Creating a kick-ass conference
Reflections on first-time success
Last year I decided to put on a conference for product people (product designers, product developers and product managers) because I, as a product manager, wanted a conference to go to and there wasn’t one.
Had I ever put on a conference before? Hell no.Was I scared? Hell yes.
It’s taken me nearly a year to process just how successful Mind the Product - the conference that I pulled off together with a few friends - was. Think I’m being hyperbolic?
We sold out 550 tickets two months before the conference. We started with £4,000 in our bank account and pulled off a £125,000 event with just under 10% in profit (all of which goes to our other events, and doesn’t include the hundreds of hours of work we put into it).
Our speakers loved us. Our attendees loved us. Our sponsors loved us. Our attendee net promoter score was 66. A whopping 90% of our attendees said they’d buy tickets again for next year - without even knowing who the speakers would be.
So how did we pull all that off?
Build a community first. We’ve been running a product meetup in London since 2010, which has over 1,750 members and gets 300 attendees every month. This meant at least 30% of the conference attendees already knew each other. They’ve had beers together and talked product before, which meant there was way more interaction and discussion between the sessions than I’ve seen at most conferences.
Attract awesome speakers. Your attendees are there for the speakers, and the speakers are your primary marketing tool. So you need big names - who are also engaging and amazing speakers. Our policy is to never put anyone on our conference stage whom we haven’t heard speak before - even if only on video.
So how do you get these amazing speakers to come to your conference? This is a classic chicken and egg problem in that good speakers attract other good speakers. So focus on nailing down two great speakers first and the rest will follow. Milk your network for all it’s worth as you’re only really going to get traction through an introduction and when you have their attention pitch them on the benefits they would get from speaking - exposure to and engagement with a relevant and interesting audience and a chance to raise their own profile. Of course, adding an all expenses paid trip to London didn’t exactly hurt.
Once you have awesome speakers, you want to treat them awesome. We fly our speakers business class, put them up in a great hotel, arrange private car service to take them to and from the airport (or to/from home if they’re local), and we pay them an honorarium as thanks for the time they put into preparing their talks. It means they’re on top form when they speak, and means they’re more likely to put some serious time into creating a great talk for your audience.
Sponsors don’t get a speaker slot. It’s mind boggling how many people want to buy their way onto stage, or try to become a speaker just to pitch their company. Avoid them like the plague. Our speakers get on stage on merit alone, and anyone who tries to buy their way onto stage is pretty much guaranteeing they’ll never be asked to speak or be allowed to sponsor. Nothing is more corrosive to the quality of a conference than the feeling you’re being sold to from the stage.
Find a venue that knows what they’re doing. A massive amount of the credit for our smooth event goes to our venue. The event manager and her team - catering managers and staff, experienced AV engineers and venue staff took care of a ton of the headaches and helped make sure everything went off without a hitch. We also had some amazing volunteers that helped out with everything from check-in to getting coffee and water for our speakers.
Spend money on branding the event. It’s important to build an ambience and get everyone psyched up and engaged on the day. We probably used up all the cyan printer ink in London as we plastered the event with our brand, commissioned an introduction video to get everyone in the mood and had an incredibly consistent design from the badges (which doubled as schedules) to the venue branding to the placeholder slides between the talks.
Provide space and fuel for networking. While attendees buy into a conference based on the speakers, they probably derive just as much value from the networking and discussions between sessions. So you have to make room and time for that - our lunch is 90 minutes for example - and provide great food and coffee on site so they don’t need to leave the venue to find it. We catered the crap out of our event - from baristas serving up proper coffee throughout the day to snacks in all the breaks and a great hot lunch buffet.
Make it inspirational rather than educational. Last but not least, one of the things that worked really well for us, and has now become our policy, is to make the speakers focus on inspiring attendees rather than teach them something. Instead of coming away with a technique or two to implement when they get back to the office, attendees came away fired up and inspired to go home, kick ass and build better products. Don’t give them a fish - teach them how to fish.
Of course, as soon as the conference was over we started planning all over again for the following year. Come to London in September for Mind the Product 2013 and see if we’ve managed to overcome the second album problem…
