huge number of reputations were bolstered."
ROI if there ever was one in my opinion! We started out with the idea that breaking even would be a great success, financially, but touring as the "rock bank you've never heard of" was among the strongest driving factors in this labor of love.
> "I would suggest that while I'm confident that you can hit Google and find someone happy to say the right things and take money to run your event, this is worse than not doing it at all. YC teaches us to not outsource our core competencies, right?"
I don't know what could make throwing a paid event a core-competency other than throwing paid events, and this is why I suggest finding a team to help with that.
For us, our core competency seems to be getting speakers & curating incredible content. Promoting and selling tickets could have used a boost from the pro's. I'm also very proud of the team for how we've managed to pull this off logistically, but again a team that specializes in this could have done at least as good of a job and freed us up to continue working on our main businesses.
I'd liken it to writing great software and selling great software - they are not the same thing and they required distinctly unique skillsets. I know this event will be awesome, which fell into our core competency, but it did not get the reach we had hoped at least in large part because it was our first time trying to do something at this scale (aka outside of our core competency).
Thanks again for your insights and continued participation in the thread!
I just wanted to clarify one small point, because I threw around the term "core competency" which shifted your attention from the product to the people trying to make it happen. Let me reframe, because in that moment, I was definitely talking about the secret sauce aka the reason people would want to come to your event.
If you opened a store advertising "the tastiest yams", you would not hire an external operator to source yams. It's not because you can't learn how to buy yams at wholesale - anyone can do that, if they put in the time. It's because your customers believe that you have a superior opinion when it comes to yams, and they are effectively delegating the role to you because they want to gain access to yams that they could never buy directly even if they learned a bit about yam logistics themselves.
Never outsource your yam tasting. To do so would be to suggest that you have no particular insight into the yams that you're buying, and so there's no reason for them to keep you in the loop.
I hope you submit an essay here at Hacker News too, when you're ready? I don't think there's a way to follow someone here, but I'll bookmark your username!
I make basically the same salary as I did before inflation went into overdrive. We were doing fine before, but are really struggling now. So, yeah, the economy, man.
Why would you put on a conference right now? It seems like really poor timing.
Your reaction is reasonable based on the limited context that I provided.
The first conference we did was in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. One could argue that things were better by 2009, or worse. Macro analysis is highly subjective, even 15 years removed.
The counterpoint to your reaction is that a small, socially-focused (networking that feels like hanging out with friends) weekend is quite possibly the highest rate of return possible with regards to short-term career advancement.
In real terms, we had 150 attendees and 6 of those people quit their bad jobs on Monday. A relatively huge number of people ended up becoming early Shopify employees. One of the co-founders of GitHub was a speaker... in 2008. The outcomes were broadly discussed at the time, so my anecdote above was directly a response to my genuine confusion that if someone needed to make more money... surely the best place to make that happen was at our event, not by skipping it.
Not every event can anticipate that sort of outcome, but ours reasonably could. I'm proud of that. It was also 15 years ago, and things have changed.
Conferences aren't universally in the doldrums. I attended one a couple months ago that beat expectations/available capacity and pre-COVID numbers--but it's in a hot area.
Anecdotally, it's a mixed bag though. A couple others I know have either come in on the low side or ticket sales have been slow.
People are incredibly fickle; moods and motivations seem to ebb and flow and there's no way to predict whether people will buy tickets even when they look you in the eye and swear that they will. That's because we've been trained from birth to tell people what they want to hear.
Our first conference was sold out and highly-lauded, with GOAT being thrown around. So we did a second one that aimed even higher and while we still managed to break even without sponsors - assuming we donate our time as organizers - we actually only sold about 60-70% of the available tickets.
I remember asking a guy who had said that our first conference had changed his life why he wasn't coming to the second one. "The economy, man." (ooohkay)
Doing these two conferences was a lot of fun, and encapsulate some of my proudest memories. They really helped cement our credibility at the time. However, it probably cost my partner and I half a year of productive time. Not only did we not make money for the hundreds of hours we poured into our labour of love, but that was hundreds of hours that we didn't spend building our actual business, which more than defeated whatever growth goals we had when we started.
All of which is to say that running a conference is a vanity flex, and it's basically all but guaranteed to lose money unless you have such a large social following (see: XOXO) that it literally doesn't actually matter if you lose money because your YouTube check that month could pay for everything.
So, would-be conference organizer, you have ask yourself two potentially awkward questions: why on earth do you actually want to run a conference, and why do you think anyone would pay to come?
Remember: the easiest way to get $100k running a conference is to spend $200k.
These days in particular, it's incredibly likely that the market is conferenced out. There's just so damn many events people can go to. At some point, a lot of people seem to realize that they don't need to make any new buddies. Invent a way for them to get an uninterrupted weekend of hacking time and you'll be rich.