Ask HN: I openly dissect my workshop planning efforts. Pls, destroy my ego.
Hello HN.

def tldr():
(return 'A shallow attempt at casual humor to
engage(bait) HN readers into reading my dissection for
a promotional landing page. The subject is an Arduino
Hands-on Workshop It's not converting very well and
want experts to rip my approach to shreds.')

I'm usually at the providing end of this exchange, but I am a student myself. I don't know everything(anything). So I humbly place my vanity on the shelf and expose my tender underbits for public rhoshambo-ing. If you promise to go easy on me, I'll try to make this beneficial/educational/entertaining.

I'm organizing my first group workshop. It's about learning to program and use the Arduino. The motivation here is to grow the technical community in South Florida. I organize an event in South Florida called Hack and Tell. (Imagine a grown-up version of show-and-tell for technophiles.) I can attract a pretty reasonable crowd but it's tough to find people to present interesting (or any) topics for the community. My hypothesis is that people feel the proverbial bar for presenting a project is higher than they are able to jump. So I want to give the local community something interesting to show off and motivate them with projects to present. I intend to dissect my marketing/promotional efforts in public in hopes the HN community would critique my approach?

With this workshop, I'm focusing my efforts on the 18-30 Male market with sparse discretionary funds (low budget). So I priced my event to keep my margins as thin as I could while still keeping this a viable proposition to invest my time into. To be clear, what makes this a viable proposition is breaking even on my tangible costs and netting enough cash to not completely bottom out my savings account while I take attention away from paying work. This is in return for connecting and enriching a portion of my community and generating some clout among my peers.

Before approaching this project, I did a little talking around to get an idea of how well this event might fly. I thought for sure I had at LEAST 5 strong tickets sold (without breathing) and while these people were very likely of converting in the first place, even a few who were more "luke warm" felt interested and might put down reasonable money for such an event. (Of course, seasoned vets know that words != actions. So I still take this with a grain of salt.) But I think this is pretty reasonable validation and move forward.

I'm compiling information from various sources who do an excellent job organizing this knowledge while putting my own rose-colored filter on communicating the content. Along with access to local experts and creating a really creative experience, this is the bulk of the value proposition that I'm attempting to sell. So I've created a promotional site to anchor my marketing activities and funneling all traffic through. (http://hackthisarduino.com. Thanks to bunsen for throwing the design together.) The website is the point I direct all my marketing efforts toward since it's a property I control and can monitor click-through for.

My approach with this is a semi-long form sales pitch. Keeping details succinct and straightforward while still "speaking" to my target market was the objective here. I've tried to minimize the amount of distractions (other links and content which doesn't support the value proposition) while focusing the visitor toward clicking the "Sign up" link to the right. I've purposely omitted any prices to help judge the actual interest in the workshop and isolate that interest from the cost-benefit analysis they'll do when faced with the price. This has the added benefit of controlling my pricing on one page and being able to do A/B testing to different price pages if I ever wanted to get that anal and had the extra time (probably won't be worth the effort). So far, conversions from the homepage to the pricing page are around 26% of about 250 visitors. I'm pretty happy with this but it could be better.

From here, I manage my registration/payment via Eventbrite. (http://hackthisarduino.eventbrite.com) Not sure how much the processor is influencing the funnel as most of the registration process is hidden from my analytics. My only option here is Google Analytics and they capture surprisingly little (helpful) information. If anyone has insight on properly using Google Analytics with Eventbrite, I'm all ears. I'll probably make my own registration page with Stripe on my next try. Needlesstosay, it's been pretty pitiful from here. (Two full packages sold.) I expect a few more, but have a personal goal of at least 10 people. (I have an awesome space to fill with about 40 in my wildest fantasy). My main challenge is getting this last leg of the funnel to convert. I'm essentially at the "???" step before the "PROFIT!!!!" and feel like I'm hitting the right points. It's making me second guess my validation, but I'd like to bring this to you (HN) for a second opinion.

As far as promotional efforts, I am highly involved in the local community and have taken several steps toward promoting to my market. Local programming meetups with verbal mentions, some tech talks with a nice plug at the end (My deck: http://nobulb.com/project/appliance_whispering/), inclusion in newletters (StatupDigest, RefreshMiami, event calendars, etc), friends, family and professional colleagues, social networks (G+, Twitter, FB, Meetup), email mailing lists, a few discussion lists and forums, etc. I've attempted to provide incentive for referral traffic ($20 for anyone who refers a sale...unfortunately, this is manual and may be creating too much friction for people to take advantage of). And early bird pricing which reduced tickets down to my cost (which was when my only sales happened) which was announced via the majority of these channels.

I know this was a lot to chew on, but I would LOVE any feedback or thoughts you have on my approach. Happy to discuss any aspect of this.

Thanks HN!