Next week my co-founder and I will be throwing our first paid conference, so this is a rather timely thread that we’ll be monitoring closely.

Following the advice of the parent article & some comments thus far, we first packed the house with standing room only for 1.5yrs before deciding to throw a paid event. For what it’s worth, we are the largest event of its kind in the local area’s history.

We have raving fans and a mailing list and in-person attendance that has gone up and to the right since we started. People park blocks away, arrive 30-45mins before our scheduled “doors open” time to secure their seats, and come back repeatedly (we track attendance, rsvp’s, check-ins, etc).

We just recently moved into a bigger venue to accommodate our growing crowds because our core audience was starting to fall off (it was becoming too inconvenient to attend for some given the event’s popularity). Even with our having to change the days of the month (from 2nd Tuesday to the first) and moving to a new venue, our attendance has continued to increase - a huge win for audience stickiness by any event’s standards.

Our paid event has 12-speakers over 2-days, including local & national level speakers, $2k+ weekend national trainers, a nationally recognized author, and the topics are extremely applicable to our niche. We have 2 of the nicest venues in town lined up for classroom training and our VIP dinner + cocktail reception.

All of this is to say that it hasn’t been enough to drive ticket sales. We’ve announced this event at our meetup since March (80-100+ in attendance each time), we’ve hit our mailing list and everyone in our sphere multiple times, and our FB ads have had over 300k impressions (with all the usual a/b testing & landing page tweaks). We made all of our plans to accommodate 200-300 in attendance but it looks like we may just barely break 100.

We launched with $499/$799 General Admission/VIP ticket pricing (prominently placed!) and the market spoke very loudly with very low sales. So, we repriced it to $150/499 (we’re now losing on each GA ticket), refunded the difference or upgraded all of our early believers, and unfortunately it has not made much of a difference.

This has been a rather difficult pill to swallow, but it's been interesting to watch the Reddit drama play out in real time and continually read articles about the "community vs audience" or "village vs train station" dynamic. It also speaks to the difficulties surrounding monetizing a free/freemium model facing many of today’s businesses. I plan on doing a full write up and after action report so that others can learn from our mistakes.

I’ll end by saying that our event is in an income producing/sales driven industry where people are accustomed to attending paid events for professional development and education. Our outreach numbers are such that even taking full responsibility for not assembling the right team, the right lineup of speakers, the right venues, or choosing the right days (weekend vs weekdays), we believe that the incredibly low conversion rate we’re seeing is possibly a harbinger of times ahead.

It may just be a bad time to throw events ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS: I've been lurking on HN for longer than my account would suggest but I've been waiting for the perfect thread to finally spend my "first comment.” I started reading before I was involved in tech, so it’s kind of funny that my first comment is on a thread that isn't exactly about technology!

edit: typos