Introducing Lanyrd Pro, for companies that speak at and sponsor events | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Lanyrd Pro, for companies that speak at and sponsor events

lanyrd.com

138 pointssimonw36 comments

Open articleView on HN

We've got a pretty amazing collection of launch customers!

http://events.heroku.com/

http://facebook-developers.lanyrd.com/

http://github.lanyrd.com/

http://lanyrd.com/mashery/

http://lanyrd.com/happy-cog/

Congrats! I've seen a bunch of folks in the space, sponsorist, sponsorfied, sponsorhub - but you guys seem to be doing it right ;)

HTTPS Everywhere is pushing the Heroku page to HTTPS, which breaks because while you've got a server listening on port 443, it's presenting a Lanyrd certificate.

Definitely an issue with my configuration, but might well affect a few of your more security concious visitors.

I have HTTPS Everywhere and I'm shocked at the number of sites I've found that don't work like they should when it's enabled. Namely a certain stock charting website that uses javascript to force you to HTTP unless you are a pro member that gets HTTPS Everywhere stuck in a loop fighting with it.

Not half-bad as a revenue strategy. As an event organizer (the Startup Conference is May 30, check out http://thestartupconference.com and contact me if your startup raised money in 2013, we'll put you on stage in front of 1,000 people), the one thing I receive over and over are offers from completely unqualified "partners" and sponsors that don't even bother to check who our audience is. At that point, I stopped answering to the worst offenders.

I like the concept of a branded page for the sponsors, tying together multiple events. Serious sponsors have a long-term view and will have a methodical approach to sponsoring multiple related events over an entire year.

Congrats on the launch Simon and team!

Re: the design of the pricing page on http://lanyrd.com/pro/ (I know it's probably in alpha):

1) The second set of plans on the dark background below the slides looks so much better aesthetically than the first set of plans! Did you find that having the plans below the slides/lists of companies converted better?

2) I found Bronze vs. Bronze Plus and Silver vs Silver Plus confusing, and organizing in 3 columns with Bronze/Bronze Plus and Silver/Silver Plus in the first two columns made it look disorganized. Why not just show 5 columns with more distinct names? The "Book 14 day trial" buttons are sort of scattered/hard to find and require a lot of scrolling to get to (esp after the huge list under Silver).

Thanks for the feedback - we're going to take another look at the pricing page ASAP.

The pricing page lists "administratiors", not sure if that's a pun or typo. The github.lanyrd.com page has "upcoming [78]" and "past [415]" at the bottom, clicking the past tab takes a second or two and then it completely removes the upcoming / past section, no console errors but the network request (to http://github.lanyrd.com/?context=past&component=107&...) returns:

    {"eval": "$('.js-component-107').html(null); lanyrd.truncateFacetLists();"}

I'm using Chrome 26.0.1410.64 on Windows 7.

edit: the upcoming/past thing seems to work now.

Thanks for the bug reports - we're rolling out a couple of spelling corrections right now.

Well, on that note--your name comes off rather weird to me. I'm guessing it's supposed to read as "lanyard", but it makes me think "Lanyrd Skanyrd".

That is not a bug report, rather an unhelpful opinion on semantics.

I've been wanting to see social networking for business conferences really take off for a while.

Anyone know why Lanyrd doesn't have more traction? For any given conference, I find that it's rare for more than 10% to signal that they are going to the conference.

I like, but I'm having a hard job seeing how it's worth so much per month to customers? Silver and Gold plans are definitely not cheap at $799/month / $1599/month respectively (source: http://lanyrd.com/pro/).

Pricing is based on the number of members - silver gives you up to 180, and the gold plan allows up to 500. If your company have 500 employees out speaking at conferences your annual events budget already measures in the tens of millions of dollars, at which point we're a small fraction. If we can make your event participation just a few percentage points more effective (and we're confident we can do a lot more than that) we're an absolute bargain.

I see, you're pricing on members, and I was looking at the useful features (like branded subdomain and suchlike). I wasn't clear what 'members' were, they're speakers? So this really isn't a product for companies with < 20 staff and only 3 speaking, but wanting to show off all their talks in one place...

We'll definitely make that clearer.

It's not just for the speakers - we show team members who are attending the event as well. The primary intention of the company pages is "come and meet us at these events", so attendees are very important too.

Thanks, that's much clearer now!

b2b markup? I've often thought that if it's too cheap then "enterprise" level companies may not take your product seriously.

Yep, it's to expensive. We were invited to participate and decided it simply didn't provide the value. Especially starting focusing on tech conferences, which are Lanyrd's core, each company which could pay for pro could also just code up their own page to do the same thing. It's a shame as I like lanyrd and want it to stick around.

I think that is a false economy - yes you always have to understand what you are outsourcing but the opportunity cost of a developer good enough to get invites to conferences is a lot - and I should put him on making a video uploaded and catalog page when lanyd do it all day? Nah just a days extra "tidying up" will blow months of lanyard prices

The problem I see with the pricing is that the smallest tier assumes you have about 10-15 persons going to events on a regular basis. The tier implies "regular" to be around once every two month. Having so many employees attend conferences so often implies maybe 100 employees all in all - so this is uninteresting for a large share of the market. It's obviously a cool product, but for me at the current pricing just a no-go.

We're listening to pricing feedback at the moment. We'll definitely consider adding a smaller plan.

I would not offer a plan of less per month - that's where everyone will head.

Go for three tiers, with a carnet or book of tickets approach. Yes it's harder to implement but in think that if people pay for say hosting for talks in blocks of three or five then you canngrab the folks who just are doing one talknand want to look pros.

When I first read this blog article, I was instantly sold on this idea (I personally go to alot of events to represent our company). I was on my way to sign up for a trial but stopped short when I saw the pricing. Why is this service so expensive?

Our initial plans and pricing are aimed at companies who have events as a core part of their marketing strategy - companies with developer evangelism teams, for example. We're actively seeking feedback on pricing for other kinds of company at the moment. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this - you can reach me at simon at lanyrd dot com.

Some commenters are referring to specific prices ("Silver and Gold plans are definitely not cheap at $799/month / $1599/month ") - well, unless I am missing smth, right now the pricing page does not have ANY numbers.

Bug?

I love Lanyrd. Best of luck with this, it looks like a good deal all round.

Isn't this basically what Pathable offers for $799 / YEAR? http://www.pathable.com/pricing

Not at all - Pathable is an entirely different kind of product.

Pathable offer a platform for running a social network at an individual conference.

Our product provides tools for companies that speak at and sponsor many different events - a branded site for promoting the events they are involved with and internal tools for planning and coordinating their event marketing strategy.

Take a look at http://events.heroku.com/ for example, or check out our explanatory slide deck here: http://www.slideshare.net/lanyrd/lanyrd-pro

How are you doing the calendar feeds? Using a caldav server or just static ical files for download?

We're serving up static iCal feeds - Google Calendar etc can be configured to poll them for updates.

Here's an example of one of our public feeds (of Ruby on Rails events in Europe) - you can paste this in to the "Subscribe" menu in your calendar.

http://lanyrd.com/topics/ruby-on-rails/in/europe/ruby-on-rai...

You can see our subscribe UI in the right hand column on this page: http://lanyrd.com/topics/ruby-on-rails/in/europe/

Thanks for sharing simonw. I'll def. be looking into this for my (similar) project Podium (http://hellopodium.com), which aggregates talks going on in Toronto.

Good stuff

I'd suggest you simplify your ^pricing.

Use the most important feature to differentiate. e.g number of people in a team or number of events. As it is presently, it is quite confusing.

^http://lanyrd.com/pro/

Potentially not even the pricing, just how it's presented. It's almost impossible to do any sort of quick comparison/ understand what the key differences between each plan at the moment.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely be iterating on the pricing page a whole bunch.

The track topic in a location is such an improvement!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com