360Conferences

We're more than one thing.

2009-01-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

One of the things Tom and I discussed a lot, was my fear that we couldn't branch out. We started 360|Flex, because we were flex developers looking for a conference worth it's salt to attend, so we made one. We're both CF developers (not as much now, but back in the day), but that technology is saturated with 'ok' events, it'd be really hard to come in and unseat even the dud event, because of it's size. So what else?

Tom's a tinkerer, but to me that didn't seem genuine, not to mention if we're both not tinkering then it's even worse (in my mind). We looking in Cel processor programming, to work with the community of game developers working with the Sony PS3. Tom even had lunch with some folks, who more or less told us to shove off. Scratch that.

We thought about doing an event on events, since most other event organizers we've met, that do as large or larger events than ours, are well, sorta lame, putting on the same type of event, over and over, because "that's how it's done". But realized that while we think pretty highly of ourselves, no one else in our adopted industry knows about us (save our friends, EventVue and Alli, and Eric) so that was kinda out.

Enter the iPhone. I've been trying to learn Obj-C to build iPhone apps for conference use, schedulers, etc. Tom also has been digging into Obj-C. We started looking around and realized, there was no solidifying agent in the iPhone community. Apple, unlike Adobe, could care less about it's developer communities. Not really surprising, given Apple's overall attitude to it's consumers. Enter us.

O'Reilly tried to start a conference and had to bail out, for their own reasons, so the door was left open to us. We reached out to the leading developer forum, to help spread the word, and then moved forward at full speed. We've now launched and are fully in "Go" mode for 360|iDev. It's a rush for sure, we had limited room to add another event to our calendar; 360|Flex was scheduled for May, we have a soon to be announced event for summer-ish, and another 360|Flex sometime late in the year. That left "sooner rather than later" for the first 360|iDev. Yes it's a tight time frame, our tightest yet for sure! But we're very positive that the community will enjoy what we offer and benefit. Registrations are brisk, sponsorships are slower than normal, but that's largely due to the tight time frames, but we do have a few awesome companies in the works, so that's good. We're going with our good friends at Ebay to host to keep costs extra low, knowing that sponsorship money will be tight.

We feel it's a good time for the iPhone development community to get a little closer to each other. Apple's draconian NDA set a terrible precedent in the community of keeping quiet and not sharing. We're hoping to break down some of that and get everyone talking.

If you're an iPhone developer, or know one, make sure to spread the word, help the iPhone developer community grow and prosper. The only place to go is up (corny, I know).

Conference wireless DOES suck

2008-12-18T08:34:00.000-08:00

Doc was at Le Web recently and blogged about the crappy wireless. AMEN Doc, conference wireless DOES suck. Providers are terrible, giving no guarantee, delivering less than they promise, etc. Here's LeWeb's official take on the wireless, plus another review from the Guardian.

This is something Tom and I have struggled with since starting 360|Conferences.

We've had a wide range of experiences with conference wifi.

At eBay, we have no control over wifi. It's there and that's that. If it's insufficient, there's nothing to be done. It's corporate IT, and they have no SLA and aren't paid to provide wifi, end of discussion.

At the Red Lion in Seattle, we made it clear, "Whatever you think, you're wrong. We'll abuse your wifi." As such, for what we paid, they really did their best. They brought in a tech from the vendor and had him stay the week to be on call. Guess what? Yup, he was called. In fact, he came down in the morning in his PJs to put more access points around the place. They definitely earned our money. Wifi wasn't 100% spot on, a few people had troubles, but overall it seemed to work well.

In Milan, we had no wifi, the hotel used Swisscom, and wanted to charge us $20,000 which (from the paper work we saw) included upgrading the hotels internet infrastructure. We just couldn't afford it, and were a bit offended to be paying to upgrade them, so we had to forego internet for our attendees, that sucked!

In Atlanta, we tried to get the point across that we'd have high demand and overall I think it didn't suck too bad.

I think we have an ok track record as far as wifi. It ain't perfect. I've never been to a large (I guess large is 400+) conference with perfect, 100% wifi. There's always some one who can't connect, always. I've been to one conference in the 200-300 range and have to admit wifi was nice. I did hear a few people complain, but overall it wasn't totally sucky.

Doc gave me a good idea. It's never occurred to me, but I think it's totally fair to expect some level of SLA from wifi vendors. If they fail to deliver, you don't pay. I think moving forward we'll see if that can't be included. For what internet costs, I think it's fair to expect to actually get it, when we pay for it.

Sadly, rather than come clean and admit they messed up, Swisscom has claimed no foul and is acting like nothing is or was wrong, with the wireless at Le Web.

Tom and I will always strive to provide our attendees with a stable and reliable wireless network. We haven't given up by any stretch! We will conquer conference wifi. Ok well, we probably won't, but we won't settle for crappy wifi either. If we can avoid it, we be sure to avoid doing business with Swisscom!

If you're going to do something, make it meaningful

2008-12-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

I was watching TV and USA Network was giving a bunch of celebs lip service for giving back and such. They showed a clip of Oprah saying (Paraphrased), "If you're going to do something, make it meaningful." That really struck home for me.

We've talked about our giving back, so I'm not gonna rehash, why we do it, and such, rather I'm going to talk about our next moves. We're expanding our offering (finally!) to include the iPhone community.

This is a big step for us. Tom and I have had several conversations on where to go next? Should there be a next? Can we recreate the awesome community vibe that 360|Flex helped create in a different community?

We threw around ideas of the next community we'd like to be a part of in a meaningful way, and how to do that. Cell Processor developers (PS3 games), Silverlight, JavaFX, even events. None of those flew because:

1. Cell Processor - We're not in that space. Tom tinkered a bit, but we're not actively participating, which for us was of huge importance. We didn't want to come in as if we're some saving angels, "We're here to help this god forsaken community to grow and prosper, as only we can." We don't feel that it's genuine, or that we could actually know what a community we're not any type of part of, wants or needs.

2. Silverlight and JavaFX - We're not developers in those languages. We don't have anything against either, but we're not going to get serious or even tinker in either language as they don't interest us. We may partner with some one who does, but on our own: no.

3. Events - This one was the front runner during a late night conversation in Indianapolis, where we were doing an onsite and an informal "corporate summit". A lot of conferences suck; trade shows suck; The reason, we think, is the event planners and organizers. They see it as a cash cow ($2000 for a 10x10 booth carpet? Just the carpet! Not the booth, which costs even more) and so the experience reflects a love of money, not a love of the content. We found out that there are conferences on conferences, and thought, "This whole community, which we're super into now, really needs a wake up call."

Then we both started reading up and playing with iPhone development. My goal (lofty maybe, given my other obligations) is to have an iPhone schedule/program guide for 360|Flex Indy. I'm still hopeful, even though I haven't picked up my iPhone dev book in about a month. We both looked at the iPhone developer community, growing as fast as it is and thought, it made sense. We both already love the devices, so we'll definitely be participating. O'Reilly tried to offer an iPhone conference that failed for (to me) a few reasons. We saw this not as an indication of the community's desire for a conference, but as O'Reilly missing the mark, which was good for us. And great (we hope) for iPhone developers.

Getting back to the meaningful part, we hope this gives you a little insight into our thought process. We don't just pick a random topic and decide to 360-ize it. We look at ourselves and what we can do for the communities we're a part of. If we can do it well and with the same passion we brought to 360|Flex, then we give it the thumbs up and move forward. That being said, we hope to see you all at 360|~~iPhone~~iDev!

Richard Branson of Virgin on business, specifically our business

2008-12-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Mr. Branson didn't actually talk about our business. However, on this American Express sponsored site, he spouts on about business. There's a ton of good stuff there if you take the time to click and view each one. The one complaint I have is there's no "Play All".

Here's some of my favorite quotes and how I feel they pertain to us:

"You need to pick an area where you can differentiate and stand out."

This we sorta picked by happenstance. John and I never really talked about creating a conference company. A how-to-run-your-business consultancy: yes. A company to help the hospitality service: yes. Etc., you get the point. One thing we did do was pick an industry where we could differentiate and stand out. Hopefully, we're succeeding.

"You've just got to strive to create the kind of product that you personally would want to go on, make sure it's the best in its field and then I think it should succeed."

This we nailed hands down. When I first approached John about the idea for doing a conference, my exact words were, "You know, we need a Flex conference. MAX is good and all, but we need a conference dedicated just to Flex and nothing else." From that, John and I built the type of show we would want to attend. Our only regret: We still don't get to attend the conference, since we gotta man the reg desk. Though, if hundreds of others can attend and have a good time, that makes it easier to swallow. :)

"If you run one business well, you can really run any business."

I think that's why John and I managed to do well. We've dabbled in business before. John had a consulting company and I did some independent consulting back in the day. Not to mention that I was a paperboy in my youth (seriously, I learned some good stuff during that job). I've also approached every job as a learning experience for my future businesses. Watching and learning from my employers mistakes while taking note of the good things to copy. John and I are avid readers of business material as well, so we had some idea about how we wanted to run a business before starting the biz. We don't agree on everything, but I think we both know how to put the company first and work off our strenghts and push the other to do better.

Our goal is to now build on the 360|Flex momentum and turn this into a great company.

"The best way of protecting [an idea] is to create something that is better than your rivals."

I have to agree whole heartedly here. If we can put on a conference with no experience, then surely others with no experience could too. Not to mention, professional conference planners could enter our space as well. The thing is that we have to be better than our rivals. I think we are, but we can't rest on our laurels. We have to keep innovating and making sure 360|Flex is the best bang for the conference goers buck.

"The bosses should never go to the back and shut the door...I will make sure that I'm out and about and experiencing...I'll talk to the [customers] and get their thoughts down...I'll shake the customers hands..."

Again, John and I agree with this. We're always visible at our shows. We try to shake our customers' hands as they walk in and again as they leave on the last day. We take note of every comment (good or bad) that customers give us. We fight with each other to make sure those comments get acted upon.

We're here for one purpose and one purpose only: to serve our customers. With them we're nothing and we realize that. It's sad that other companies treat their customers as a necessary nuisance.

"It's the little touches that keep people talking. For instance, Ice Cream and Popcorn on Virgin Atlantic flights keeps kids and parents talking and it's not very expensive."

I think every show has had something special. We try to put a little something in each show to make it different. Sometimes its food. Sometimes its swag. Sometimes it's awards. There's always going to be something special for our attendees and I think they know that.

"As long as you can get the right people to run the businesses, you can stretch your brand pretty incredibly."

This one will be interesting. We're a long way off from this since John and I aren't even full time. However, John and I would like to get to the level where we can have the right people helping us in our business. We had Ryan Stewart until Adobe stole him. We've just never been able to recover since his departure, so we're still on the hiring freeze. :)

"With a committed team, you're going to be able to deal with setbacks and then enjoy the good moments together."

For this, I have to give mad props to the other half of the team: John. When I was most down about the biz and was on the verge of giving up, John pulled me (and thus the company) back from the brink of a huge setback. He did his best at a pep talk and then went potty. This give me a few minutes to digest his words and by the time he came back, I was back on track. That show later turned out to be our first profitable show.

And it's been great sharing the good moments with him as well. Standing with him as we presented Second Harvest with $7K is a moment I'll never forget.

Well, that's enough quotes I think. Watch the series for more Branson goodness. Also, mad props to American Express for putting on the series. Sign up for the card if you like the vids. We have a plum card ourselves. Even though our spending habits freak out AMEX, they're still our preferred card to use.

When do you stop caring about your product and customers?

2008-12-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

I know this may sound crazy, but I truly believe that many businesses stop caring about their products and/or their customers. Which leads to the title of this post, "When do you stop caring about your product and customers?"

What do I mean by this? Two things: Short-Sizing and Cutting Quality.

With Short-Sizing, they're flat out lying to their customers. Instead of having this conversation with customers: "Hey loyal customers who give us your hard earned cash, we need to talk. To keep our profit margins, we're gonna need to either cut back the amount we give you OR we're gonna have to raise prices. Which do you want?" They simply choose to lie and then go to great lengths to hide it.

With Cutting Quality, they're saying: "Well, we know the product is good, but we're going to start making modifications to increase our profits. Sure, we'll be making the product at slightly less quality, but hey, we gotta sell more. Plus, the newer customers won't know it was ever that good in the past."

Granted both of those are food related, but let's face it, we know it goes beyond just food.

Apple has cut giving out free remotes with new Macs and the high end iPods don't come with all the free tricked out extras that my 60 gig iPod+Photo did. I received a docking station, A/V cable to hook the iPod to my TV and a nice case to protect the iPod. Now an iPod comes with a USB cable, a small power brick and earbuds. iPhones comes with the same, no dock ($29.00).

How does this relate to conferences and/or the 360Conferences biz? Simple. I was thinking the other day that John and I try very hard to make each show better than the previous one. We're constantly tweaking, trying to add more value for your money. We added more sessions to San Jose to get you more bang for your buck. In Indy, we're adding a new track aimed at the business side of Flex to help out in these tough economic times.

Yes, we've raised prices and we've cut back on some things, but we talked to our customers. We asked for feedback. I assume we're doing good because we keep selling more and more tickets. Plus, people keep saying that each show is better than the previous ones.

That's the way it should be. You should delight your customers by giving them more than they expected, not by short changing them in hopes that they don't notice. (Yes, we faultered a bit in Europe and underdelivered, but we definitely weren't trying to pull a fast one there. We just made some bad mistakes that we can hopefully make up for in the future.) We think it's time business started overwhelming and impressing customers. Time and again it's been shown that it works, loyalty increases, additional purchases increase, etc. Few companies can get away with underwhelming, and keeping their customers.

25 startup commandments.

2008-12-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

Someone (i can't recall whome) twittered this. As I read the list, many didn't apply, Tom and I have no API. I suppose maybe we're our API, does that analigy even make sense? I dunno. Some of them however made a ton of sense to me, and I found myself feeling better about some, and worse about others.

1. Your idea isn't new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

Ain't that the truth! Conferences and trade shows date back to Jesus. Granted we're small and nimble and taking the big ones on, but still we're the same too.

3. If you don't have scaling problems, you're not growing fast enough.

This rings true to me a lot. Tom and I have odd problems of scale. We're both employed full time, yet our model of events doesn't bring in windfalls on a single event. We can't scale up to more shows without doing more shows, you see where I'm going with this :)

13. If you don't pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

Tom and I spend a pretty good amount of time thinking about our competitors. There's no direct but many, many indirect competitors that could decide to become direct competitors, and likely will. Most are in the Charge too much model, some are in the Community isn't the important thing model. We all have our differences.

21. A startup will require your complete attention and devotion. Thought your first love in High School was clingy? You can't take out a restraining order on your startup.

This is a big one IMO, and one that Tom and I fight about a lot. 360Conferences is a two man show, done part time, our attention is stretched and often things don't happen when it might make sense to or things don't get done. It sucks, but for now is the nature of our business model. The upside is, most people don't seem to notice, but I think I have an ulcer the size of Rhode Island, I know that's still not very big, but come on!

25. Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.

Done. Tom and I thankfully aren't greedy. We're not very good capitalists in that sense, but it works for us. Sure we're not our Startup'ing full time, though I'd like nothing less, we're not raping our customers, and that's what's most important to us. We give a ton of money to charity, even though we don't make enough to pay us salaries yet, because it's important to us. Monstrous Greed, squashed. Now terror, that's another story :)

I only took a few, go read them all. They're incredibly salient no matter what your startup does, and may open your eyes to a few things.

And so it begins. Big over priced events are failing

2008-12-08T08:13:00.000-08:00

Last week Adobe announced that it would not be participating in Macworld (they also laid off 600 people, wonder if it would have been less if MAX didn't cost so much to produce?). Following that announcement was Seagate and Belkin.

Tom and I aren't surprised. We've believed, and said that events of this magnitude are doomed for some time. The economy is speeding the process up, clearly.

"And while these by themselves aren't necessarily dangerous to the show's health, people familiar with situation also claim that attendee registration is down by 20 percent versus the same period last year, providing the main reason for IDG's last-minute extension of the Early Bird discount for registration until December 8th."

I can imagine registrations are down. Companies are laying off hundreds or thousands (AT&T announcing something like 12,000 jobs to be cut), sending a single person to an event that runs well over $1,000 just to get in the door, let alone, airfare, hotel, and incidentals, is likely out of the question for many businesses, let's not even look at the cost of sending several people. No duh, they're not gonna send them!

Looking at these events from the consumer stand point, I can also see why registration is down. If I'm an indie iPhone developer, looking to network, how successful am I likely to be at an event the size of Macworld? Is it worth spending my own coin to go be lost in a sea of people? Even more so, a sea of people who aren't all in my sphere of interest. Do I care about the Pro tools people? No not really. I'm sure they're nice, but our worlds don't intersect much.

It makes much more sense to attend an event focused on my sphere of interest, with sponsors and speakers talking about iPhone Development. It also makes sense that this much smaller event will cost less (it should, and those that don't are robbing people), and oh yeah at an event that's focused on my interests, the community will be more than a huge ocean of people, it'll be a smaller sea of all people I want to meet, and it'll be easier to meet them.

Sure super huge mega shows will never go away, they're marketing expenses usually and help clean up the books. But the conference and trade show space, is quickly making room for the smaller indie events, that serve a tighter (better IMHO) community, affordably, while still offering top notch sessions, speakers, and sponsors.

Oh yeah, this example also serves to make clear our intentions :) 360|iPhone is coming.

Youtube videos that really capture "US"

2008-10-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

Tom sent me this video, It's long, but worth every minute. It's about youtube, but the community aspects really resonate with us, on a 360|Flex level.

This one, I came across and sent to Tom. It speaks (through Gary's voice) to why we do it at all. My favorite quote, which really rang true in the tech conference space, was "Listening to your users, great, but giving a shit about them, that's huge!" That's not verbatum, but close. And I agree. Lots of conferences and conference organizers, claim to "be community" and say they "Listen" but in my experience, that's totally bogus. They may ask questions, but don't seem to act on the answers, and "being community" is more about having a lot of people in attendance, but not really caring that they enjoy themselves, or that they get something out of the event.

Tom and I run 360Conferences at night, because we have to. We didn't look at the job and think, "Well we've got jobs, so we can't start this business". We just started it, in the time we have. Sure we don't want to keep it as a side job, we hope to pay ourselves to do what we enjoy, if not love, but in the mean time, we do what we have to do, to serve our customers and community.

Take a look at these, when you have time, the Gary V. one is only a few minutes long, so watch it now :)

What do you think?

Community Truth vs Business Ideals

2008-10-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

I was watching this video by Michael Wesch (Thanks Steve for the link) It got me to thinking about business and community. For John and I, the two are linked for two reasons:

Our business is serving the community. With no community, we have no business.
We participate in the communities we serve. We're real people, not faceless business owners.

Michael makes the case for cultural inversion in his video:

The concept is people express one thing but really value another thing. Here's how I see those 3 inversions manifest themselves in the Flex community and our business.

Individualism vs Community

A majority of our attendees and nearly all our speakers blog. It's normally a personal blog, though a few are grouped (Adobe Blogs, InsideRIA). This is where their individualism shines through. These same people though also are the biggest advocates for our show. They use their individual blog to invite their community (readers) to meet up with and hang out with them at our show. Thus our community is actually comprised of many smaller communities agreeing to meet at one specific time and place.

The company (360Conferences) itself is two individuals: John Wilker and me (Tom Ortega). We have no office. John lives and works in Colorado, while I live and work in California. We both have personal blogs aside from the business blog. On our own blogs, we post on very different topics: John's are usually techy with hip and wit tossed in, while mine are mushy with tech thrown in. Our styles are different: His are quick and stream-of-conscience, while mine are lenghty and (re)edited for days before posting. Yet, he and I together help form and create the 360|Flex community. A community that would exist in parts had we not created our biz, but a community that we proudly claim as our own.

Independence vs Relationships

Everyone screams of being independent: Doug McCune with his 'hawk and frank speech, Jesse Warden on being your own boss, and every developer who wishes they could pick and choose which projects to work on. Independence and relationships, however, live in a strange, self-feeding, yin-yang circle.

By being independent in our thoughts and in our actions, we attract like minded people. This attraction leads to discussions, which in turn leads to relationships. These relationships at times become business opportunities (consulting jobs on code, teaching, etc). The money from those biz opps then turn right back around and allow the independence to continue and move to a higher level.

We're independent from Adobe. That is single handedly the hardest concept hotels and vendors have with us. Here's the typical conversation:

Them: "What's the show about?"
Us:"A product from Adobe called Flex."
Them: "Oh, you work for Adobe?"
Us: "No, we just put on a show about their product."
Them: "Oh so they hire you to do this?"
Us: "Well, they sponsor the show, but no they don't hire us to do this."
Them: "Oh, so you work for a big company that does trade shows?"
Us: "No, we are the entire company. We'll be negotiating the deal with you and signing the checks."
Them: "Oh, okay. I see."

They really don't see, but that's okay. John and I often think about our relationship with Adobe and other big companies. I always thought it would be dreamy to maybe cozy up with them more, but I recently read this. I now see that to not lose focus on our customers, we'd have to stay independent. (Let the record show, John was never so much on the partner kick as I was. See, toldja he's the smart one.)

Commercialization vs Authenticity

lonelygirl15, which Michael mentions, best illustrates this point. She was a lonely teen that people fell in love with via her vlog on YouTube. Then it came to light that lonelygirl was a fake and not so lonely. There was a mad uproar as the community fought back for being duped. What's odd is that businesses which serve customers (and thus by default, communities) are at times at odds with community. I'm thinking of Paramount attacking Star Trek fansites in the early days. Or Coke copyrighting their shade of red and banning it's usage. Or even more recently, the iPhone and the ban against discussing it's SDK (The ban is now gone, I know but I'm making a point here). There are many businesses that supposedly care about you, but make it so hard to let you show how much you care.

We want to grow the Flex community with 360|Flex. Therefore, since that's our goal, we need to try to do that as best we can. The best way to do that is to do it cheaply and easily. With 360|Flex, we try to keep the cost low. We do have to charge for attending our show because the meeting space, food, speaker rooms, etc aren't given to us for free. Thus, we're commercial in our business because we have to be. But we generate a lot of content, over 40 sessions per show. We have so many sessions that even as an attendee, you can't see them all. Surely, we could do something with them, right? We needed to stick to that authenticity aspect of our goal.

We tried selling videos of the presenters. That didn't work out so hot though, even though we kept the price cheap. Our distribution reach was way too small to make that successful. Adobe came to us with an interesting offer before our last 360|Flex though. "Let us record all your sessions and rebroadcast them for free." At first, the business side of me was hesitant. "Don't do it! Why will people pay to come to your show, when they can watch it for free later?" I quickly came to my senses and said, "For the same reason they come now, to meet with and interact with the community." I think Ryan's post best exemplifies what I mean by that. People come to our shows not only to learn FROM one other, but to also learn OF one another and become a tighter community.

John and I try to be authentic as well in all our dealings with customers (we greet you all at the reg desk) to our vendors (we chat with them in the same manner as you). One of the most interesting aspects for me is seeing how people react to our authenticity. Many hotel coordinators tell us the same thing, "We want you back. Not because of your money, but because you guys are not like everyone else." Aside from wearing flip flops (me) and being funny (John), I guess we're just not pretentious or distant like other conference planners are. It's odd to me to hear that, but nice to be that breath of fresh air for them.

It's also funny to hear the shock in people's voice when they call the "company number" and they get me. "Like, Tom the guy running the show?" LOL If only my friends, wife and kids held me with that kind of awe. Life would be much easier at times.

Business is an odd beast for sure. Like I told John, the road seems long and lonely at times, but then we get to a show and life is grand. There's nothing like meeting a customer face to face and making that connection. Yes, Michael's post is about YouTube and connecting virtually while our "product" is about connecting physically. However, I don't doubt that soon enough, we'll be seeing YouTube conferences popping up. Hmmmm....now that's an idea. Who's up for a YouTube conference?

"Why are you picking on CFUnited?" answer, CFU launches Stellr and another nugget on speaker costs.

2008-10-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

In a previous post , an anonymous commenter recently asked John this question: "Why is this post specific to CFUnited when there are so many other conferences that charge the same, if not more (i.e. Max)?"

It was actually my post, not John's. Therefore, I'll answer the question as to why CFU since John covered the why not MAX part.

If you glance back at the post, you'll see this as the opener: "Based on some info on this post by Sean Corfield, the ticket sales from the last CFUnited event equals the total cost of all 5 360|Flex shows and all 3 CF.Objective() shows."

This post was continuing the conversation on a topic chosen by Sean Corfield on his blog. I didn't "single out" CFUnited (CFU), but rather picked up on a point presented by Sean. If you read the "Final Math" section of Sean's post, you'll see that Sean was simply stating that he didn't see the value of CFU and felt that CF.Objective (CFO) was a better show for the money in 2008. That got me to thinking about how many CFO shows could be produced with roughly the same sales figures from CFU. So I asked Jared for his rough numbers, in chatting with him I gave him our rough numbers (though our numbers are wide open, I didn't expect Jared to know them off the top of his head). At that point, we realized that all of our shows were covered by roughly the sales figure from the latest CFU. Like John says, we're in the conference business so we can make a good guess based on numbers, costs, etc. Yes, we believe in transparency and believe everyone else in business should too. (I think not being transparent is sad, scary, and destructive i.e. look at the recent $700B bailout for financial businesses not being transparent and therefore, sadly, not honest.)

I am NOT insinuating that Liz and company are dishonest in any way by not being transparent. Liz sounds like a great person and Michael was a very nice guy last time I hung out with him at MAX. I can only assume their lack of openness is because they feel their numbers are an integral part of their business (a competitive edge) OR they're afraid of how their customers would react to seeing the numbers without knowing the facts behind them. I'll assume it's the former since many businesses do hold that belief and thus I can't blame them for holding such a belief. John and I don't agree with that mode of thinking though, because to us the magic in a service oriented business is not in costs as those are primarily fixed. Sure, you might be able to pay $3 for a soda vs $3.25 but really, it's still expensive as heck. Rather, to us, the secret sauce is customer service and attitudes towards what is important. I.e. Flash on the Beach (FOTB) thinks lunch is unnecessary and spends the money that would've gone on food to cover speaker costs. We think lunch is important as a network opp, which prevents us from getting some speakers who only speak if all costs are covered. Is FOTB right and us wrong? Or vice-versa? I can't say, only customers can. However, because some speakers decline to speak at our show due to us not paying all expenses, that means we have to homegrow speakers and seek out newcomers to the "speaking circuit". I think everyone benefits from this. The popular speakers travel less and more speakers move into the spotlight. These new speakers then become available to all shows (i.e. look at Doug McCune. I had to convince him to present at 360|Flex Seattle despite his "What would I present on?" attitude and last month he spoke at FOTB. I'm not saying I "made" Doug into the great programmer and speaker he is, but I did help nudge and bring him into the speaking scene.)

There are many topics (and shows) we talk about internally, but didn't pertain to the topic that Sean brought up. If you read our blog, you'll see we talk about many shows in their own respective posts. I was merely going to post a comment on Sean's post, but instead it turned out much too wordy for a comment and thus I wrote the post. (Much like this was going to be a comment to the Anonymous comment, but again I got all wordy.) If you look at Sean's comments, I'm second to last. The last one being Sean who was very interested in my insider's perspective on an issue he brought up. An insider's perspective that Liz could've commented on and cleared the air about at that time.

Fast forward to October 10th and you see the announcement from CFU about the formation of Stellr. Fast forward to the 15th and you see Sean being glad CFU listened and CFU being glad that Sean noticed they listened. Now, is the whole Stellr thing due in part to the discussion had by Sean and I? Or was Stellr in the works for years and it just coincidentally launched after a "poor" show in 2008? Is Stellr going to gear CFU to target some of CFOs attendees in an attempt to win back market share? Will Stellr borrow concepts from the lower cost shows in an attempt to win back the hearts of it's detractors?

I don't know, but I applaud their efforts. I'm eager to see what Stellr has to offer and, if need be, competing with them for customers. Any time a company begins to listen to it's customers, only good things can follow. Competition, good competition, makes for a better product for customers. Is that something you agree with Anonymous? (Also, why comment anonymously? Really, do you think we're gonna track you down and start spamming you with hate email or something? LOL)

Showing our appreciation, MVP program

2008-09-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

On top of giving back to the commnity, Tom and I decided that we needed to show our appreciation, on a smaller scale, at the person level. We decided to start the MVP program just after we got back from Atlanta and Milan. Nick Kwiatkowski and Michael Labriola really stepped up and helped us out. They did so for no other reason than to help.

Upon reflecting on that help we realized that each of our events had an MVP: someone from the community that went above and beyond any expectations. Either with guidance in business, logistical help negotiating the Adobe landscape, or helping us burn USB drives, or acting as translator for us in Italy, helping smooth out some of our harrier international incidents :)

To quickly recap from our Wednesday keynote from San Jose '08:

San Jose '07 - Ted Patrick. Ted was an orginal founder and was instrumental in getting this ball rolling.
Seattle - Ed Sullivan - Our man on the inside of Adobe; Eddie helped us find the right people to talk to for whatever problem we had. He helped us not go crazy dealing with the Adobe corporate machine. We love you Adobe employees, it's just the machine that gets in the way sometimes.
Atlanta - Nick Kwaitkowski - Nick helped us burn USB drives and man the registration desk. We were admittedly a bit unprepared and Nick helped us not look completely lame.
Milan - Michael Labriola - Mike helped us a TON. His Italian mighta been rusty, but our Italian was corrosive, so Mike was a god send when dealing with registration issues. Plus he was instrumental in ordering dinner without nasty looks. :)
San Jose '08 - David Bigelow - Dave is possibly an unlikely source of business knowledge for us, since most of his advice directly impacts him as a sponsor. That said, he's been the closest thing to a mentor in business Tom and I have had, and we're hoping that relationship (as well as the organizer/sponsor one) continues to grow and flourish. Dave has opened our eyes to a lot of business realities we had overlooked.

Thanks you guys!!!!

We wish we could do more, but hopefully the cheesy plastic trophies and Olympic-like medals show how much we appreciate you more than words can :) Plus you can defend against ninjas with them, which has to be worth something.

The Bowling League shirts are worth something though, so we'll have to get together and play a few games.

Paying for 14,000 meals sure does feel good

2008-09-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

Back before we were profitable as a company, we made a promise:

20% of all future profits of our shows will be given back. 10% will be given back to the community which the conference serves and 10% will go towards making the world a better place.

It's easy to pledge money when you don't have it. It's quite another thing to follow through when you do. Money has all sorts of effects on people and sadly most of the effects are not good. We think that a lot of these issues would be solved if some of the profits were given back. It's hard to be greedy and all about money, when you give back and see the fruits of the generosity.

At our most recent 360|Flex event in San Jose last month, this was the breakdown:

Community 10% - We gave over $9,000 in tickets to Flex User Groups. In addition, we're buying a PlayStation 3 as the prize for the OpenFlux competition. That's more than 10%, but who's counting. :)

World 10% - We gave $7,000 to Second Harvest Food Bank and $1,000 in prizes to those that helped with the Charity Flex Code Jam. The code jam built a "hot meal locator" application (search for zip code: 95117) for Second Harvest. Ali Daniali led the effort, we provided the hotel room and conference space.

Second Harvest wrote this in regards to our donations:

Another huge thank you for the most generous gift you presented us with today. Your gift of $7,000 will help us buy enough food to provide at least 14,000 meals for low income people in need. That’s a lot of hunger relief!

Your gift will change lives this month and into the fall. Again, thank you for your partnership.

And thank you for all of the programming and developer hours that went into creating the application for our call center to become available after-hours. That is something we have been dreaming about for years. Many of our food recipients work during the day and can’t easily, or discreetly, call the Food Connection hotline to ask for food assistance between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Now there is a solution.

I would love to talk with you more about your company’s philosophy of giving back – I welcome the opportunity to learn about excellent ideas, as it ads to my arsenal of thoughts to share with other like-minded companies.

To be able to provide that was truly an honor for John and myself. We were both surprised by just how good it felt to give back. To be honest, it felt way better than becoming "profitable" as a company.

We share this info, not to pat ourselves on the back. Let's not kid ourselves here, $7K is but a tiny drop in a global sized bucket of needed relief. We do it instead for two reasons.

First, we want to challenge you and your business to do the same. You can match our $7K donation to the Second Harvest Food Bank (email info@360flex.com if you do). More importantly though, we'd challenge you to match the '10% back to make the world better' pledge. You may have your reasons on why that isn't possible, but to be honest we don't want to hear 'em. It's a challenge because challenges are hard, not easy. If it was easy, there wouldn't be much of a challenge now would there?

Second, if you came to 360|Flex, this donation is every bit because of you. Much like how John and I are merely the messengers for 360|Flex, we're just the messengers here as well. The $7K was a portion of all the funds you gave to us, funds that you entrusted us to do the right thing with: Put on a good show and make good on our promises.

Hopefully, as time goes on, we'll be able to increase our contributions. John and I will likely not change the world all by ourselves, but every little bit helps. Plus, if we can inspire others to do the same, we get that much closer.

Why we chose USB thumbdrives

2008-08-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Did the last conference you attend give you it's material on a DVD or CD? After browsing the disc one, did you find yourself stacking the disc with that pile of AOL discs? Hoping someday, some new drive will be able to wipe them clean and make them useful again?

Yeah, been there done that. Sucks, I know.

Remember the last conference you attended? Was there a worker bee standing outside to hand you a piece of paper with questions on it? Was (s)he there to collect your paper survey? Did you rush to fill it out as the session ended? Did you opt to not fill it out because you had no time or no pen?

Yeah, been there done that, too.

Those are the two reasons we went with USB drives. CDs and even DVDs are useless for the most part. Once you've copied the materials off onto your computer, you chuck the disc. What a waste (Literally). It occured to us that USB thumb drives aren't that expensive, so we looked into it. After finding a sponsor to split the costs with us, it was just about the same price as having a CD mastered. Oh and we could update the content, any time. Burned discs are a bit hard to update. Speakers like to update their presentations once or twice between handing the "final" over to us. With drives, attendees come and get the latest and greatest right there at the registration desk.

Feedback is the cornerstone of how Tom and I do things, so getting feedback from attendees on sessions was paramount. We had to know who should be invited back and who shouldn't. We also wanted to make that data available to speakers so they could evaluate themselves. Who wants to wait months to find out what people thought?

We wrote an AIR survey app so that attendees wouldn't have to fill out paper. They could even fill out survey's in their hotel room, going back to the other sessions they had sat in on. Killing trees to make paper surveys just doesn't make sense. Add to that the amount of work that went into manually (remember, it's just Tom and I) recording the data from the paper surveys into a meaningful digital repository so speakers could get feedback. It was months before speakers had their feedback. Weak Sauce!

Some interesting numbers:

Paper Surveys:
San Jose '07 - 300 surveys
Seattle '07 - 880 surveys

AIR Survey Submissions :
Atlanta '08 - 750 surveys*
San Jose '08 - 930 surveys

*I think we'd have had more but the app had some initial issues on the first couple of days.

We're trying to make sure it's worthwhile for attendees to answer the survey (paper or electronic). All raffles are based on submissions. You give no speaker feedback, you don't win any prizes. We think that's fair, everyone benefits.

The USB drives were one of those kill many birds with a single stone things; 1. we're saving trees, 2. we're delivering a survey app to attendees that allows more and faster feedback to speakers, and 3. allows us to add content for attendees right up until 5:30 on Wednesday.

Win, Win, Win Dont'cha think?

It's nice to see openness and transparency

2008-08-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

tap tap tap, makers of several iPhone/iNewton apps, posted their sales figures for a week.

It's nice to see others being as open as Tom and I try to be.

Tom and I try to be as open as we can, we've called on some of our competitors, to no avail, to be as open. We feel that a company should have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, if you're embarrassed by your profit margins, and don't feel comfortable telling your customers, well that says it all. Tom and I aren't.

It's cool to see how the iPhone application market really works. We've all read about it, etc, but Tap, tap tap SHOWS us, which is the most powerful way to communicate!

As businessmen, Tom and I give our Kudo's to tap tap tap for their openness.

Tom and I Getting Things Done

2008-07-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

Tom and I are both endeavoring to make the most out of our time, by looking into Getting Things Done. We've already been using OmniFocus, and I've been using the idea of an Inbox folder where things go to be sorted, but in reading the book, I'm seeing how much we're not doing.

It's actually highly enlightening to see how much more we can do towards making the most of our time and having fewer things slip through the cracks.

It was (as David said it would be) to go through my @Inbox folder, as well as my downloads folder, and completely clear it out. Things got sorted, deleted, etc, and at the end both folders were empty.

I'm almost halfway through the book, and hoping to get the rest read before Tom and I get together in Indianapolis, so we can truly and powerfully brainstorm.

If you're looking for a personal productivity tool, I highly recommend checking GTD out, the book, ain't too big (which is always a damn good thing!), and the concepts are easy to implement whether it's with pen, paper, and wireframe document holders, or using something like OmniFocus, or Things.

Hopefully this journey of productivity will bring really great things to 360|Flex events, and the phrase, "That didn't get done?" won't be common when Tom and I are talking anymore.

Do what you're great at

2008-07-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

This blog post, from someone who looks just like Che, was aimed at Yahoo! and their plethora of problems. But in reading it, it spoke to me and 360Conferences.

What is 360Conferences, Inc. great at? That answer is easy: Community building. What does that mean? Why are we great at it? Below are four points in bold and their explanations. Hopefully, they answers those questions.

1. It's bringing people together.

What does "bringing people together" really mean? Well, to us it means this: our events don't have the small fish in a big pond feel. No one is allowed to be a wall flower, no one sits alone. Tom and I shake hands with each person as they pick up their badge. We stay on the floor talking to people and mingling all day.

2. It's making it affordable so EVERYONE can be a part of the community.

"Affordable" is easy. We easily captured the market and shook up the conference industry by being not only sub $1,000, but by being one of the least expensive events in the world. In most cases, low cost equates to low quality, and that's where we have set ourselves apart. We compete with much more expensive events and often times beat them. $480 for a three day conference with meals, SWAG, free training the day before, etc. That's what we do, and everyone can be there.

3. It's being part of the community, not treating the community as a "source of income".

Our attendees aren't just a "source of income". We don't charge very much for them to attend because we see them as our colleagues and friends: people we talk to online, on email, even on the phone and work with. During lunch at the events, Tom and I walk around and say hi to people. At the evenings events, we walk around and talk to those brave enough to party with us. We say, 'hello' to each person when they show up to grab their badge. We hang with them, we eat with them, we party with them, we drink with them at the parties. Well I do, Tom doesn't drink. What I mean to say is that we don't take attendee's money then go off to some ivory tower or VIP room. We're on the floor experiencing our event with our attendees.

4. It's about not chasing a buck at the expense of the community.

What do I mean by "chasing a buck"? Isn't everyone? Sure, and Tom and I certainly plan to make 360Conferences a viable and profitable business. To a degree we're there already. Atlanta made a profit, but Europe ate it up. We learned though, so next time Europe won't eat our profits. That's huge! That means that conferences that don't cost an arm and a leg are a viable business. So why is everyone else charging so much? Good question.

1 CFUnited could pay for all 5 360|Flex events and 3 CF.Objective() events

2008-07-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

Based on some info on this post by Sean Corfield, the ticket sales from the last CFUnited event equals the total cost of all 5 360|Flex shows and all 3 CF.Objective() shows. If you think 1 CFUnited is worth 8 other great conferences, please raise your hand. (I'll even knock it down to 7 since our Euro show was a bit bumpy.)

Now, I'll start off by saying that I've never been to a CFUnited show. John has though and we've talked about them at a conference level. I've heard in the past they were bigger and better. This year had a bunch of rough spots going for them and I get that. We had a bumpy time with 360|Flex Europe, but that bumpy show didn't generate enough sales to run 8 other great shows.

Thing about business though is that you really can't let emotions get involved when doing a cost comparison. There was an estimated 750 attendees at the latest CFUnited event. If we take the early bird price of $900, the grand total of intake just on ticket fees is roughly $675,000. Yes, I realize there were comped tickets, free passes, etc. However, that number is at early bird pricing, which I assume not everyone made it in time for. Therefore, the more expensive tickets should offset the comped/discounted ones. There is also the money made from sponsorships, which for my purposes I will ignore.

Adding up the total costs from the past 4 360|Flex shows, the upcoming 360|Flex San Jose show and (with Jared's permission and input) all 3 past CF.Objective() shows, you come up with roughly the same amount of $675,000. To me, something simply does not add up.

I don't know what Jared's profit is on CF.Objective() and frankly that's a topic better left for Jared to discuss. For 360|Flex, I know that we lost a bit of money on 3 of our shows. However, the shows themselves (again, with the exception of Europe) were a tremendous value for the attendees. John and I suffered profits but attendees were always first and foremost in our minds.

I'm sure CFUnited also has their customers in mind too, but they have a legacy of costs to pay for: employees, office space, etc. Does having legacy costs give them the right to charge more though? I don't think so. John and I could survive on $50,000 profit per show with 4 shows a year. (We're not there yet, but stay tuned to find out what steps we're taking to progress to that goal) That would give us salaries of $100,000 each. We have no office space, no employees and no legacy costs. That may change over time, but not after much consideration on cost impact to our customers. An assistant isn't worth raising the cost of our events.

John and I have tinkered with the cost of 360|Flex in the 1+ years of its existence. We went from $100 to $360 to $480 for an attendee ticket, with the purpose of trying to reach profitability. The one thing we did not do however was start at $900 and work our way down. Why not? It would've been justified as the market supported it. Why should CFUnited be knocked for merely operating at acceptable market rates?

There's a saying, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." We could have modeled 360|Flex after CFUnited. In fact, I even spoke to Michael about CFUnited at the community dinner at MAX Vegas. I told him that I was thinking of starting a conference and if he had any pointers. I wish I could say he gave me some grand revelations that I cherish to this day, but he didn't. I'm not trying to insult him as he is a very nice guy. Instead, I say that to point out that I found more inspiration from Mashup Camp and my own user group, Silvafug. Both are cheap (if not free) to attend, have strong community feels/ties and turn ordinary attendees/members into "speakers". Had we started at the $900 dollar price point, a lot of the things I found inspirational about Mashup and Silvafug probably wouldn't have made it into the 360|Flex show. Sure, John and I probably would be retired from our day jobs by now, but the 360|Flex vibe that attendees love would not be there. Starting lean and working with the community to become profitable is part of the 360|Flex magic. How lean is 360|Conferences? It's me and John's night job after our day job. Yeah, we ourselves are not even full time 360|Conferences employees.

Granted, our shows are smaller than CFUnited events, but this year's number of 750 attendees is roughly the size of 2 of the 360Flex events. Taking 360|Flex Seattle and 360|Flex Atlanta, we helped people save on travel costs (speakers and attendees) by putting a show within driving distance of two US coasts, gave twice as many sessions and 3 times as many networking events. The biggest difference is that those two shows only cost roughly $270K(combined, not apiece) to produce. Yes, I realize that we cover Flex and CFUnited covers ColdFusion, but still. Jared covers ColdFusion and does it at drastically lower costs as well.

To their credit though, CFUnited is changing. I'll even be bold enough to say that they are learning from shows like CF.Objective() and 360|Flex. This is good for the attendees. While they are mimicking a lot of things from the smaller shows, there's one area where they are not: price. It's all fine and well that they copy a lot of features from the smaller shows, but they need to in turn also lower their price. If they don't, then they should not be surprised when speakers and attendees begin to leave in droves. Like Sean, attendees will ask "Why pay more for show if I don't have too?"

The sad thing is though, can CFUnited lower their price? Probably not. Their costs are too high and their methods too ingrained. I do not envy their predicament. There are probably some tough conversations going on internally at the CFUnited camp. As one business to another, I tip my hat in their direction as they go through this rough time. My biggest advice for them would be to ask their customers what's important and take action on what their customers say.

Treating the community right

2008-06-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

The great thing about our company is that it is community involved and community driven. Our 360|Flex show was developed through the support of the community. We give some of our money back to the community in a variety of ways: sponsor contests, help pay for shirts, etc.

Recently, I was able to attend the Adobe Community Summit (group shot at the top of the post, click it for higher res). It's this once a year event where Adobe brings together all of its User Group Managers as well as Adobe Community Experts. It's loads of fun and a great idea by Adobe. Hats off to Jonathan Wall and his crew for always putting on a great summit.

Adobe brings in their best and brightest to talk about their products. They also cover the cost of the hotel, food during the summit and a few evening activities (i.e. parties). Every company should look to that and do the same for their own community.

For whatever reason though, Wednesday night had nothing going on. After a quick chat with John and a business friend (Denver Dave), we made the announcement that 360|Conferences and RealEyes would be taking everyone out Amici's for pizza and drinks (picture at the bottom. I'm horrible at estimating things: distances, time to drive, etc. Therefore, there's no shocker I underestimated the size of the group coming. I said 20 and we had way more. LOL We were like 5 people away from shutting the place down and catering only to us.

We realeyes'd (bad pun, I'm sorry!) the awesome opportunity we had to give a little back to these great community leaders. While they seemed grateful for the food, it was our two companies who felt luckier helping all this great dialogue take place and letting those folks from all around the world hang out together.

When a company can help a community grow, it's doing the right thing. After all, marketplaces were once just as much social centers as they were business centers. It's time we try to bring back a bit of that back.

A new partner joins the club! Welcome, EventVue.

2008-06-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

Tom and I are really happy to announce that 360Conferences, inc. has a new partner. Joining the ranks of Eventbrite, and CFDynamics is EventVue!!

EventVue is a local area company to me (Denver/Boulder). Usually, we hunt down our partners. This time though, our partner found us. From the moment I saw the demo I was pretty sure we'd want to partner.

What does EventVue do? Their website has plenty of details. For us, they help offer a much great experience to our attendees. People come to our events to network, learn, find work, find workers. EventVue helps with that, by making it easy for attendees to connect pre-event, arrange to meet, hang out, even work together. They also help attendees stay in contact, or even connect, post event.

We're very excited to be partnering with EventVue, and can't wait to see what comes of this new dynamic to 360|Conferences.

The new standard of conferences...we started it last year.

2008-05-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that title is a bold statement. However, the great thing is that we're not the one making the statement. Seth Godin is. We just happen to be the ones already executing what he thinks the new standard of conferences is going to be.

Brooks Andrus seems like a smart guy, but I think he's got Seth's post incorrect. Brooks says Seth's post "smells of Singularity " (an online conference). While it may "smell" of a future conference, I can honestly say we've been executing the new standard for over a year now. Four shows done with a fifth in the works. (Seth and Brooks, complimentary tickets on us if you want to experience the show first hand in August. Just email admin@360flex.com and we'll hook you up.)

We'll give Brooks a break as our conference business has only touched the Flex community (so far). We do want to offer our thoughts and attendee/speaker/sponsor quotes as evidence that we execute this new standard.

One thing Seth and Brooks don't cover is price. While many shows hover around $1000 USD or higher, ours is $480 USD for 3 days (of 30+ sessions). We believe the lower price point enables independent developers to come and participate when it would otherwise cost too much. We think an overpriced show is bad, but an overpriced show that's living the "old standard" should just die.

Now, we'd like to take on a few of Seth's points directly to prove our case.

Seth says:

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you're wrong.

I specifically tell speakers, "If you had no powerpoint slides and just showed code and examples, I'd love you. Anyone can read a slide deck at home." Our speakers also know that they can depend on conversation with the audience, so real time interaction is almost standard.

Here's some quotes from attendees:

"Although I give huge props to the two [speakers], I really enjoyed the input from the crowd. I think this is where 360|Flex shines." - Ryan Campbell

"At 360Flex, speakers are just 'attendees with a little more responsibility.' This is just one of those things that makes smaller conferences more special." - Jeff Houser

Seth also says:

Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don't provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you're wrong as well.

When we started this business, we did it as two wallflowers. What we wanted was a show where the wallflowers were going to be converted to social butterflies.

I even call it out publicly and during the shows, I pull the flowers off the wall and teach them to fly socially. Strangely enough, they seem to be thankful instead of mad.

We try to have parties all 3 nights of the show (money permitting) and serve at least lunch (if not more). This way, attendees spend more time just hanging and chatting as a whole versus leaving to head offsite in little groups.

Here's some quotes from attendees:

"As always the best part of a conference is what happens outside the sessions." - Dan Florio

" I really appreciated there being lunch. Without it so much time would have been lost, as well as a lot of connectivity [to other attendees]. " - Jason Epperson

One last quote from Seth:

And here's what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.

We'll just let the attendees comments speak for this one.

"As the Atlanta conference was ending, I was already getting excited hearing about when/where the next conference will happen." - Ryan Campbell

"Now I'm no stranger to conferences...360|Flex was a totally different feel." - Andy Powell

"360|Flex was a blast and it seems to get better at each conference." - Juan Sanchez

"360|Flex is an absolute blast, it's great company, full of intelligent people, and I couldn't ask for more of a conference to go to." - Axel Jensen

"Regardless, I am ecstatic that I was able to attend and start to meet many of the friendly yet a bit eccentric members of the Flex community." - Jim Boone

"Last week I had an exciting opportunity to attend the 360|Flex Atlanta conference...Exciting. Inspiring. Aspiring. Can you tell how I felt leaving the sessions?" - Bill Christian

"The conference was incredible." - Blake Eaton

"I don't know if they have a long term plan for world domination, or are just doing things right by instinct, but they're doing just what I'd do if I had a five or ten year strategy to totally own the 'small high-value technical conference' brand." - Dave Coletta

Are we perfect? No. Do we make mistakes? Yes. I hope it's obvious though, that we're executing that new standard now. There's no need to wait for the future, it's here.

No Food for you!

2008-05-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

So I was working a booth at Software 2008 this past week, and it was quite an eye opener. Obviously Tom and I don't put on events of that scale, and frankly that's not our dream.

The sheer size and scope was almost unthinkable, as far as our events go.

What really got me, though, was the treatment of sponsors/exhibitors.

Tom and I have had our fumbles, putting the expo area in a room in the corner being the big one to date. But we never kept them from eating or drinking.

At software 2008 when lunch was served (only to full priced attendees) exhibitors weren't welcome. We had to go to a snack bar (with the other hundreds of "expo only" badge holders and exhibitors) where the lines were over 30 minutes long. OK well maybe they don't provide lunch, whack, but you know.

5pm rolls around, conference ends for the day, food tables are set up (they were unguarded), bars roll out, bartenders start trading drinks for drink coupons (worst idea in the history of the universe, the drink coupon). Coupons which exhibitors didn't get. Okay, come on! The attendees are eating and drinking and mingling right in the expo hall and exhibitors don't get to participate?

To her credit, one of the CMP'ers (Names withheld to protect the innocent) snuck us two drink tickets, but really?! 1. Drink coupons? 2. Only for full price attendees? That's just crap.

One might argue the cost of providing drinks and food for exhibitors, and even "expo only" attendees is cost prohibitive. I call bull shit.

The booth I was in, $10,000. Not including the chairs, the carpet, the tables, who knows what else. Take 200 dollars out of that, and there's a damn nice lunch both days. Take another hundred out or so, and that exhibitor should be able to drink just fine.

Oh, and this booth was the smallest option, there were larger, and I'm only talking about Software 2008, not Interop.

I just don't get it. Exhibitors are one of the main sources of revenue for conferences, and the treatment was really kinda crappy. I hope as Tom and I grow 360Conferences, we never go down this path!

Jake McKee has a great idea

2008-04-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this post on Jakes blog, and it while he took inspiration from a recent Microsoft event, I'm taking it from a recent Adobe event Tom and I attended.

I'm only going to take the Titles of his points, you'll need to read his blog for his specific thoughts on each (unless I quote any parts).

1. Define your objective
This couldn't be more true! As much fun as I had in San Francisco, Tom and I both entered the room on the first night, wondering why we were there. We left after the last party, still sort of wondering. Was the objective to show us what's in the pipe and how the various Adobe technologies inter-relate? Was it to help improve relations among event planners that focus on Adobe Tech? We weren't sure.

2. Set the expectation on Day 1
This sort of folds back into number 1. During the welcome reception, Tom, being Tom, said we should all introduce ourselves. It was only then that we realized, that about 99% of the people that had been gathered, were event coordinators... Most of the heavy hitters in that space were all together in that one room. Tom and I looked at each other, and kinda shared an "Ahhhhhh. Interesting" moment, realizing who was in the room with us.

3. Choose the attendee list with purpose
This I think Adobe did well. There were a few folks, who the rest of us were like "Why are they here?"? For the most part, Adobe picked the folks in the Conference space around Flex, Flash, and the designer products. I'm not sure why they left out the ColdFusion conferences, other than maybe there's simply too many of those? Though Flash ain't exactly lacking in the space. I have one suspicion that Adobe brought together those of us, who've had no dealings with a competitor of theirs, haven't taken money from said competitor, and are more squarely in the "Adobe camp". I'm not sure and it's 100% speculation, but it's what I'm thinking. The only exception was a bit too big in the space to leave out.

4 Learn the group in advance
This one, I think Adobe didn't do as hot on. We got spoken at by several big names in the company (though the early promise of "Talk to the executives" never materialized). I use "Spoken at" because many of them didn't seem to know us, or who we were, or even what we'd like to hear about, or talk about. The FlashLite group was the first to have less slides and more discussion, even though as a group we brained them pretty severely.

5. Find a good facilitator
Adobe did a good job having Laura Wilton facilitate, it was sorta like herding cats, due to the tight schedules, but she rocked it! I do wish there had been a time for open discussion, maybe with Laura or someone acting as facilitator of a larger open forum discussion. Tom and I would have loved to have a chance to just "Talk shop" with the others. They've all been doing it longer than us. Plus, while we all do shows and so in a sense compete, there's still room for us to work together and possibly cut down on our costs.

6. Design the event
Adobe is great, but the SWAG at the end was a bit forced. (Lisa we love you like our sister!!) Adobe branded Wifi Finder, Flash lite training materials (Tom and I were the only planners who are developers by day, I can't see the others busting open a book and DVD to learn Flash lite. Shit, I'm not gonna do it!), some sort of art pencils... it just felt like they went around to each group to see who had "stuff" that they could give us. I'd actually be ok with no stuff vs. weird stuff.

Tom's Note: I differ here. I'm all about free stuff, the stranger the better. :) Being a regifter, the benefit of getting the Flash Lite stuff is I know I can give it to someone who really does want to learn that stuff.

7. Invite colleagues, then train them on expectations
(from Jake) "Unless your event design specifically calls for it, don’t stick your attendees in a room only with your team for the entire session. Invite your colleagues to come present what they’re working or participate in the session as members of the group. Just make sure to tell them in advance what the purpose of the group is and what you specifically want to see from them."

Right on, 100% and Adobe did this well. We had presentations from many product teams, and were shown (NDA) some really cool things.

8. Social events rule the day
Amen to that! Tom and I feel the same about way our events, so it was cool to see Adobe plan events each night. It was also cool that Adobeans showed up, to mingle and talk. It's nice to see them outside the mothership, just talking about whatever.

9. Create a method of follow-up
Adobe had me a little worried about this one. During each talk, the various groups all gave their emails (though some haven't replied to any that Tom and I have sent), but all of us were hoping and asked for, a comprehensive list. Adobe delivered, which was great! In fact it came today, and there was a list of Adobe emails and a list of Attendee emails.

In going over the attendee list, I was sorta surprised how many folks didn't opt in. I mean, were all of us so lame that talking to us later wasn't worth sharing your email? Some of us could probably share what we've learned, partner, etc. Opting out was just sort of lame.

Overall, Adobe pulled off a really cool event. I hope they include us next year. I think we have a lot to offer them and I think they have a lot to offer us. Coming together to share and talk is of immeasurable value! It was particularly nice to hear that Adobe would try harder at not stepping all over us. That's a welcome change and the way it should be. We're all on the same team.

How not to win or influence customers

2008-04-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Or how Creative might have nailed it's own coffin shut. Or at least drove one of the last nails.

In what's a sadly typical corporate move, Creative seems to have decided that their customers needed to buy a new sound card for use in Microsoft Vista machines vs simply updating the existing drivers.

Ok that alone, I don't think is the worst thing ever. Hell Apple does it all time, and look how many people love 'em. What makes this situation different is Creative's response.

One of their customers, 'daniel_k', wrote the drivers on his own time to help out. In response to his selfless efforts, Creative had this to say: "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods," That from Creative Labs' Phil O'Shaughnessy in the Creative Forums.

So rather than say nothing at all, which is probably the path Creative should have taken, they not only said that they chose to essentially screw their customers, but then went on to say that an enterprising customer that solved the problem with a hack was a thief.

"If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make."

So what's going to happen next? Well, in all likelihood, Creative will lose a good number of it's customers. The Hack is still out there, so there will be a large percentage of users who will not be upgrading.

If Creative had done nothing, the hack would remain on the fringe. Sure, thousands would use it, but only those brave enough to use hacked drivers. Most would have just upgrade to the new card, simply because it was the path of least resistance.

Phil's move has single handedly cost Creative more sales than 'daniel_k's handiwork.

So why are we talking about hardware on this blog?

Other than it being a completely anti cluetrain thing to do, which goes against everything Tom and I stand for, but it's just damn shady! I mean really Creative! You can't come up with a valid reason for users to upgrade their hardware? You can't offer a better product? All you can do is cripple existing products to drive sales of new ones? Really? That's a truly great business plan. Good luck with it.

A conference for community builders

2008-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Tom and I attended Adobe's "Industry Leader and Creative Media Summit", not a descriptive title at all, but it turned out to be fun. We can't talk about what we were shown, but that's really only part of the coolness of the event. The main cool factor was meeting other event organizers and talking shop. None of them do things they way we do, their events are closer to traditional conferences, but still it was nice to meet them and talk shop about dealing with sponsors, how to deal with A/V, internet, special needs attendees, etc.

The one thing that didn't take place was a time in the schedule officially for talking shop, which would have rocked. As it is, we talked in between and might be able to leverage our collective buying power on things like USB drives and such. That would have been very worthwhile. Hopefully, our various events can pool resources to make our respective events better!

Educational Marketing... the only way it should be.

2008-03-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

Business Week had a very informative article and it really resonated with Tom and I. It's about educational Marketingc and its benefits. The interesting part is that this approach isn't just beneficial to the marketer, but also to the marketee (that's a word, right?)

Three examples from the article:

Business: Real Estate Agency

Ineffective offer: "Let me teach you why you should list your house with me."

Effective offer: "Let me teach you the five mistakes everyone makes when selling a house. No matter who you list with, you'll need to know these things."

Business: Financial Planner

Ineffective offer: "I want to come and talk to you about how I can help you plan for a better financial future."

Effective offer: "Even if you never do anything with me, I want to make sure you know that there are five critical mistakes everyone makes in trying to accumulate wealth."

Business: Technology Services Company

Ineffective offer: "Let me tell you how great we are at helping with your IT services."

Effective offer: "As part of our effort to build better relationships in the business community, we offer a free white paper entitled 'Six ways to dramatically increase productivity using your current technology.' "

This really hits home for us, and fits with how we do things. We've addressed the transparency already but this is a different beast. This is putting our attendees, and even speakers and sponsors, ahead of us.

Our goal is to expand the Flex (for now, it's just Flex... for now :D ) Community. The industry needs developers, of all skill levels. If they get that training at 360|Flex, great. If they go to any of the other conferences offering various levels of Flex training and sessions, that's great too. The end result is the same, and the industry and community benefit.

So how does this directly help us? Well according to the article, and even some limited anecdotal evidence we've already collected, by looking out for the best interests of your constituents (customers, community) we make them more likely to want to work with us. By being genuinely interested in our customers' well being, they return that sentiment in kind with their business. Everyone prospers, and comes out the better for it. Anyone see a downside to that model?