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How to run your first conference

Getting started

  1. Invite good speakers. Speakers are what draw the crowd. They won’t necessarily make the experience of your conference
  2. Pick a date and a venue.
  3. Set up a website. Copy existing conference websites. Have speaker faces. Have a date.
  4. Copy a ticketing system. Luma will do in a pinch.
  5. Have some kind of way of tracking speaker reachouts and attendees. Highly recommend Airtable for this.
  6. Create a conference calendar. Airtable is reasonable.
  7. There isn’t a great conference app. Swapcard is eh. You can maybe vibecode one.

The people

  1. Events are mostly about the quality of the people who show up.
  2. Spend way more time than seems reasonable hand-inviting people who would be good. Don’t just blast group chats, go the extra mile, write a personalized message indicating why they’re welcome.
  3. Conferences are a great excuse to reach out to people you admire online, and ask them to come to your thing. Cold outreach can be surprisingly good.
  4. Think about where the people who you want to come hang out, and market there. Post links, make flyers, give talks, etc.
  5. Referrals, of course. Conferences are more fun with friends.
  6. Ask the speakers to help with promotion, to their audiences
  7. You can set up an application process if you’re trying to curate a premier experience, and maybe get a prestige boost. Beware, though; application process is soulsucking. So ideally you can get away with just positive selection (promoting in the right places) rather than negative (filtering out people you don’t want)

Engineering great experiences

  1. The best moments come from attendees making things happen. Unconference sessions, singalongs, games, lightning talks, etc.
  2. Booths are another way to do this. Career fairs, night markets, basically structures where there’s supply and demand. (Markets are beautiful.)
  3. Hallway track is one of the best parts, so give people permission to do hallway track, aka wandering around.
  4. 1:1s can be really good. (Though, you can go too far — see EAG.)
  5. Provide food. This keeps people hanging around, rather than dispersing
  6. Talks… are a bit maligned nowadays, I think they’re actually still pretty great. Underappreciated features of talks: they force busy speakers to make their recent thoughts legible to others. They act as a batsignal to bring together people who care about specific topics.
  7. I think the ideal thing is something like 1h slots. 20min talk (people don’t actually want to listen to long talks); 20min Q&A (moderated or audience Qs); 20 min office hours (aka give most people permission to leave, and then the remaining 10 people who care a lot get individual time with the speaker)
  8. You can do fireside chats as an alternative to entice people who are too busy to prepare a talk. (but, those are less good than actual prepped talks.)
  9. Have, not just a diversity of talk topics, but also a diversity of experiences people can opt into. Some for introverts, some for extraverts; some for newcomers, some for enmeshed individuals.

Financials

  1. Expect to lose money on your first conference.
  2. Definitely have early bird pricing, you want to encourage early commitment. Raise prices and use that as an excuse to do more marketing (”prices going up soon!”)
  3. Have a tier where people can pay a lot — helps to anchor to higher amounts. Give them some nice perks (special badge, VIP dinner are cheap to provide but valuable to sponsors)
  4. Later on, you can make a lot of money on sponsorships. There’s an entire art to this. Sponsors usually want some combination of brand, marketing, recruiting, and largess (to support the community) — ask about their specific goals.
  5. You’ll probably spend the most money on the venue, then food, then a bunch of random other expenses.
  6. Print good swag, it’s worth it. Your event will then live on in people’s everyday wardrobes.

Logistics

  1. In planning, make sure you agree on shared systems: CRMs, internal chat, email (try a shared email system like Missive)
  2. Have good day-of comms, like a Discord/Slack.
  3. Each evening, run through the game plan for the next day with your staff
  4. Managing a volunteer team — find leaders who’ve done this before, run a training session
  5. You don’t need to be amazing at public speaking (I sure am not) but you do have to take some charge.
  6. To get a crowd to quiet down, I like “if you can hear me clap once”, then twice, etc. By 3, everyone’s on the same page.
  7. Get ops experience by volunteering at other conferences.
  8. Also just attend some and take notes about what was good and what was bad
  9. Feedback session: copy EAG, make everyone fill it out at the end, otherwise you get a lot less feedback
  10. Make sure to have a section where people can write nice things about the event. Good for you to read later, good testimonials to market
  11. Even better, get them to send nice messages to each other. Sometimes these are called “affirmations” or “kudos”
  12. Take pictures!!! (or get a volunteer to)

Inspired by https://www.atvbt.com/21-facts-about-throwing-good-parties/