Tag: growth

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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?

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Trying new things!

One odd thing about running conferences is that it’s hard to iterate. We’ve treated each event as a learning process, taking the good and bad, learning and then making the next event better. The only problem is the ‘next event’ is 6 months or more away.

Not only is it hard to remember what we need to remember sometimes, but it’s hard for our customers to remember, or worse, they remember the bad more than the good, and have to hope in 6+ months we’ve gotten better.

We also like to try new things, which is also hard for many of the same reasons. If something doesn’t work or needs improvement we’ve got to wait a while before the next iteration. Its not like software where the next version is only so far away as it takes to write it.

That’s probably one of the hardest things for us, we come up with an awesome idea, but it’s either too late to implement, or post event entirely. Some things work, our USB dead drop at WWDC, was awesome, and it led to a registration, which makes it worth it! Some stuff doesn’t work, Flex/Flash camps. Operating within bounds that aren’t conducive to making money is tough, We’ve got nothing against flashcamps, but they’re useless as a money making endeavor, because of Adobe’s rules, for organizing them.

Joint efforts with big companies don’t work either, we learned that the hard way.

So what’s next?

Cruises! Yeah like on a boat. The concept is actually not new at all, the Mac Geek Cruise has been around quite a while and attracts some pretty big names. Our first cruise we’re starting small, see how it works, if we can make some money, even break even really. It’s an adventure, and we don’t know where it will go, but we’ll see.

Join us, we’ve got some awesome (big) names lined up for the cruise, and I mean really it’s a cruise!

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It’s a busy Summer!

We realized there wasn’t any single place to point people to our roster of conferences this summer.

These are in order:

  • InsideMobile – july 26-27. San Jose CA.
  • InsideRIA – August 23-24. San Jose CA.
  • 360|iDev – September 27-30. Denver CO.
  • 360|MAX – October 4-7. Los Angeles CA.
  • RIAdventure360 – December 6-13. New Orleans (Departing)

Clearly we’re busy :) It’s a good busy though, we’re trying new things; the first two events are partnerships with O’Reilly Media, we’re going back to Adobe MAX, and we’re even taking to the high seas!

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3 Things to make conferences better, according to Harvard Biz Review

I’ve had this article open in a tab since, well it was published. I’ve been wanting to comment on it, since I don’t think it’s 100% right. YOu can read the entire thing at the HBR site, but I’ll paste the main points

1. Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories.

True, sorta. While we definitely don’t fit the writer’s model of how conferences are created, we still make a lot of decisions ourselves. We look at conferences as “what will people take away” not “What will they get”. Sure they’ll get Chotchkies, and whatever else our sponsors want to provide. But they’ll take away, more knowledge than they can even imagine gor the price they paid to get in the door. They’ll take away connections that lead to new work, new hires, new open source projects, new companies, etc. So while you can make your conference tell a story, I think the value is the event, not the story,whatever that is. The people, the connections, that’s where the value is.

2. Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees.

i agree completely! We often mock events that have “steering committees” because if the organizer knew their audience, their community, they wouldn’t need a committee to help them select content. They wouldn’t have to ask publicly “Who’s the big name in the industry?” They’d know. If they didn’t know they’d know who to ask, and know how to find them. And that’s for speakers, it would be one thing if it was a keynote or special one off type thing, but not even knowing enough about the community to find speakers? Well that’s not us.

Tom and I call our events, for and by developers, because that’s where our roots lie. Tom still writes code for a living, and I write it from time to time when we need something simple done, we manage our own websites, and SQL DBs, etc. There’s no “Team” supporting us. We think this gives us not only an insight into developers needs and wants, but also allows us to relate.

3. Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting

While eating is definitely high on Tom’s list of priorities, we do agree that sitting in sessions, and sitting at lunch, are not the most important parts of a conference. More often than not, our lunch setups don’t include seating, we’d rather people have to find a seat in the crowd, just sit down somewhere next to other people. Banquet rounds have a countering effect to that usually. Sometimes it can’t be helped, when the venue has a “Lunch area” that you just can’t avoid.

At night we throw a party (sponsor supported), rather than have a half dozen seperate parties, or no parties, we throw one, one that everyone is welcome to attend, one that has food and drinks, Rock Band and conversation. We sometimes have BOF sessions, and sometimes people go off into the break out rooms to plan, write code, and talk quietly. The bottom line though is we’re all together, there’s no need for small cliques to go off on their own (very un-community) for lunch or dinner, when we’d rather everyone hang out and talk. It’s amazing to see people move from group to group having incredibly cool conversations at every stop.

So yeah there’s always room for improvement, and Tom and I endeavor to learn all the time, so each event is a learning experience, but lumping all conferences together, kinda sucks for the Indies in the crowd. I mean, web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, CFUnited, WWDC, Adobe MAX, are not even in the same park as us, and we like it that way.

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It’s gonna be a busy summer!

Tom and I first met Steve Weiss at 360|Flex San Jose ’07 (Yeah the very first one) and we hit it off immediately. Steve’s an awesome guy so it wasn’t hard for us to like him.

We talked at length about our thoughts on conferences, our approach, our goals, etc.

The friendship continued through the last few years, Steve coming to the events he could so we could chat in person, otherwise email was our medium. Back before InsideRIA launched Tom and I were actually in talks to run it, which was were pretty excited about. Things didn’t work out (as they do sometimes in business) and we all continued to chat.

Around the time InsideRIA was getting off the ground, the idea of an RIA conference was born. Something that wasn’t Adobe specific like 360|Flex, that brought as many of the competing(?) RIA platforms together to network, share war stories, share approaches to problems etc.

That talk continued on and off for months, until now :)

We’re happy to announce our partnership with our pals at O’Reilly! InsideRIA and InsideMobile are our first (of many?) collaborative efforts. Each will be a 2 day event, in San Jose CA. We’ll bring the same cool “John and Tom” vibe, and O’Reilly will bring their awesome reach and connections in the multiple communities. A match made in heaven. I can’t wait to meet everyone that comes to these events! The Call for papers are open for both events, so fire off an idea.

Tom and I also announced recently that the second 360|iDev was in the works for September. In Denver (my home town)! It’s gonna be a fun time, in a fun city!

The last part of the busy is that Steves boss, Joe was very interested in 360|Whispering, our fledgling eBook publishing service. There might be something there! I’m excited, we’ve got a few authors already signed on, so content should be showing up soon, especially an awesome ‘Tech Novella’ (Tom’s term) on Android development from Faisal Abid.

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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!