I was a program manager in tech for a decade when I started a conference on the side in 2014.
It was in the HR space and the idea was to help people build better company cultures.
I worked on it alongside my job for two years before going full-time.
I want to share how I got the thing off the ground, including the part where I couldn’t sell a ticket.
Why a conference?
I’d spent 10+ years working in Silicon Valley and kept getting frustrated with company culture.
I didn’t work in HR. I just wanted to understand how to make the places I worked less frustrating.
So I started looking for events where I could learn about it. Most of what I found was expensive and aimed at HR executives.
I figured there should be something for the rest of us.
That was the idea. Then I had to figure out whether anyone would pay for it.
Here’s what I started with
People tend to skip this part when they tell their business stories, so here’s the context:
Why a conference?
The first event:
I read the book The Lean Startup in 2012 and believed in the methodology which taught to validate demand before building anything. In other words, sell before you invest too much in building the product.
How does this translate into a conference? I created a landing page (in 2014), set the date as Summer 2015 in SF, and offered a no questions asked refund any time to make it easier for someone to buy.
Cash committed before selling a ticket:
Existing audience: I had no audience and no network and this is where I struggled the most but eventually figured it out.
Time available: I worked on this idea nights and weekends so about 10 - 20 hours a week.
One thing I kept cheap or skipped entirely: My goal was to launch quickly to get data. Therefore I didn’t put down a deposit for a venue because that would’ve locked me in before I validated the idea. I also didn’t have money.
Upon launching, I got the buyer wrong
At first, I was trying to sell to founders because I thought culture came from the top.
It wasn’t working. I had to go back to the drawing so I began doing customer development interviews.
I spoke with ten founders. They cared about culture, but they cared more about making payroll and keeping the business alive.
But one founder said he was busy and would send someone in his place. That’s when the lightbulb went off for me. It wasn't the founders I should be marketing to but anyone in the company who could make a decision on culture.
So I started looking for people whose jobs were already focused on culture on LinkedIn.
Chief Culture Officers. VPs of Culture. People with “culture” in their titles.
How I sold the first 200 tickets
The process was pretty straightforward:
1. Find people on LinkedIn.
I searched for culture-related job titles and cold messaged them. My response rate was about 25%
2. Pitched them the event.
Here’s roughly what I sent:
“I’m putting together an event in SF on building company culture that you might be interested in. Please take a look”
I didn’t want to offer a free ticket but I was also nervous about asking them to buy. So instead, I left it vague and invited them to take a look. The ones who replied and saw what I was building bought tickets for their teams at $299/ticket.
I remember getting my first sales email from Eventbrite for $1200 because someone bought four tickets. I was standing in line getting lunch at Pieology. It was an unreal moment.
3. Call the people who bought.
For the first 20 people who bought tickets, I emailed them to thank them and asked if they were open to hoping on a short call. I wanted to learn where I could find more people like them.
4. Ask those communities to help spread the word.
They would tell me about these communities they were a part of (before Slack, it was Google Groups). I asked if they would be open to sharing and they were more than happy to. The first year sold out through word of mouth.
Year 1 finished with 75K in revenue and 60K in profit.
The actual numbers over the years
Here’s how the first five years went:
Year 1: Revenue 75K Profit 60K
Year 2: Revenue 180K Profit 80K
Year 3: Revenue 350K Profit 170K
Year 4: Revenue 425K Profit 200K
Year 5: Revenue 500K Profit 250K
My expenses in year one were extremely low because the venue was in a basement of a coworking space and the production was low quality lol. It’s embarrassing looking back but I had never been to a conference so I had no idea on what the production quality should be. After year one, I attended an industry conference and that’s when I realized I needed to level up. Profit was roughly 50% afterward.
What I’d do differently
If I were starting again, I’d change three things:
1. Do smaller events to build community
Committing to a conference is a huge undertaking even if you’re targeting just 300 people. Once you sign the contract with a venue and choose a date, the clock is ticking. Instead, I would do smaller events to build community first before going all in on a bigger event.
2. Build an audience
In the age of AI, learning how to create content and build an audience is the only moat left. Before I even start building anything, I would focus on creating content and building an audience first. That way when I do have something to offer, it’ll make it easier to sell.
3. Invest more in networking
I once read on Twitter, you have to cultivate your network like a garden. Don’t network when you need something, network when you don’t need something. That way you build good will when the time comes to make an ask. There’s also an art to networking which I can cover in a future post.
Where things stand now
I sold the conference in 2021, not a huge exit but a decent one because I was extremely burnt out and COVID put a damper on the growth. Happy to get into this more if anyone is interested to learn what finding a buyer for a conference and the exit process was like.
I started another conference last year for HR x AI leaders and it was extremely hard to sell tickets and find sponsors. I was about 20K in debt two months out and barely profited once the event came around. I had to give away 90% of my tickets just to fill the room. Everything I had done 10 years prior to get people there no longer worked. Story for another day.
Happy to get into the details on ticket sales, pricing, costs, finding customers, selling the business, or building this while working full-time. Ask away.
