When Nobody Shows Up to My Conference Talk

Not a conference, but once, I wrote a book. The local bookstore, bless them, staged a meet-the-authors, tech talk. I showed up two hours early, lugging a suitcase with extra books. Cookies and lemonade were laid out, along with pristine pens and pads, chairs in perfect alignment. A very nice, gentle old lady showed up early. I was hopeful. I soon discovered she was retired and occupied her time by going to these library things. We gamely began our prepared talk. Half an hour later another person wandered in. He was probably homeless and was there for the lemonade and cookies. This very kind pair stayed until the end and even asked some questions -- that had nothing to do with the subject, and I doubt they understood a thing I said.

I've given talks where I think at the time that we'd have been better off giving everyone in the audience a cheque for $500 to read our blog post rather than fly me to the US for a week.

But then one person in the audience likes what they hear or asks a really insightful question, and then next year they're giving their own talk about your work because they're using it and you realise it was worth it.

And I think a counterpoint to this, as a conference attendee, is that if you walk by a room and it's embarrassingly empty, then jump in, make eye contact with the speaker while they're talking, and ask a good question afterward, to help them out.

Especially when you get into multi-day conferences with multiple tracks and things like evening events, it's easy to create "death slots." The slot right before the party on the last day of the conference, a morning slot after the party on the final half-day, a breakout slot before the keynote, or a breakout at the same time as one or two hugely popular speakers. I've sometimes been surprised by how many people have attended sessions of mine in clearly pretty awful time slots.

I'd argue that there are some practices that are sub-optimal but it's really hard to avoid some time slots being inherently better than other. And TBH to the degree that having sub-optimal time slots means there can be more speaker slots, that's not necessarily a bad tradeoff for a lot of speakers.

In the early 80s I got an, at the time, revolutionary new, inexpensive home computer and brought it along to the local university computer club monthly meetup. It created an awful lot of interest and I was asked to give a "short informal talk to a few people" at the next event. I declined countless times but eventually I was persuaded to do it - after all, How Hard Could It Be? I turned up the next month and got asked to report to LT2 whatever that was.. LECTURE THEATER 2!! must have been 400 people in there. I'd like to say I gave an insightful, detailed presentation on the hardware and software aspects of the device. I did not. I was so nervous that I don't even remember most of it but I am sure it was simply awful. Since then, I've never been able to speak in public in any shape or form. Getting help or training is on my bucket list of things to do one day but as much as I want to improve, the idea of it literally makes me quake.

This was a good collection of speaking tips.

"I was the last talk of the last day. Only about a dozen people attended that talk."

From the title I thought literally NOBODY showed up. I've done talks at 8am on Saturday in a room built for several hundred people where only about a dozen showed up and it didn't even occur to me to be upset. I was surprised & happy that many people showed up! I guess my expectations are low.

In case the site gets overwhelmed: https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisse...

I'm the author of this post. I just wanted to say even with the embarrassment of my site going down (the blog was on a $5/month Digital Ocean plan, never figured I would write something only my mother would read).

I'm reading through your comments. Thank you for sharing your insights and stories. Would love to do a follow up post at some point.

When you are hustling to raise a seed round, you end up at some strange conferences.

I was invited to speak at a VR conference last minute a few years back. It was a good opportunity so I flew out to SF (from LA) for the day. My company had just finished research that would be interesting to the attendees and, frankly, positioned my startup in a strong light in front of the niche investors who I hoped would be there.

This was so last minute that I didn’t even have a deck completed. Instead of going to the first half of the conference I holed up in a coffee shop and worked on the presentation. When I get to the conference it is the end of the day so I don’t bother checking in.

I head to the room where I’m to speak and watch the second half of that prevention. He leaves. It’s 5pm. The room clears out and I setup. I never like that small conference, self-service mad-dash to hook into HDMI and hope the connectors work, but all is well and I’m ready to go on time.

No one enters.

Literally not one person.

I poke my head out and people are milling about, you can tell it’s time to go home. I notice the sign in front of the room that lists the presentations. I’m not on it. The one prior was the last of the night.

So I wheel the TV out into the hallway and present to everyone and no one all at once. I’m good at projecting my voice and actually drew in 10 or so people for the entire presentation. I carnival barked at investors I recognized (from their LinkedIn. I made flash cards of them, we’d never actually met) and sort of captured their attention. Security thinks about saying something. I run through my talk, someone even asks a question and that was that.

Somehow the organizers never actually booked me. They said they did, it just never made its way to the program. Had I gone to registration to get a badge I would have learned that fact earlier. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t.

This story would have been awesome if I found a lead investor from it, but in the end that company didnt work out. It is my favorite conference story though, with my presentation to an entirely Chinese-speaking audience coming in second. Good times.

In another life, I was in a hip hop group. We did shows up and down New England. Once in a while, we did shows for 100 - 200 people. Often we did shows for 20 - 30 people.

One time, we booked a show in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We asked a few other acts to play, and they all came in from 50 - 100 miles away. We promoted the show beforehand using all the normal channels we used, and even handed out fliers at other local shows.

The acts all show up. The bartender shows up. The sound person shows up. No one else rolls in. We wait, but nothing. Not a single paying entrant after a couple hours.

All the acts performed anyway. And nobody ended up showing up.

Even if the room's near empty, you never can tell how many people will watch a recorded conference talk online.

I don't know about other folks, but I can rarely get out to conferences for time/money/family reasons, but I'll often watch the talks online.

If you give a good talk and it's recorded and online, with luck you'll eventually find an audience.

I speak publicly a bit more than monthly from groups of 50 to over 400. When I have the last slot, I make sure do a few things:

1) make the title salacious as I can; 2) engage those "survivors" more. In the past when in Vegas I've ordered a tray of drinks and offered them up as prizes for participating (this also works during early morning session of the last day of a big conference... Highest rated session lol); 3) depending on size (like less than 50) give them things I wouldn't necessarily give to a captive huge group, like templates, checklists, etc. 4) make damn sure my content is exciting. This means making especially not boring slides. Give them a progress bar at the bottom. 5) be more conversational, especially if it's less than 50.

Anyway, my few cents ;)

The best way for a conference to address this is to put a headline level general talk in place to close out the conference. It gets people to hang around specifically for that big talk which will keep people from leaving early if the last day is only track talks.

I was scheduled to talk at an InfiniBand conference. The day arrived - and my talk was cancelled. By the sponsoring organization Microsoft. Because I was going to talk about deficits in interface specifications. Microsoft hadn't fleshed out their plans in that regard, and didn't want anybody talking about it without their marketing message being foremost. They were paying for the conference, after all.

But it left a bad taste in my mouth.

> Also realize that many WordCamps and conferences record talks and those are usually available to the public web, where many others can discover and view them.

This. I've only given one real conference talk—a lightning talk at Globus World 2019—but I do wish I had a recording of it.

Not exactly the same thing but we have a family band and play at various low-key events, we've been on stage where there have been maybe 10 people in the audience and they were probably all organizers or vendors who had booths at the event. We still try to give it our best each time but it can be awkward.

Talks to smaller groups can be more fulfilling. Lots of 1-1 engagement, and the audience is much more engaged and truly cares about the topic. Real relationships are formed.

Sometimes to an audience with 100s half the people are on their laptop or phone. And can’t give you feedback as they listen to your talk.

Better title: "When everyone shows up on my website"

"Error establishing a database connection"

Well, maybe most people can't even access what his events are about?

"Error establishing a database connection"

When Nobody Can Read My Essay About Nobody Showing Up to My Conference Talk

Error establishing a database connection.

Error establishing database connection.