What I Learned From Hosting a 500-Person Business Conference
What I Learned From Hosting a 500-Person Business Conference
Why events are easier than you think, details on Lumos House in SF/LA & our upcoming founder summit.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a 500-person “summit” with my friend Ankur and his startup, Carry. It was my first time building a conference from scratch, and both our teams had spent three months putting together this event.
We called it The OOO Summit - the entrepreneurship event for (Business) Owners, Operators, and Outliers.
The result? A massive success with 500+ paid attendees at the summit and another 2,000+ attendees over 6 days. It was surreal to see the event come to life, from the seed of an idea we had a few months ago.
A few people have asked me how it went and were curious to know why I did it in the first place, so today I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes of The OOO Summit.
Why did I host this conference?
I’ve always viewed entrepreneurship as a way to attain freedom in my life
For me, this freedom meant creating financial security, living in the United States without depending on an employer, and being able to spend my time doing things I love.
Despite being just one year into this journey, the concept of “freedom” has proven to be true. I have enough financial freedom to confidently say “no” to things I don’t want to do, granting myself the freedom to choose how and where I spend my time.
But the road to entrepreneurship has not been easy. I had to seek out the right mentors, read the most relevant books, and attend the high-quality events. The entrepreneurship education world is rife with loud course peddlers, pyramind schemes, and distractions.
So I reached out to my friend Ankur, a prolific entrepreneur who grew his last company to 100+ employees and $60M in annual revenue, before selling it for $250M. And we partnered to bring together our resources and networks to create the ultimate event for early-stage entrepreneurs.
How did it go?
Every event decision we made was to optimize for attracting the right crowd:
We hosted it on a Saturday, so only the most ambitious founders willing to sacrifice their weekend would come.
We made it application-only to eliminate non-serious builders.
We chose a location that was a 30-minute ride from the city to filter out people who didn’t want to make an effort to show up.
The result:
We sold out! We sold 535 tickets to the main event and 838 tickets to the VIP event, after-party, and social sauna.
We reached thousands of people. We hosted 2,000+ people over 7 events over 5 days.
We achieved 137% ROI on the conference. With many other secondary effects to our businesses that we haven’t fully calculated yet.
What did I learn?
The 80/20 principle for event planning.
I believe that the more complex a problem is, the more simple the heuristic for problem-solving should be.
At first glance, producing a conference can seem exceptionally complex. You need the perfect venue, A/V configuration, hotel rooms, ticket sales, restaurants for lunch, badges and name cards, and over a hundred other things. Planning an event is the ultimate test of your operational competency.
But in reality, you only need to get a few things right (the 80%) to maximize the chance of the event being a success. In this instance, we needed a suitable venue, a means of promoting the event and selling tickets, sponsors to bankroll the event, and a reason to bring everyone together. The rest you’ll figure out along the way.
The same heuristic applies to many other things, like selling B2B software, launching a marketing campaign, or giving a presentation. Get the big things right first.
You can get paid to acquire customers.
Some businesses struggle with acquiring customers affordably. They buy Facebook ads, pay for SEO services, partner with influencers to promote their offering, and constantly try to optimize their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). But other businesses get paid to acquire customers. They own media assets (e.g. a paid newsletter) or host conferences, where they generate revenue AND acquire new customers. Their CAC is negative.
It takes time to build a negative CAC asset but once you do, you have the unfair advantage of getting new customers at zero cost.
The ticket price is a feature.
I’ve attended events that cost $50 and events that cost $5,000. Honestly, they’re not very different. The coffee smells the same, the food is just as bland, and the venue is just as corporate.
The biggest difference? The attendees.
The type of person who pays $50 for an event is very different from the person who pays $5,000. Often, the ticket price is a feature. Applies to event tickets, membership subscriptions, and social clubs.
Events are just marketplaces.
At its core, an event business is a marketplace to match buyers and sellers. A buyer can be a hiring manager, an investor, an early-stage company, while a seller can be a job-seeker, a service provider or a decision-maker at an enterprise.
Events exist to bring these parties together. Now when you can find a way to broker these transactions or be the intermediary (i.e. the event host), you turn it into a business.
In my experience, I’ve seen sponsors spend anywhere from $10k to $500k to sponsor an event to find the right buyer. The more obscure the marketplace is, the more profitable.
H/t to Jon Weiner, the Co-founder of Money20/20 & Shoptalk for sharing this mental model with me.
Everything happens in the final quarter.
The trickiest part of the events business is that everything happens in the final quarter.
No matter how many weeks or months you spend planning, the event’s success hinges on what happens in the last 1-2 weeks.
Most tickets will be sold during this time
A headlining speaker might back out at the last minute
The venue could have unexpected issues
Everything could go wrong…
But it’s up to you to put out all the fires and keep things on track.
This is the nature of events. Great news if you’re a clutch player and respond well to pressure. Bad news if you don’t…
We’re doing it again!
Most people host a conference and never want to do it again. But we’re psychos and we love the game, so we’re doing it again.
On October 25, I’m hosting an invite-only summit for seed-stage founders in NYC with Rho. We’re calling it the Seed-Stage Summit (duh).
I’ve invited Russ, Iqram, Dennis, Lindsay, and many others to come and share their stories, tactics, and learnings from building generational companies.
DocSend – a secure document-sharing startup that sold to Dropbox for over $165M.
Venmo – a popular consumer payments platform that sold to Braintree for $26.2M, and later to PayPal for $800M.
Chief – a private membership network for female executives that is generating $100M in annual revenue.
Foursquare - started off as a consumer app that pivoted into a B2B business that is doing over $100M in annual revenue.
The event is completely free for founders, but we’re only accepting 100 high-potential founders. Apply here!
Three other events I’m hosting that you might be interested in:
See you around!
📌 Andrew’s Bookmarks
Fascinating internet things I’ve come across…
There’s an AI for That – Find the right AI tool to help you do anything. H/t to my friend Shirly.
Anecdotal Telltale Signs of Exceptionalism – I recently came across David Zhou’s work. He’s a prolific writer with wise musings on investing, venture, and startups.
99 Pieces of Unsolicited, (Possibly) Ungooglable Startup Advice – A bunch of condensed knowledge for first-time founders. A must read.
💼 Job Board
My friends who are hiring for the following roles:
Lead Product Manager, ResortPass
Founding Engineer, Superpower
Chief of Staff, Eniac Ventures
City Launcher, POSH
Software Engineer, Cassidy
Founding Full Stack Engineer, Micro
Founding Full Stack Software Engineer, Plymouth Street
Client Relationship Specialist, Maestro Lab
Head of Marketing, awesomic
Generalist Role, Paradigm
Have a job to share? Please reply to this email.
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What other perks should I include? Let me know.
🖼️ Behind the Scenes
Introducing the A-Team, our incredible squad of volunteers working behind the scenes to bring our events to life. Last night, over 30 volunteers helped run our tech event, which hosted more than 1,000 attendees. It was a full-scale production, expertly led by Jacob from my team.
These are the amazing people who make it all happen.
