My natural habitat is what you're looking at right now. A keyboard, a monitor and a whole bunch of words. It's where I'm comfortable. So taking the chance at moving out of that environment, to a room full of 160 people who paid hard earned money to attend, including dozens who I respect and admire, was fucking terrifying. I was shaking with fear when I was driving along the Tullamarine Freeway to the venue on Saturday morning and was scared I might drive the car into a concrete barrier. It's not like I thought I'd totally suck. I know I had a chance at it going well. I wouldn't have bothered otherwise – but like anything you create, until it's launched, you never know if people will love it, hate it or just not care about it.
Luckily for me, it seems people cared. Cared a whole heap actually. Random people, that *paid* to attend, took time to say thank you and that it was a great conference. Shit – two people I don't know, managed to find me and tell me "this was the best conference I've ever been to." The best conference they've ever been to!? I've never done this before and two people thought my first attempt was the best they've ever seen. How awesome is that? It totally makes up for the bullshit that sometimes creeps into projects like this – although, the amount of bullshit was very, very, very low. (Fuck you Allied Express – eat a bag of dicks, French breadstick style)
At the end of a project, you need to somehow gauge it's success. Success is very relative and for some people, profit is a major factor. For some it's a checklist of things nobody except people who need to justify their existence give a fuck about (was it all on time, did it meet our KPIs, was the survey feedback in the top percentile of jerks who care about surveys, etc. etc.). But for me, it was pretty simple:
Did I have fun and did the people attending feel as if they're better equipped to tackle their own iOS projects?
I know I had fun, even if at times I felt like going in the corner and rocking back and forth (sorry James & Russell, honestly – I meant it when I was I was embarrassed). I don't know what was fun about it exactly, but I felt the opposite of hate, so that must mean something.
And I certainly know that at least some people who attended enjoyed it, as they told me. Within hours of the conference ending, 3 people emailed me to say they've got new resolve to complete their iOS work after attending One More Thing. Exactly what I wanted to happen. That's what it was all about. That's why I put all this effort into it, Not trying to sell solutions, to promote the speakers consulting groups, not to market a product, or to sell access to workshops and classes. I just wanted to help people get shit done and to make cool iOS apps. No agenda, no pretence, no self-interest and all from the heart.
So for me, One More Thing was stupidly successful, I don't regret doing it, losing thousands of dollars doesn't bother me and that's all that matters.
And one more thing, regarding One More Thing – I've been asked three questions over and over, so I'll answer them here:
This is really long and kinda boring unless you're into how to make money out of a conference, but I wanted to write it for my own analysis and for future reference. If someone else finds this handy, that's awesome. TLDR; I spent too much to get more people to attend in the hope it would counter the fact I couldn't get a large sponsor.
I won't know for sure until I do go through my credit card statements and piles of receipts, but I do know that I budgeted for the whole thing to cost $36,000 and we made $26,500 in ticket sales (109 paid attendees) after booking fees, plus $2,150 from our 3 sponsors. A total of $28,650. So just by that very rough estimate, there's a $7,500 balance at 10.49% interest on my credit card I need to pay back eventually.
Making a profit wasn't one of my barometers of success. I'm lucky enough that a $7,500 debt on a credit card is just an inconvenience and not a life changing turn of events where I'm suddenly eating from the bin outside KFC. But it would have been nice to generate some coin, because I like money and it often comes in handy. Like avoiding KFC from a bin...
When I look into why it didn't make money (I believed it could), I realised it was because I over-estimated the amount of sponsor support I could gather. My intention was always to keep the entry price low. The whole day was about quitting your job and making kick arse apps as an indie developer, so getting employers to shell out $1000+ was out of the question. It had to be low enough to make the coder struggling on a shitty wage at least kinda afford it, but also be high enough that we generated a majority of the income from it – hence the $249 price point. That was set pretty early on. I also knew that there's about 100 people I reckon who would attend. That's a bit more than what attend the Melbourne Cocoaheads meet every month. So with 100 people, at $249 (which is really $243 after fees), I'd need a sponsor to make up the rest of the expenses, plus a bit more for financial cherry on top. With that in mind, I wanted a sponsor, or sponsors, to fork out $16,000.
I figured finding a sponsor that would have 100% naming/branding/signage/web/video rights would be easy. But it wasn't. I really, really suck at getting businesses to give me money in return for advertising. It was fucking hard to do at MacTalk (which actually had a track record, a reputation and stats) and was almost impossible with One More Thing, which was nothing except a 2 page PDF asking for $20,000. It was a really nice looking and clear PDF though! I emailed approximately 500 businesses and PR companies who I thought would be relevant to One More Thing. About 40 replied back. About 5 were semi-serious. None actually gave me any money.
Knowing I'm not going to get a big sponsor, I needed to get more attendees. 150 was the target, which I also knew was going to be damn hard. So I took a gamble and splashed more money in promoting the event. I budgeted to spend about $500. I ended up spending almost $4,000 – eight times the allocated budget.
For those who care, here's a list of what I did to promote the event (with some stuff missing because I forgot to list it during the promotion process):
I think it's an extensive list. I exhausted all the avenues I could think of. I may have been able to do more – I could have bugged the speakers more, to use their networks to promote the event, but I respect them too much to use them in that way. I should have arranged more interviews for myself and the speakers, by constructing a more emotional and easier to rip off press release. I should have also made a promotional video and got Pete to do interviews with all the speakers and make a One More Thing podcast series to promote the event (and it would have been kinda cool).
The thing that pissed me off the most about the promotion process was the total lack of interest from Apple, AIMA and Multimedia Victoria. Apple I can kinda forgive, they never give a shit. But AIMA and MMV should really have got off their fat arses and the very, very least sent out my press release to their outlets. One More Thing was the first iOS developer conference in Australia and it went down in Melbourne. We had the cream of the crop speaking, a ringing endorsement of this fledgling industry, right in our backyard, which these groups are supposed to be supporting. I got no love from them at all. Not even an email or return call from AIMA, and nothing but incompetence from MMV. Extremely disappointing and very frustrating.
In the end, the 109 attendees found out about One More Thing by predominately 4 ways – word of mouth (friend told em), MacTalk, Cocoaheads and articles on Gizmodo AU and in the Green Guide. All the money I spent on the advertising was not directly accounted for. I can only link 2 sales directly to paid advertising. There may be a "halo" effect around that paid advertising, but was it worth $4,000? Shit no. I took the gamble and lost. Not only did I increase my expenses by $3,500, I also didn't get close to 150 paid attendees and didn't get a sponsor to cover the shortfall.
In the end, I did manage to get three sponsors – Other Levels, cool guys who also paid to attend and found out because they're fellow nerds – Nuance who found out via a PR company I've never heard of – and Big Nerd Ranch, who got a tip off from one of the speakers, Russell. It was great to have their support, but the amount I managed to get in the end was less than 20% of what I thought I'd get and that combination of increased expenses to get more attendees, plus lack of big time sponsor meant One More Thing lost money.
Many people asked me this yesterday and I said "I don't think so", but I was exhausted, a little frustrated and hungry. After a day of reflection, I'm more included to try it again. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it and I had fun doing it. I've gained some experience and would hopefully learn from the mistakes I made. There's also a reputation there to leverage off, which I didn't have before. It would be a shame to let that all dwindle away into insignificance. So while it's not 100% confirmed and there's no date, no speaker list, not even an idea of planning another, I haven't discounted it entirely. Just keep following me on Twitter and watch the cogs turn in my head...
