360Conferences is John Wilker and Tom Ortega, long time friends and longer time web developers.
We started this company with a single core belief:
Great conferences need not be expensive.
It’s that simple; Conferences should not break departmental budgets. A company should be able to send a whole team, not just one member.
What makes us qualified to produce conferences?
We attend plenty, so we know what we like and don’t. More over, we listen to what people say about conferences. We structure ours around what people want, not around what makes the most money for the conference coordinators. (Yes, we realize that’s us.)
How can we be profitable charging such low entrance fees?
There’s being profitable and then there’s making money hand over fist. We believe in the former, we’re not here to make a killing on a single conference or come away from a mediocre conference with tons of money left over. Success for us is a truly great conference that people will remember and that keeps the community buzzing. We’re happy to do that for just enough money to pay ourselves and put some money towards the next conference.
The biggest key to our success is our partners. Eventbrite handles our registrations, fees, and attendee lists. CFDynamics handles our hosting needs (website and mail). EventVue helps our attendees become a community. As we grow, we hope to announce more partners who alleviate the stress and pressures of things we shouldn’t waste our time on. In other words, if a company can handle something better than us, we’ll likely partner with them so they can do what they’re best at and we can focus more time on our customers.
How can anyone be sure we’re not “making a killing” and walking away with “tons of money”?
Easy, we plan to be as transparent as we possibly can. We’ll blog about how much it costs to feed a conference, how much it costs to produce hundreds of badges, etc. We think business as a whole needs a little more honesty. Therefore, we’re starting with our little corner, the conference space.
What about the established “big” conferences?
What about ’em? They serve a need and a market. We serve another. We aren’t trying to conquer the entire conference space. Quite the contrary, we aim to fill the need for quality conferences at affordable prices. Which ones you prefer is up to you.
Why is our corporate website a blog?
While we are web developers and could make a traditional site, business is a conversation and so we feel our website should be too. If people want to make comments on parts of our corporate site, they should be able to and we should converse with them. Let’s face it: We’re here to serve you and if we ain’t got the time to listen and chat, then we shouldn’t be in business.