[yrocaz]

> "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.

[peteforde]

I don't know your business and we didn't have sponsors, but the calculus for us was "can we curate speakers, audience and events that will be greater than the sum of all parts?" and we felt we could. Thus, could we then convert that into material value?

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.

Did that translate into paying customers for our consulting business? Maybe, indirectly, but I can't remember any direct referrals. Not to say that we had a leads board on the wall... if that had been our conscious objective, that would take the prize for least efficient pathway to new clients ever. More Rube Goldberg than Business Development.

So yeah, for us, the "sponsor" by virtue of the fact that we were unpaid volunteer organizers, it was probably a crazy thing to do. We worked our asses off and lost a lot of sleep and brought a lot of amazing people together. 15 years later, I'm super glad that we did it in the same way that I'm glad I toured in a rock band that you've never heard of.

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?

All of the things that make a conference memorable and impactful come from passion and sweat by true believers. To hire someone to just plop out an event is to boil fruit. It's like spending money to guarantee that nobody has fun. Don't do this.

In our case, my then business partner turned out to be a brilliant event organizer. She had amazing logistic chops and work ethic. Every hour I put in, she put in three. It was in our founder DNA, you could conclude.

Now, you could hire someone to organize events large and small, if you're at that stage of your companies' growth. If that's not where you're at, then it's too soon and I wouldn't recommend it when it would come at the cost of not hiring a great designer or something. We got lucky because one of our partners discovered a hidden talent.

YMMV in all things, of course. Either way, I really do hope that your event goes smoothly and helps everyone involved connect the dots.

[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!

[peteforde]

I just wanted to clarify one small point, because I threw around the term "core competency" which shifted your attention from the product to the people trying to make it happen. Let me reframe, because in that moment, I was definitely talking about the secret sauce aka the reason people would want to come to your event.

If you opened a store advertising "the tastiest yams", you would not hire an external operator to source yams. It's not because you can't learn how to buy yams at wholesale - anyone can do that, if they put in the time. It's because your customers believe that you have a superior opinion when it comes to yams, and they are effectively delegating the role to you because they want to gain access to yams that they could never buy directly even if they learned a bit about yam logistics themselves.

Never outsource your yam tasting. To do so would be to suggest that you have no particular insight into the yams that you're buying, and so there's no reason for them to keep you in the loop.

[abnercoimbre]

I hope you submit an essay here at Hacker News too, when you're ready? I don't think there's a way to follow someone here, but I'll bookmark your username!