yrocaz

> "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!

> "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.

edit: clarity/typos.

Thanks for this. Looking at our attendee, sponsor and vendor lists, we can thankfully say that we're in the "quality over quantity" boat. My co-founder and I are splitting a pretty serious loss, but we knew the risks going in so it's not the end of the world.

We're also going to be recording each of the presentations and the speakers really are worth the ticket price and then some (as evidenced by either their own ticket prices or the other events they've spoken at), so we're hoping there will be some additional revenue generated from the video lessons.

We're really looking forward to experiencing the conference and making the best of it!

Yes, we did early bird pricing rounds, we offered 50% off at each meetup for attendees in the audience (we converted a handful each time), and until last week we offered $50 off to members will a completed profile making the tickets $100/450 (membership is free).

We advertised to 4 other local MSA's within 4hrs driving distance, so we always knew that the bulk of our tickets would come in the final days/weeks since they didn't have to plan a flight or hotel even, but we didn't see any meaningful traction until we lowered the price completely.

We put out a fun video to our network explaining the thought process behind our initial pricing (pay for an ops manager to help run the events) and why we were lowering the price to a below-cost pricing scheme (to fill the room as much as possible in order to prove we can host these types of events in our area), but ticket sales have still been underwhelming.

The idea was to leverage the strength and success of the local conference to bring national-level styled conferences to the local area. To be seen if that will be successful long-term!

I obviously can't argue that there were issues with ad content, targeting, the landing page and even the conference's offering, but our target demographic is "easily" targeted and the unsolicited feedback we frequently received was that people were seeing our ads everywhere. I gave a talk at 1Million Cups about this to an audience filled with people outside of our target demographic and none of them had seen the ads, so we're fairly confident that targeting was at least not failing completely.

re cost: this is absolutely something we considered, and hopefully after the conference we'll get honest feedback, so standby for that!

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