[yrocaz]

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

[ipaddr]

Thanks for sharing. You did everything the right way. 100 isn't bad for a first conference with a seed of 80-100 regulars from a meetup who know your style. The percent of each group would be insightful. Some thoughts.

The people going to the weekly free meetings might not be the audience for the conference. Group meets months (weekly?) for free those friendships get renewed often and don't require an expensive meetup.

The FB ads are not working, it might be the ad content. You mentioned a/b testing but it sounds like a low % of signups. It might be the wrong medium. It's probably targeting poorly. A sponsorship deal with popular twitter/ig/podcasts personalities would have been more targeted and introduce you better.

The other thought is perhaps people don't want your type of local conference for the price you are offering. I might pay $500 to go to a conference in Europe (plus airfare+hotel) because it's an experience but I would never pay 500 to go to a conference in my city because it lacks that global experience that justifies the cost. The price drop to 150 makes it seem less valuable.

[yrocaz]

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!

[Lacerda69]

Have been using FB ads for events for the last 12 years and they never made a significant difference.. Might be related to the audience/topic but IMO facebook ads became useless for events in the recent years.

[ValentineC]

> 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.

Did you do any early bird pricing rounds?

[yrocaz]

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.

[sikosmurf]

Thanks for this great post. I'm an organizer of a local DevOpsDays conference with a very similar attendance goal and actual (300 planned, 130 final attendance including speakers, sponsors, organizers). We were touch and go for a while as to whether we'd put it on. Ultimately there were enough commitments to vendors that it was cheaper to put it on at a loss than to back out. Fortunately we had some pre-covid buffer money that kept us from being in real trouble.

All that to say, the conference was a fantastic time, even with the fewer people. We went in with the expectations of a much more intimate event than pre-covid, and we were totally energized and ready to kick it off next year. None of the people there complained about the groups being too small. The conversations that happened were the right ones; the people that had them were the right people.

[yrocaz]

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!