The Exchanges

Q and the problem is everyone is doing webinars, everyone's doing big Zoom calls, so it's very noisy, and people don't understand how to keep people's eyeballs through a live session when I can easily walk away from my computer to go to my kids or go out, you know, whatever. So, so how did you go, let's start with a registered. How did you get 7004 and 37 people registered?

A Yeah, so about a third of them came through our email list. We have a pretty engaged community, about 40,000 subscribers currently. Then, uh, majority of them came through partnerships. So we build relationships with, uh, growth hackers, with SEMrush, with, uh, MobileMonkey and Larry Kim. So, uh, Pretty big amount of them came through partner promotions, and we also implemented, uh, a viral, a few viral incentives. We use the software called early parrot and P A R R O T T double. Yes. And, uh, as soon as, uh, uh, someone signs up for the summit, uh, as soon as they register, they get an, uh, incentive to share it with their network about That referral. And as an incentive, we had, um, uh, opportunity to get a complimentary all access pass for which we usually charge anywhere between 150 to 250, which include access to recording as well as executive networking.

AI assessment note: “about a third of them came through our email list. We have a pretty engaged community”

Q things, but the best I could ever get was about one third. So I could, I could almost always rely on getting like between 20 and 35 ish percent of registrants to actually attend live. You beat that, or just barely beat that, but still in an environment where you're competing with so many other virtual events, that's impressive. What did you do to get the registrants to attend live?

A Yeah, so one of the things to mention for the webinars, actually, we, we've seen that attendance about 20 to 30% in the past, and for the summits, we've seen attendance about 10 to 15% in the past, because summit is sort of the full day event, and the attendance generally is lower, but what helped us increase the attendance for this specific event is using Hey Summit, Hey Summit has a very intuitive, um, process on how to show to attendees when the session actually starts, and, um, it sends a pre-event email. When people go to the website, it shows which sessions are actually live. And in addition to that, we used, we integrated Crowdcast, our live streaming software with it, which sends pre-event emails 10 minutes before each session. So, and I think also what helped Is the fact that, um, obviously everyone is at home and right now I'm seeing the attendance numbers, uh, being higher, um, across the board than they used to be in the past. But I think it's combination of technology or the right pre-event emails at the right time and, uh, integrating everything and make sure that also we also have community managers, uh, in the chat in Crowdcast At each of the sessions, engaging with attendees. So, so they stay longer.

AI assessment note: “what helped us increase the attendance for this specific event is using Hey Summit”

Q Okay. I mean, that's impressive for a first year event. How'd you get 400 people to show up?

A Well, um, So our first one was actually a startup marketing conference back in 2014. We had about 300 people. So, um, and originally, uh, you met some of my, a few of my partners. We started the community Startup Socials, where we organized, uh, startup mixers for founders here in Silicon Valley. That's how we built the network. That's how we got to know a lot of people. But I think it's about the right positioning, growth hacking, And growth marketing overall started to become trendy. And at the same time, um, knowing a lot of speakers in the space, I've been doing events for the last 12 years, helped me to bring, uh, some very talented, uh, speakers and, uh, drive the attendance.

AI assessment note: “We started the community Startup Socials... That's how we built the network.”

Q That's a no, I mean, that obviously works. Okay, good. So, um, so 600, up to 600 attendees in 2016. When did the sponsor revenue really start getting closer to 50 50 with ticket revenue? Like what was the key there?

A I think the key is, um, just being around for, uh, at least four years because, uh, sponsors often ask, how long have you been around? Um, making sure that they understand the quality of our audience. Some of them prefer would, uh, send a few people to the event first to, uh, experience, uh, the conference to meet, uh, attendees. So I think also rebranding helped quite a bit. Uh, it repositioned us to the next level. So this, this is the first year when we really, uh, it's going to be around 50 50 split. And, um, previously it was about, I want to say, 6040, 70, 30. So we were just ramping it up year after year.

AI assessment note: “this is the first year when we really, uh, it's going to be around 50 50 split”

Q go to growthmarketingconf, C-O-N-F dot com. They see the people that are looking to speak. How do you curate the speaker list to make sure that not only these are intelligent people, but you know what I mean when I say there's a lot of very intelligent people that cannot present. They'll put an audience to sleep. How do you make sure you get speakers that are smart and entertaining?

A Yeah, absolutely. So I have, I have a simple formula for that. So there are three, um, main, um, characteristic in every speaker that I look for. First of all, it needs to, he or she needs to be a practitioner, right? So sometimes we would prefer to have, uh, a manager and director level, but somebody who's in the trenches and who can really show actionable stuff. Then the second one, it's, he or she needs to be an engaging speaker, because some of the smartest, as, as you just mentioned, some of the smartest people on earth, unfortunately, they can, cannot clearly communicate the message, um, to a larger audience. How do you, how do you test for that?

AI assessment note: “there are three, um, main, um, characteristic in every speaker that I look for.”

Q Got it. Ok, so you had about 300 brands paying again, or sorry, 300 startups paying 300 bucks, it's like 90 grand there, some paying 600, so you get to about breakeven. Is that right?

A Yeah, I mean, yeah, so one of the things when you start an event, you would have to give away a lot of tickets for free, so that's just the nature of it. Um, And, uh, but you need to make sure you do it strategically. So even for our conference, uh, currently this year, so, uh, what we do, we allocate certain amount of tickets to, uh, for some people that we want to see at the event, that we want to see at the event, that our partners want to see at the event, and they might not be necessarily people who would be buying tickets. So it's always a split between the tickets that you sell for full price, discounted price, early world price, and you just give away To strategic people who you want to have at the event.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I mean, yeah, so one of the things when you start an event”