Why you can't Kickstart a conference

Two-time conference organizer here.

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.

as an events organizer i empathize. the venue and food costs stack up surprisingly quickly and many events are run at breakeven or loss, and attendees dont often have empathy for the stress of putting together even an average event.

if i might suggest one way to build up to a conference is to run meetups beforehand. not many are needed, say 3-6 of them before you probably have the community trust and events experience to go big.

https://www.swyx.io/manifest-meetups

Does any tech conference not have sponsorships in some form? I know small conferences, unconferences, etc. and they all seem to rely on sponsors--maybe primarily so to have low/no conference prices.

The $495 ticket price in the article also isn't especially high in this day and age but I don't consider it especially cheap either. Definitely a destination conference sort of price which has implications relative to cheap and local.

Also of course life can get in the way of speakers (who are typically not paid at tech events unless they're some non-vendor "draw"). If anyone wanted me to sign some contract with consequences if something came up I'd laugh.

I've run a couple of Community security conferences and whilst some of what's said here chimes with my experiences, other bits not so much.

On sponsors, I don't think there's always that much influence from sponsors, typically it's an exchange of money for booth presence, mentions during the conference, and some social media marketing, there was no control over content from them.

Costs are very geography specific. For example in the UK it was possible to put on a conference for 100-200 people in a decent venue for ~ £20-25k. This was not for profit obviously, but we kept ticket prices low and relied on sponsorship money to break even.

I'd agree that the first year is the hardest, we had to pay deposits out of personal cash while working on sponorships, so that's tricky unless you've got a source of funds. After a while it gets easier with sponsors as you're a known quantity and hopefully you have some cash from previous runs available for next year's deposits.

The most expensive items are anything that's per attendee. Even a small expense (like snacks or lunch) gets expensive once you multiply by 200!

The speaker contract thing was also odd to me, I've spoken at > 20 conferences and I've never been asked to sign a contract (also never been paid to speak but that's the reality of most tech conferences)

It gets even tougher if your conference or convention does NOT target a business audience (who often can just expense a $500 ticket). For general interest or hobby conferences, you are much more money limited while the costs of venues remain just as high.

It is possible to kickstart conferences, but hard. One that has been going for several years is a bit more of a high-end conference retreat: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wargamergirl/valhalla-i...

When I was an undergrad, I ran a small TeX conference. I forget how the finances worked out, but I used the college facilities (I may or may not have asked permission for this) to host this. There were some workshops which were an added fee and the workshop presenters got that money. No food or swag, publicity was all done via the late 80s internet venues (so comp.text.tex and TeXhax if I remember correctly). I think I may have run into an issue depositing checks at my bank account since they were made out to “Cal TeX” or something like that and I didn’t have a DBA on file with the bank (or that might have happened later with another project). But I do remember that the amount of work and the low payoff were enough that I never tried to do a second conference.

The XOXO festival is a counter example of a "conference" type thing that was kickstarted and has been running for multiple years (aside from recent ones thanks to COVID)

If you have a conference theme that nobody else is targeting just start off as virtual, it's free aside from organization time. You miss interactions but if you're having big speakers or a niche topic there's still value and more participation possible.

I've been on convention staffs a lot. Everything here rings true.

I've got less experience with heavy corporate sponsorship micromanaging content, though I don't doubt it: for everything else, as far as I can tell this advice is gold. I've even tried to organize an event myself, knowing that it had to be vision first and the content would follow: got a little way along and brought in some good people, but one of the key fellow organizers showed he was an astute choice by having his OWN vision and running with that :)

I went along with this, as it was also a good vision and less ambitious, but covid hit and the whole thing rather fizzled. It's possible that, had it not been for a pandemic, we'd still be growing an event: we were at least somewhat interested in the process and how events take hold and grow, and we had some comparable events we'd been involved with that had recently flamed out through running into all these problems.

No, you can't Kickstart a conference, and what's more be cautious about attempting one. Think of it like a small college, except it's an event. Sayre's law applies: the reason the politics will be vicious, is that the stakes are so low. After the event, everyone will go home, including you. Therefore, anybody you bring in to help run the event will feel mighty licensed to get their way on their 'fun weekend'. Your job may well be to keep your vision intact (and, along with it, the conference itself). 'cos you likewise can't Kickstart a vision.

Next week my co-founder and I will be throwing our first paid conference, so this is a rather timely thread that we’ll be monitoring closely.

Following the advice of the parent article & some comments thus far, we first packed the house with standing room only for 1.5yrs before deciding to throw a paid event. For what it’s worth, we are the largest event of its kind in the local area’s history.

We have raving fans and a mailing list and in-person attendance that has gone up and to the right since we started. People park blocks away, arrive 30-45mins before our scheduled “doors open” time to secure their seats, and come back repeatedly (we track attendance, rsvp’s, check-ins, etc).

We just recently moved into a bigger venue to accommodate our growing crowds because our core audience was starting to fall off (it was becoming too inconvenient to attend for some given the event’s popularity). Even with our having to change the days of the month (from 2nd Tuesday to the first) and moving to a new venue, our attendance has continued to increase - a huge win for audience stickiness by any event’s standards.

Our paid event has 12-speakers over 2-days, including local & national level speakers, $2k+ weekend national trainers, a nationally recognized author, and the topics are extremely applicable to our niche. We have 2 of the nicest venues in town lined up for classroom training and our VIP dinner + cocktail reception.

All of this is to say that it hasn’t been enough to drive ticket sales. We’ve announced this event at our meetup since March (80-100+ in attendance each time), we’ve hit our mailing list and everyone in our sphere multiple times, and our FB ads have had over 300k impressions (with all the usual a/b testing & landing page tweaks). We made all of our plans to accommodate 200-300 in attendance but it looks like we may just barely break 100.

We launched with $499/$799 General Admission/VIP ticket pricing (prominently placed!) and the market spoke very loudly with very low sales. So, we repriced it to $150/499 (we’re now losing on each GA ticket), refunded the difference or upgraded all of our early believers, and unfortunately it has not made much of a difference.

This has been a rather difficult pill to swallow, but it's been interesting to watch the Reddit drama play out in real time and continually read articles about the "community vs audience" or "village vs train station" dynamic. It also speaks to the difficulties surrounding monetizing a free/freemium model facing many of today’s businesses. I plan on doing a full write up and after action report so that others can learn from our mistakes.

I’ll end by saying that our event is in an income producing/sales driven industry where people are accustomed to attending paid events for professional development and education. Our outreach numbers are such that even taking full responsibility for not assembling the right team, the right lineup of speakers, the right venues, or choosing the right days (weekend vs weekdays), we believe that the incredibly low conversion rate we’re seeing is possibly a harbinger of times ahead.

It may just be a bad time to throw events ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS: I've been lurking on HN for longer than my account would suggest but I've been waiting for the perfect thread to finally spend my "first comment.” I started reading before I was involved in tech, so it’s kind of funny that my first comment is on a thread that isn't exactly about technology!

edit: typos

I'm organizing Outland right now and learning some of these lessons the hard way.

We're planning to lose lots of money and have a small group of attendees, and we're okay with that :)

[1] https://outland.sh

The Context Free YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@contextfree/videos) has a lot of interesting programming languages and interviews. It's a shame that the Kickstart conference was unsuccessful for funding.

I can see why single programming language conferences are often popular. But is a "Programming Languages Festival" too broad for a conference? Are attendees mostly from academic interest?

I've been involved with a nonprofit organization for decades, and we have frequent conferences. They [usually] have nothing to do with tech; They are just gatherings of like-minded individuals. I've been on a number committees, organizing these events.

The process of putting together one of these shindigs is pretty intense, and there's no way that a single person can do it. It's good to have some leadership, but they can't be too heavy-handed, and these things are usually volunteer efforts, so it's important to not be an asshole.

In the case of the conferences I've attended, there's often a 1- to 3-year period between concept and keynote. There's usually a lot of fundraising and awareness-building. I've never heard of Kickstarting or GoFundMe drives. In my experience, fundraisers are fun social events or meetups with an entrance fee. These also act as advertisements for the main event.

Of course, nowadays, you also have the option of paid webinars. These can be a great opportunity to project the brand, and also test out possible conference presenters.

Another option that tech conferences have, that the organization I'm involved with does not have, is branded sponsorship; especially from local businesses. Having someone that's a good glandhander is a big deal. My mother used to do that for her NPO, and I saw her land some big fish.

Insurance is a biggie, and no one ever seems to give this much thought. Poke around. Find out what it will cost to insure one of these things. Not all companies will do it, and the prices can be all over the place.

A lot of times, you can cut deals with hotels, and they'll let you have the conference rooms for free, as long as you commit to a room block (so getting the word out is important). Conference centers are usually not willing to cut breaks, but many hotels can't deal with anything of any size. I've attended a number of smaller (including tech) conferences at Holiday Inns.

Nowadays, there are some great SaaS options, for things like schedules, Web sites, badges, etc. Some may cut deals for NPOs.

And, for the cherry on top, you generally have colossal egos, battling back and forth, like a kaiju movie.

It can be great fun, but it's a ton of work.

I would not be surprised if many folks on this forum have been involved with Science-Fiction/Comic/Fantasy cons. That's a good place to find experience.

Many times conference organizer here.

Every year was the same, we organized an installfest plus talks about free (as in freedom) software and open source products or projects for people.

Every year was thinking where to do that and start talking to places to get the space.

Every year we declined the idea of patronage from private companies to avoid them controlling something. So, the upfront cost was paid by us (think that a team could be from 10 to 20 people)

That could took us maybe 4 months to organize one day, that must be THAT DAY.

Over the years we got experience and we learn a lot from the people doing this event before, setting a schedule to start meetings, having a base of providers, having contacts to ask for space, etc. Our budget was 0 (yes it is a zero) and all cost should be paid by us, the organizers. So to recover that we made t-shirts, and souvenirs (that needed to be paid in advance) then maybe you didn't lost money when the event was finished. Because people didn't pay a ticket for it, it is a free event.

It was a huge effort to make something like that. Months sleeping few hours, people going crazy to setup tracks for talks, approving them and talking to the people that gave the talk to accommodate the schedule. Having the t-shirts on time and the souvenirs, because if not, we will not broke, but we cannot recover the founds. Having the cables and the network ready, the software and servers to install was also a huge task.

Food and water..? Yes, that is a crazy nightmare

We even developed Eventol[1], a software to schedule this kind of events. Yes it is open source also.

Organizing a conference looks easy but really, if you work and you do that, get good people around you. Look what they are good for and what they enjoy doing and give them task that make them happy. It could sound almost a stupid advice, but is not, if they are not being paid and even when they are paid, if you gives a task were they are bad to or something they don't like, it could fail and that means delays. And your conference is already scheduled and you cannot say: sorry, it will be not this weekend, will be the next one. No.

I was happy to be attendant first, volunteer for some years, then get the experience to be the manager of sooo experienced people and got milestones in the event history, from record of attendance, to earn money and stop losing it (that was for the next year event) or the software we used and it is open to everyone.

Anyway, after the conference.., you needed 8 months to relax your mind and body and start again that crazy idea to run a conference about free Software and for free.

As an acquired experience, when you got that running, you can start thinking to be a wedding planner if you wants to move from IT, because a conference is something like that when we talk about organization :v

[1] Eventol: https://eventol.org/