Tag: competition

Posted on

Start with Why. Not how much can I make, Not who will come

Tom sent me this TEDx talk, and it pretty much exactly captures why I do conferences.

This came up in looking at some of the events that compete with my events. There’s several people jumping into the iPhone conference space. It’s hot, it’s new, people see the iPhone community as a bunch of dollar signs. They won’t be around long. People see our events, and; 1. think they can do it (it’s not rocket surgery I admit, but you can’t just create a reg site, and expect success and profit) 2. poach our speakers thinking that speakers alone (don’t get me wrong, we pride ourselves on AWESOME speakers) make an event a success, and simply bringing them along will bring the attendees. 3. Think they can do better, because their SAP event, or their single publishing company line up of speakers can do better.

I’ve heard from several people, who’ve attended 360|iDev, as well as one or more of the new comers. Overwhelmingly, they all said the vibe was much more corporate at the other events. Corporate sponsors, sessions to schill corporate goods/services/ideas. Watching this video resonated to me, why our events attract developers, attract community, attract indie gamers, scratching and clawing to make a living on their software. Because that’s who we are, we are indie. We aren’t a company looking for another profit center event.

I don’t do conferences (or Ignite Denver) to get famous, to get invited to other events to talk, to make my name bigger. I do it because I enjoy doing events that people love coming to, that give the attendees more than what they came in with.

We started (and I’m continuing) 360|Conferences, not because we thought conferences would make us rich, or famous. But because we saw a need in the community for the events that made the most impact to the developer community. We didn’t start asking how much can we make? Can we quit our jobs tomorrow? How can we get famous doing this? What will people pay for our events? What will make us rich?

No, we asked “Why?” Why do events suck so much? Why do they cost so much? Why do attendees get so little in exchange for (in so many cases) their hard earned money.

I was an independent consultant, I paid for Adobe MAX, CFUnited, etc with my own money. Each conference was several days worth of billable time just to get in the door. Several more days in un-billable time in attending. I wasn’t alone in asking those “Why” questions.

Enjoy the video. Think about who organizes the events you attend, are they in it for reasons you agree with? Do their actions (reg price, session depth, sponsors) match what you would like to see?

Posted on

Drinking your own kool-aid is bad mmkay.

Anyone that knows 360|Conferences, corp knows that the “corp” is two people; Tom and me.

During one of our chats we came to the realization that we’ve been drinking our own kool-aid and it’s detrimental to our business.

Huh?

Basically Tom and I realized that our desire to be the most affordable event around, has kept our prices very low relative to the other events in the space, but has restricted our ability to grow, which of course has larger impacts, such as 360|Conferences ceasing to exist, being the most severe.

So…

It means we offer way more value than other events. So for the price of one of their hands on training sessions, we offer 4 full days, several hands on pre-conference training options, and more. Something doesn’t add up, what’re we doing wrong, we often ask each other.

Tom and I realized that by and large we offer more. 3 days of 80 minute sessions, pre-conference training included with registration, networking and social interaction for the entire conference, no special parties, no cliques, just everyone hanging out, talking and learning from one another. BoF’s with industry leaders, Rock Band!!, tons more.

So what’re we doing wrong? The short answer is charging too little. Plain and simple we’ve been so focused on being less expensive than the competition, that we overlooked the obvious “we offer more”. So not only are we doing more, but we’re doing more for far less. Great when it’s sustainable, but when it’s not it means you’re doomed to be a flash in the pan, which is obviously bad for business.

So what’re we doing to fix that? One huge downside of our current model is that the learning curve is long and wide. an event a quarter (you read right, there’s stuff in the works). We’re adding more shows to our roster which is good, and learning from past mistakes and starting them smaller, with more of an eye to profitability. We’re also taking our existing events and re engineering them to make more sense. Namely we realize that offering more for a lot less is awesome, and tough. offering more for less or the same, that’s still a good value proposition, and brings us closer to sustainability.

We’re announcing this week a change in pricing for 360|Flex, we’re also scaling our two new events back to 2 day events to test them out, let them scale up. We’ll see how that goes. We traditionally have launched anevent as the full 4 day affair, but have realized that it makes more sense to grow into that.

Wish us luck!