When I saw that #1 was “Speed” i knew I had to post something there. Tom and I argued… ok fought about speed a lot. I’m a very now now now, let’s do it now vs. wait around and do it later person. Tom is the opposite.  So is Nicole for that matter, but she’s at least open to letting me convince her I’m right :)

#3 is a good one. Hard to make work, but a good one. It’s really hard to remove emotion from the equation. A sponsor being lame, or backing out, or people abusing press passes, it hurts. It’s an affront to you, and feels like a slap in the face, and it’s hard to not do the first thing that comes to mind. But I agree it’s often (I don’t know if I’d say always) best to let logic win out.

#7 Is interesting. 360|Conferences wouldn’t exist without Tom and I. Neither of us is likely to have done it on their own. I know it wasn’t on my mind, and pretty sure it wasn’t on Tom’s. But the two of us together bootstrapped the company into 4 anchor events a year, plus a few one-off trial events etc. And not to be all horn tooty, pretty sure we’re why several others have created events. A business partner is a huge asset, but as Tom and I learned, you need to be more than just friends. You need to be on the same page. Turns out Tom and I were rarely on the same page, and only sometimes reading the same book.

The rest of the list is great, and I agree with each item. I take vacations, sometimes a weekend off, etc. I plan for just enough of tomorrow to know what I want to do the next day, but if you were to ask me what 2012 or even 2011 looked like for us, the best I’d be able to say is 4 events, a possible location. That’s it.It’s grand to plan out to 2015, but it’s the stuff in between that’s FAR more important.

The twitter rule is a big one. I manage about 7 twitter accounts. tweeting discount codes, RT’ing things I think the communities those accounts care about would be interested in, etc. It’s damn near a fulltime job on it’s own. but it does pay off over time. It’s not huge, or fast, but when looked at cumulatively, it’s a steady building wave. The more I tweet, the more people RT, the more widespread the message gets. For events, it’s especially important to leverage the network effect. the 360flex account has about 1500 followers, each of those has their own number, etc. so each person who helps spread the word, has near infinite reach.

#5 is something I need to do better at. I’ve got awesome friends, who introduce me to new people when we’re out. They do a great job of talking up the particular conference they’re tied to, but then it’s my turn and I nod, agree with their statements, and maybe add something boring. I’m working on that aspect. Not quite an elevator pitch, but a short burst of “Why you should be attending as well”

#6 is timely. We started video taping sessions this past spring. They’re very successful, each is $3.50 there’s currently a buy 5 get 1 free deal, and they’re selling pretty well. Not paying my phone bill, but covering hosting, etc and giving me lunch and beer money. Which is great since even if I’m at an even keel, that’s better than spending what little I have. We’re already planning to increase the video quality for the fall events, by buying some HD flip cams. Not everything this time will be HD, but we’re phasing out SD.

We’re also going to get more testimonial, man on the floor type video this fall, to produce some fun/cool videos to show people why they should be at 360|events.

#7 I think we came close to pioneering :) We reach out to our speakers to help get the word out. We don’t demand it, but we ask each one to help make noise, help raise awareness, etc. After all people pay more attention to the speakers, they’re big names in the communities, well connected, etc. When they speak people listen. It works really well. Leveraging their names, and fame to help increase attention on the event, is a big boost.

#10 is a tough one for me. As a developer and person who’s on lots of lists, every email campaign I create I have a mental block to get past of “is this too much?” For the most part, and this was awesome advice from Liz.. Go just past your comfort zone on sending emails. If you think you’re getting close to annoying, you can probly send one more email. Our own filters are naturally strong, so it’s tough to reach past them. But it’s true. My mailing lists for the most part grow weekly/monthly as I send out more and more interesting things.

What works for you? Leave a comment, share your thoughts.

Case in point (I’m not naming names… at least not right now)

At the most recent 360|iDev conference I met 2 guys who run a small software developer newsletter/newspaper. They also do events. One of them paid for a regular attendee ticket, they other asked for and received a press pass.

They came and said hello when I was at the desk, and nicely let me know they were planning their own iPhone conference.

More the merrier, sure I’d love to be the only show, but I’ll settle for being the best. They expressed their desire to not overlap, or in any way interfere with 360|iDev, and presumable receive the same from me. Cool.

One thing that stuck with me was that they flat out said in the course of our conversation, “we like to think we’re the good guys in conferences”

I didn’t see them much the rest of the conference, turns out the “press” only came for 1 day and posted a nice post on his personal blog about the conference.

The other guy spent (to the best of my knowledge) the rest of the conference poaching speakers (and possibly/most likely sponsors)

Now, don’t get me wrong, poaching speakers and sponsors is par for the course. Recruiting speakers to your events, involves seeing them at other events. However I find it completely slimy that I basically helped finance the poaching by giving a press pass.

Sure passes are largely a soft cost, but there’s an expected quid pro quo in giving someone from the press a pass. IF they even come (a lot will ask for a pass, but then never show. I don’t get it, but whatever) they write about it. Heck even a “X event was nice” something to show that you appreciated the pass, and the courtesy extended for the press.

I finally wrote one of the offenders, expressing my feelings of being taken advantage of, and got back

“There wasn’t any hard news  (ie, product announcements) that were picked up but Alan did blog about the conference:”

No explanation or denial that I had indeed helped fund their fishing trip, no apology for an act that didn’t come across as the actions of a “Good guy”. Just the above and “If you want to come to our event, let me know” Not even a “here’s a discount code”

Off the top of my head there was the merger of two indie iphone dev companies, Fastmac had all kinds of cool new products they were announcing/showing, we had a round table discussion about Apple’s SDK agreement clause 3.3.1, we had a 12 year old who had several apps in the app store, and was working on iPad games in attendance, we had a 12 hour game jam going on over night,  and more. Other press had no trouble finding plenty to write about (see here)

It’s sad that there are businesses who find this type of behavior ok.

It’s sadder still that as a result, the “no longer allowed press credentials” list has an entry on it.

Clearly we’re doing better at this than before :)

Not super terrific awesome, but better.

I think we’ve found pricing that works ($499 first 100, $599 the rest), and stays true to our “Not breaking the Indie bank” ethos. We’ve also found a rhythm in selling sponsorships. Turns out I’m actually pretty good at it. These two things combined, with really aggressive selling to the community, seem to be paying off.

Our sponsorship package has gotten more wide ranging, and I think truly offers our sponsors a great value. For 360|iDev, I actaully had to turn people away, we simply didn’t have anything left to make into a sponsorship, and I refuse to simply take people’s money without giving them the absolute more value for their spend.

As the transition from 2 man team to 1 man team (Actually my wife is a major part of the company now) finishes it’s 6 month progression, I find myself even more excited about 360|Conferences. There’s lots to do, and plenty of uncertainty, but that’s exciting. I’m working hard to get 360|Mobile locked in. I’ve already begun looking at locations for 360|Flex and 360|iDev Fall. I’ve even started the ball rolling for 360|iDev Spring 2011, if you can believe that!

Oh and Europe. We might actually make it to Europe in 2010. Still TBD.

In looking at past sales Tom noted that offering a Team price, resulted in about $10,000 more in profit at the end of the day (the last day of the event, for the sake of discussion), vs. our current model of offering 100 tickets at a reduced price, typically $100-$200 off the regular price.

It was interesting because while $10,000 is certainly nothing to scoff at, at this point in the business, early sales are more important. While I hate the concept of early bird ticketing to inflate early numbers, I do like offering those who want to save some money, the opportunity, AND I like having some early money to pay the bills

So is $10,000 down the road, worth no sales, and no income in the short term? Currently, my answer is no. In the longterm, I think the answer is different, obviously I want to do right by my customers, and make money, so I’m not sure it’s ‘either or’, but I do think things with change down the road.

You?

It’s definitely a sad week.

unfortunately it highlights a glaring omission in our business, a lack of written agreements and/or even mutually agreed upon definitions of things.

Sure we have the actual incorporation papers, our ownership split, but that’s it. I won’t lie and say it never occurred to me, it did, several times, and each time I either back burnered it or prioritized another expense over it (lawyers ain’t cheap). And like all things put off, it’s biting us in the butt.

I don’t foresee any Calcanis/Arrington style online bitch matches, but I’m not gonna kid myself, the next few months will be messy as Tom and I figure out what it means to work 1 partner out of the company; assets (what few there are), debts, responsibilities, etc all have to be figured out.

On my end of things I have to figure out where I’m going from here. I mean the company is going to continue to bring Flex and iPhone developers the best community conferences around, but will I do it alone? It’s no secret money is tough for Tom and I because we have 2 people to pay, and doing an event 2x a year doubles expenses, but doesn’t double income. It might make sense for 360|Conferences to be a one man show, at least for a while.

It should make for some interesting blog posts :)

I suppose on one hand it’s a compliment, since often those events are 100% community and usually entertaining and fun, if not informative. On the other hand though, it’s not a very fair comparison.

• Barcamps aren’t usually 3-4 days long
• They rarely include meals and/or parties
• They don’t often have SWAG (of varying importance for sure)
• They don’t cover any speaker expense

We recently had someone complain that we should still be charging $100 dollars for 360|Flex, our Flex Developer conference, because that was what we charged the first time.

That’s all well and good, except we lost money. $100 for 3 days, without it being completely a marketing event, with fun parties, good content, etc, is as we’ve found, unrealistic.

Barcamps are great, but they’re not a business. Barcamp style events are typically organized by local community members who want to do an event. The barcamp style event is very easy to get setup and has very few, if any requirements on the organizer. Barcamps rely on sponsors to provide things, like lunch, badges, parties etc. and if that doesn’t happen, that’s just too bad. “You didn’t pay to come, or you paid very little, what do you expect?” is often heard.

The organizer is most likely employed, and not relying on the conference to pay his phone bill let alone mortgage. His goal was to bring people together, which is awesome and applause worthy, but not a business.

Barcamps (like MashupCamp, startupCamp, etc.) don’t have defined speakers, and rely on people coming prepared to speak/present, and finding enough people to do so, the day of.

It’s hard to stack up against a free event, when the free event isn’t intended to be a business. Tom and I would love to do free events, but unless everyone wants to be schilled at 100% of the time by the sponsors we’d need to subsidize the event, it’s unrealistic.

I think comparing one event to another (regardless of whether they’re similar or not) is a bad practice to get into (and I often do it myself, I admit), when the real comparison is the value and ROI to the attendee.  Compare what attendees take away, compare what they get from the event. After all that’s the important thing. It’s not a ‘who gives more SWAG, or has the best parties’ contest, it’s who gives their attendees the most bang for their buck, that’s what counts.

It’s tough sometimes to keep that in mind, I admit.

The first thing to realize when pricing your product or service is that there is no such thing as an “actual” value of a product or service.  Everything deals with perceived value.  As a vendor, you have a perception of the value of your good or service.  The customer will also have a perception of the value of the product that plays a role in whether they buy or not.

Before moving on, let’s take a step back and talk about the US system of ethical capitalism.  Capitalism is by far the best system we have going on the planet for improving the quality of life for people on earth.  Unfortunately, capitalism in its purest form will not work if unethical people are involved.  In a capitalistic transaction, each party brings to the table something the other one wants.  In modern society, where we no longer have a barter system, one party brings money, and the other brings a good or service.  The beauty of this system is that the game is set up so that BOTH the buyer and the seller win in the transaction. The seller receives money which they want, and the buyer receives the good or service that they want.  If one of the parties starts to act in an unethical manner, both will end up losing in the end.  The seller will lose because people will stop buying from him if he’s perceived to have “cheated” people in the past.  The buyer will lose because he’s either been cheated, or because the good or service is no longer available.  Any business transaction is built upon the trust between the buyer and seller.  In the US, we don’t have a capitalistic economy, but rather a mixed economy.  We take the priciples of capitalism we like, but also add some government regulations such as anti-trust, and price-gouging laws to the mix because we inherently know that not everybody will behave in a purely ethical manner.

So, how does a seller make the decision of where to price a product?  In the seller’s mind, the thing they’re selling has some set value to them.  In the buyer’s mind, they also have a perceived value.

Some startups make the mistake of pricing their product at the level of customer perceived value.  They put themselves in the customer’s shoes and say something like… Ok, if the customer uses my product, they’ll save 4 days of effort on their side as opposed to doing it themselves.  Therefore, I should price my product at 4 days of the buyer’s salary.  This approach completely misses the subtle fact that a buyer will not buy a product unless the price is somewhere BELOW their perceived value.  The buyer NEEDS to feel like they’re getting a deal.  This also misses the fact that the buyer may not care about buying additional days.  They might be buying “cool” or “useful”, not necessarily something practical like “days of effort”.  They also might be buying something intangible like “prestige” as is the case when you buy a Ferrari, BMW, or Lexus.

Assume you’re the buyer for a second.  If the price of something is exactly at or above what your perceived value is, you won’t buy because you don’t win in the transaction.  You either come out behind or exactly where you started out.  The default position for a buyer is to do nothing.  A buyer won’t be moved to act unless there is a strong feeling that they win in the transaction.  A buyer will perceive value in a product when they feel like they’re getting a deal.

While we’re pretending, let’s say that I’m in the market for a basejumping wingsuit.  I have some perceived value in my head of the fun I’m going to have while basejumping with that wingsuit and what amount of money that is worth to me.  Let’s say that the experience is worth about $2000 to me.  What’s important to note is that I won’t buy anything at or over $2000.  If I were, then my perceived value is actually higher than $2000.  In this scenario, the basejumping wingsuit store first looks at their hard costs for time, materials, and labor.  Let’s say they can build a nice wingsuit for around $500.  Their perceived value for the wingsuit is actually a bit higher than that, since they wouldn’t have undertaken the effort to begin with if it wasn’t worthwhile for them. The seller then has some flexibility in pricing their product from $500 up to $2000.  I probably won’t buy at the low end because the product will feel too “cheap” for me.  Since I’m taking my own life in my hands, I don’t want to buy a “cheap” wingsuit. I also probably won’t buy at the high end because I’m not getting a good enough deal.  In the end, I go with a $1500 wingsuit because I feel like I got a deal and I got a higher-end wingsuit so there’s some intangible prestige value to me there.  The seller also walks away happy from the deal since they just made a nice profit of $1000 from me.

This principle of buyer perceived value vs. seller perceived value can be seen starkly on display when you watch a TV infomercial.  In an infomercial, they usually try to tell the buyer what their perceived value should be.  They say something like, “All of these items…A $60 value, all for $19.95″.  They try to put a perceived value of $60 into the head of the buyer, but sell the items for their own perceived value of $19.95.  The buyer may or may not actually perceive the value to be $60 dollars, but that doesn’t stop the infomercial people from trying to put that idea into the buyer’s head.

I’ll leave you with a little bit of inspiration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xlQdx9nCeM&feature=fvsr

1. Small business loans. Apply a micro-lending model that has proved successful in developing countries, extending credit lines up to $50,000.

Why? Because models of investment besides just venture capital can stimulate the economy. Let’s not neglect entrepreneurs who create coffee shops, florists, taxi services or other small businesses that help the economy thrive at the local level. Sometimes, a coffee shop becomes Starbucks. These don’t require venture funding; they just need a small business loan to get started and grow. Micro-lending has proved viable around the world — let’s do more of it at home. If a service like Kiva.org (disclosure: I’m a board member) can succeed in 12 countries, it can succeed here too.

I couldn’t agree more! 360|Conferences doesn’t need 9mil! We don’t want 9mil! We really (and currently) need just enough money to push us into Full Time employee status and pay ourselves salary so we can focus on more events, which drastically improves our money situation. Right noew we’re at a weird tipping point, needing more money for more events, but not being able to do more events because we have jobs and need the money to quit those. funny Interesting, not funny ha ha.

2. Abolish the limit on H-1B Visas. Remove the cap on H-1B visas and impose a 10 percent payroll tax beyond the benchmark salary for each visa. Then channel the proceeds from the payroll tax into US re-education programs.

This is a country founded on immigration. We should welcome the best and the brightest as our own. Abolish the H-1B cap, and give me an economic reason for preferring local. I’ll only do foreign if I need to. A 10 percent payroll tax for each H-1B visa can be reinvested in whatever it takes to get American talent up to the same level. This has been proposed previously, but a payroll tax ensures that H-1Bs are used for skilled labor, not cheap labor.

I’m really torn on the whole H1-B. Reid’s solution at least makes sense to me. I just can’t stomach the typical reason for hiring H1-Bs, which is to essentially get cheap indentured slaves. People can cry fould, but I’ve worked at more than 1 place with H1-B folks, and have known many others.  The fomer companies find the cheap labor, screwing US workers. When I hear “There aren’t any programmers in the US” my Bullshit alarm goes super sonic and dogs start barking.

I’ve also known H1-B folks that have had to stick with a shitty company, that’s in a slow death spiral, working them 12+ hour days because the Americans have long since quit for better opportunities, because the company held their paperwork. Weak sauce.

So while I’m no fan of the H1-B ‘thing’ at least Reid’s idea incentivises companies to really try to find local talent, and invests in our future. The US is in a death spiral of our own. When kids see adults losing their tech jobs left and right (to outsourcing and H1-Bs), what on Earth makes us think they’ll want to go into a tech field when they’re older. We’re sowing the seeds of our own demise, for short term profit bumps (executive bonuses).

3. Match funds for venture capital and angel investors. Match up to $100 million in stimulus funds for qualifying venture and angel investments if they create jobs in the US. Let these investors keep their normal return plus 50 percent of the returns on the matching funds, while the other half goes back to the government to revitalize further investment.

This one doesn’t apply to Tom and I, since we’re in the Taxi, Coffee shop, Florist realm, but I think it’s a good idea. Screw GM and the big banks bonusing out and partying on our tax dollars. Put stimulus money where it can do good, in start ups who are creating jobs in the US!  This is a win/win idea as far as I’m concerned.

360|Conferences, Corp is a purely service business. Our offering is our abilities, our community, and ourselves. That’s it. No app, no website, no SAAS, nothing that can be bought, sold, or processed. (bonus points if you got that)

We can’t attract investment capital in the traditional tech start up way, since we don’t have any ‘out’ or clear return. To quote David Cohen (whom I hope to meet in person one day!) “i think raising money right now, especially for a business that doesn’t have the best scale economics, is just tough. there’s not much debt money available. ”

Our business however, works like any other, we require capital to continue, we’re bootstrapping, and that get’s us sorta kinda by, but the reality is we need capital like any other start up business that needs to expand it’s offerings. It’s quite the conundrum to be sure.

It’s one of those weird start up problems, that I never really thought about in starting on this adventure. We figured bootstrapping would be just fine, but in actually executing on our business we’ve found that we’re at a place where we can’t easily do more events without the free time of paying ourselves, but we can’t pay ourselves full time (or even part time) without doing more events.

I re-stumbled across this blog post and it gave me some hope, I think our ’13 months’ is a bit longer than 13 real calendar months since our events are spaced apart and there’s low periods.

I think 360|Confferences is at this tipping point right now, we just have to hold on. Hope we can.