How to Run a Conference with Benjamin Dunphy

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Boss. Welcome

to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Today, we've got ready. A guest on for you. We've got Benjamin Dumpey. He's here to talk to us about running conferences. He's run a whole handful of different rid. Web development and tech conferences in the past. So here to talk about how conferences are run and what's hard about them and and All of the all of the stuff that involves in person as well as, like, now we have coronavirus. So now we have a lot of online conferences. What makes a good re Online conference as well as, like, the tech behind running an online conference. So welcome, Ben. Thanks so so much for coming on. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Yeah. With us as always is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I'm doing good. I do wanna say at the jump, Ben, The conference is the I don't understand. I'm not saying this to just butter Ben up here, but the conferences that I've been to that have been the best conferences. So I think we have the best person to talk about this on because, seriously, the all of the conferences that whether it's Reactathon, whatever, Jamset com, those conferences re Always awesome at at Ben Storozel. Thank you very much for, 1, throwing awesome conferences, and 2, stopping by to talk to us about it. Yeah. Absolutely. It is my pleasure both to

run those events because it's absolutely my passion and re My love of running these events and bringing these people together that hopefully shows in those events. And it's secondly, it's my pleasure to to come on this Podcasts. I've been a fan of your podcast for a long time, and I think you guys are are amazing individuals and amazing podcast hosts. I remember your first Episode that I I No.

In my car. Actually, just thinking about it now, I was, like, driving across, one of the bridges Coming up to the San Francisco skyline, and there's Wes's voice and Scott's voice, and you guys just sounded awesome. And it was and you guys were like, oh, we're just figuring this out. And now you got This, like, amazing cadence going, it's amazing,

it's amazing stuff going. So not to butter you up, but you guys you guys are awesome. I'll take it. We'll take it. Yeah. Ready. Yeah. We've been exceptionally into being buttered up lately. So Yeah. For those who are listening, our live I think we've done 2 live syntaxes, And we were supposed to do 3, but Yeah. That didn't pan out. We were COVID had other plans for that. Yeah. But those were at at Ben's conferences, and he he had this, like, rid The really cool what do you call those big signs that you have made? Oh, yeah.

So it's just like an expandable, like, sign that we just put on the table between you guys. So you put up like The syntax logo. We put up the syntax logo on a table between you guys. We got rid Nice couches for you, and then we put some shrubbery up there, which we, like, set up, like, quickly during a break. We're like, everyone, don't go anywhere. It's good Strawberry. Yeah. Shoving everything on the stage, it was it was really great. And I I believe 1 of you started off saying, yeah, Between Two Ferns with Wes and Scott.

Yeah. Which was which was so amazing. Like, we didn't learn this until after that, but you guys had never met

state. Well, not on state. Well, I get it. Re Yeah. Basic More or less.

We went out for ramen before. Which is fantastic.

We gotta hear about that story sometime.

Yeah. Yeah. That was that was good. Scott is exactly what I thought he would be, so there's not too not too many surprises there. Likewise. We gotta talk about our sponsors real quick. We're sponsored by Sanity, which is a structured content CMS, and FreshBooks, which is Cloud Accounting. We'll talk about them partway through the episode.

So you've decided that you would like to run a conference. Right? You said, oh, I I think a conference is a good idea.

There are a lot of variables, which I'm I'm sure ready. Very aware of that there's just thousands and thousands of variables here.

There's a lot of costs.

What do you do when you're thinking like, okay. Now Now I need to start figuring things out. Like, what's step number 1 of of starting to throw a conference?

Sure. So I think re There's really 3 things that you need when starting to run a conference.

And the first thing is your motivation.

Who are you? Why do you wanna run this conference? Right? Are you a company? Do you want to run this conference for recruiting? Do you want to do sales of a product? Do you want to just bring people together? Are you establishing a new category? Are you an individual? Are you doing this for passion? For money? Are you doing it because you just love events? So in my personal story, you know, I have a background in Sales and marketing and finance, then I moved into web development.

Started off in rails, you know, went to one of those boot camps.

But then I really got into React.

And I was fortunate enough to really start my web development career when React was starting to come out. Like, I remember I just graduated Epicodis, little shout out to them, and in Portland, Oregon. And React Native was just announced on the stage, and I was just blown away. Right? I remember Tom Okino's keynote, amazing speaker, even better manager of rid The over there at Facebook for the React team. And it was just so inspiring, so amazing. And they put on quite an amazing conference.

So that really inspired me to get into React. So for my personal story, it comes from a passion of the of the subject matter of the conference, And it comes from a a passion of the events. Because after I graduated from Epocotus, I moved to San Francisco, which Just has an amazing meetup scene. And meetup as in meetup .com, which curiously has a trademark for that word. So let's call them meetings.

I don't I don't wanna be serious.

So they have an amazing San Francisco has an amazing meeting scene, which are, like, basically many conferences.

I mean, it's happening every single night.

And you have these these companies that are hosting these these events at their offices.

You know, they're promoting themselves in their company. They're saying, you know, come and work for us and and and so on. But then just the transfer of knowledge, rid The sharing of knowledge, which is which is very special both to San Francisco because it's such a high level here, just web development in general. You know, when I went to my 1st conference when I was working in finance, I remember the company I was with. We had a booth there was this guy who comes up to us, and he just looks like a banker.

He probably even smelled like a banker. I mean, he's he's clearly our competition, because we had this, like, proprietary software product, and he's asking us all these probing questions. But he's pretending that he's an attendee, and we're like, Dude, you took off your sponsor badge. You're not even wearing a badge. You're wearing a suit. You look like a banker. So he's, like, infiltrating us. Right? He's, like, coming to I'm sure that happens in software, But among us devs, not really. Right? We're all about open source. We're about sharing knowledge. And this just this culture was just so Captivating to me. And it it just really, really I just fell in love with it. So I fell in love with the meeting scene in San Francisco. I fell in love with the knowledge transfer, The community building.

And I noticed that there was really only 1 React meetup, and it was happening a lot in the South Bay and not as much in San Francisco, which is where I was at the time.

I decided to start my own. And we started this rid meetup.comgroup, and it just grew from there. Right? And so the motivation is really important to establish. So me, it's a lot of passion. It's a lot of interest, and it's thematic.

Right? It's around a specific theme. And so this leads into my second re Goal that you need to understand when you're looking to make your 1st conference is to know who your target audience is. Re If you don't have a specific target audience and you don't have, like, a brand already built, it's going to be tremendously difficult for you to run a conference.

Like, for example, let's just say there's this really hot new technology out. I don't know. It could be React. It could be Vue. It could be What's that new one by Google? The new mobile cross platform Flutter. Flutter. Right? Flutter. Flutter. Yeah. Seems really cool.

Do you have an audience for that? Are you the person to run an event like that? Like, if your motivation is more I want to fill rid The demand for this, are you the right person for that though? You know? So you have to be connected with your audience. You have to know who they are, you have to have specific motivations for that.

Does that make sense? Totally. Rid. Yeah. I I think that's an an often overlooked aspect of just about everything. Like, what are what are your actual motivations here? That sort of high level thought of who is this serving is stuff that we even talk about in the context of whatever our freelance rid out. Right? Like, who is this is this project serving your ego? No. I don't think it is. I think this is serving some company's goals or whatever. So what are those goals? What is your motivation? And I think those are ex exceedingly important questions that often get overlooked.

Yeah. Exactly. And since this is you know, since your show is all about Web development and tech within that industry, specifically among us developers, rid It really comes down to transparency. Right? You have this whole culture of open source.

And so that transfers, I think, into events, and you want to be as transparent as possible with who you are, how you're running the event, and why you're the right person to run that event.

Yeah. Do you mind telling us, like, which of the conferences that you've run-in the past? Because, like, I know you've run some yourself, and then you also, have run some for 4 companies as well. And I always thought that was pretty interesting because, like, your also, your conferences are are there for profit. Right? You're not just, like, some sort of re Meetup group that's now running a conference. There's certainly lots of those. I'm not gonna name names, but there are there are conferences in our industries that You go to, and they're very much put on by companies looking to make a massive profit because their some other sales are are down right now. What's the what's all I'll say? Yeah. So conferences are done for 2020, of course, probably 2021.

But just to give you a little background on on me to answer your question. Yeah. So I'm in a unique position because I'm an independent organizer, rid. And I have a number of skills that allow me and just experience overall that allow me to run events almost solo. And what I mean by that is I have a background in sales and marketing, which if if you're thinking of running an event and you're not comfortable Speaking to people, you're not comfortable cold calling people. You're not comfortable cold emailing people. Yeah. Either get someone to do that And be really involved in it as a as a major stakeholder, as in, like, giving them a lot of the profits if you're if you're if you're going for profits, Or don't do it at all because that is a major part of this. Because conferences are enormously expensive, rid Enormously risky.

And if you don't have the confidence to sell sponsorships, tickets, and just be on it All the freaking time.

Don't do it. Don't do it. It's just like, you have to enjoy it. Right? That's part of why I'm in such a unique position because I really love what I'm doing. I have the experience to be able to do that with sales and marketing. And then with Web development to a lesser extent, I I don't really get into code that much anymore. But when I first started, like, I built the website and, you know, I designed it. And, Like, it it showed because my design I'm not a I never worked at a company as a professional designer, but it got the message across and it was it was good enough. Right. You know, if you put your heart and soul into something, then it it definitely shows.

But just to answer your question, so I'm rid. The organizer of Reactathon, which I've been organizing since 2017, Reactathon started as just really just a week of events supporting Facebook's Books React Conf, which at the time was impossible to get tickets to. Like, they'd open up tickets, like, at 12 PM on x day. Right? And they would sell out in In, like, a milliseconds, I'm like, okay. How many tickets were there? Did people write bots for this? I don't know. They were they were just so hard to get. Secondly, it was in Santa Clara, Which if you're not familiar with the Bay Area, it's a decent distance away if you're, like, working in San Francisco and you're used to used to walking places. So we've been running events rid For over a year in San Francisco through the Real World React meetup group.

And, you know, I had had been building this community. It's a there's a lot of Interest around React and this whole event space.

And so what we did was we just I we basically said, let's run a a week of events Leading up to Facebook's ReactCon. So we partnered with a number of companies, including Pinterest to run our our meetup there, which we had over 350 people come there. It's rid It's insane.

Fortunately, they have a massive office or I I think they used to. I think they're getting rid of that office.

Did they make you log in before going into the office?

Yeah. They had the they had the envoys there, and the line was extremely long. We had an RSVP of over 650.

I think you can still see it there on our meetup page. So a bunch of people did end up not coming in because the line was just so incredibly long. Rid But, like Hilarious. We stacked the deck with just amazing speakers. We talked about serverless, Redux. We had people flying from the East Coast. Rid. Justin Bacharach from formerly from NPR, I think he's at Capital One now, came all the way from Washington to to speak at this event. But we also did 7 different workshops from 6 different instructors.

We had a hackathon at GitHub over the weekend.

And then on Monday Tuesday, which was React Conf, we had a a live viewing party of the conference. And so with all this demand, this this goes back to motivation and knowing your target audience. So I'm really understanding that, wow, there's a lot of demand for this.

But at the same time, There's already a conference in San Francisco, ReactCon, right, that takes place q one. Reactathon was taking place q one. So what do I do? But Reactathon is pretty, sorry. ReactCon.

Facebook's is pretty advanced. Right? It's for people who are already in the React community. Right? You're going there as a quote, unquote React developer.

Yeah. Or or web developer who specializes in React as I should say. Or JavaScript developer who loves React.

But there wasn't like an introductory conference. So the idea was, Okay. Since there's all this demand, let's create this one day conference to welcome people to React. Right? So we curated all this content, Basically, for people coming from, you know, other technologies or out of boot camp or just new to it in general.

And that was in the works, But then Facebook announced that they weren't going to run React conf. And so I said, okay.

I guess I'll run advanced conf too. And that was That was the impetus for Reactathon becoming a a 3 day event. Still did the workshops, and we still did the the hackathon.

But just a Long winded answer to your question. I also so Netlify was a sponsor of the very 1st Reactathon, which was just, you know, that week of events leading up to React Conf. And then they also sponsored the 2nd one.

And after that 2nd conference, which was that 3 day event, I'd been talking with them for A number of months about running a Jamstack Conf.

They'd actually run a precursor to Jamstack Conf The year prior, but I think they realized that it's it's a lot more involved. It's a lot more difficult to run than they had previously estimated.

So for their 2nd attempt, they they came to me, and they said, you know, we want you to to run this. So I was hired as the program manager ran. To run Jamstack Conf, and I ran the first 2 as the program manager. And then the next 2, I I helped at a more, like, organizer capacity, because they started to build out their internal events team. And so I ran that. And before before coronavirus ruined My career and, you know, much of much of the world is just so sad to to say that I was in talks with AWS.

I was in talks with, Stripe to run events for them. And And I just need to deal with Apollo to help them with GraphQL Summit, like, in a limited capacity.

And, you know, all that just rid stopped. Right? Oh, dang. Including Reactathon, which was Yeah. Yeah. Insane.

Man. Yeah. I remember it was, like, March, and I was just like, oh, like, we're we're still going to this. Right? Like, yeah. We're still going to this. And there's there was no cases rid in San Francisco at the time, and everything was gonna be fine. And then At least reported.

Yeah. At least no reported cases at all. And

Within a week or so, it just I'm sure your email is about to just blew up from people. Quickly. It escalated so quickly from, oh, there's no cases here to oh, there's 100. Oh, events over a 100 in person gatherings are illegal.

Okay.

I guess it's not happening.

We actually postponed it before They made it illegal because our policy as we wrote because we were monitoring this. Our policy was that if this has declared a pandemic, because remember, this is early March late February, early March. Yeah. Everything is still unknown. So we're, like, still figuring this out. But once that WHO was like, hey. It's a pandemic.

We need to, you know, stop this thing. We were like, okay. Yeah.

Cool. Can we talk about getting speakers and whatnot? I'm I'm curious about, like, How do you select who gets to speak at it? How do you ensure there's appropriate diversity in your speaker lineup? Paying speakers, things like that. Do you pay speakers? Should you? There's a lot of opinions on whether you should speak for free or not.

Any thoughts on that?

Yeah. Absolutely. That's a great question. So this this goes back to my point of knowing your target audience because your audience isn't just rid The people who buy tickets and come as attendees.

Your audience by audience, I also mean know who your potential sponsors are, Know who your potential speakers are.

Right? Know who your potential marketing partners are. People who would be interested in coming to this event. You know? You wanna get the press involved. You wanna get as many people to make to make your conference as well known as possible.

Right. You need to make a lot of noise because events live and die by awareness.

They really do. Like, how often have you Log on to Twitter and you're like, oh, wow. This amazing conference is happening tomorrow.

Right? Like, why didn't you hear about this before? It's like, hey. I'm rid. 10000 miles away.

So now with remote events, that's gonna kinda flip that on its head a little bit, but we'll get into that a little later if we have time. But to answer your question about, like, speakers specifically, well, this goes back to your motivation and knowing your audience rid. And defining a specific theme. Right? No one wants to go to a conference that doesn't have a theme.

You have to convince those people to actually want to come to this event, both the the audience and the speakers.

And so This also goes back to, again, your motivation of who you are and if you are the right person to run this.

That will give you a bit of credibility rid to approach speakers. And my philosophy is always that you should confirm a number of speakers By inviting them, that helps to give the event a sense of allure, a sense of, I'm at a loss for words right now. Premiumness. What's the words I'm looking for? Exclus not not so much exclusive, but but something that's more premium. Yeah. Re Total. You you often see that with, like, the conference will launch, and it'll say, Chris Corriere is headlining,

and then none of the other speakers are announced They'll be announced at a later point, but they you sort of have to anchor it with, like, this is legitimate. We got Chris Coir to come for the Yeah. The It's a lizgitimizer.

Rid Legitimizer. There you go. No worries. Yep. Exactly. And and and these people who are, you know, well known, they're also many of them are, like, big megaphones. So if you can get someone that has, like, a 100,000 followers on Twitter, like, that's good. That helps you to market that. Rid Because your speakers don't just become speakers, they become stakeholders. Right? Because it's important for them to go to an event that's also successful. You, Like, if you're a speaker, you don't wanna confirm and say yes to an event that you are unsure of. Right? You can't be like, well, if I go to this event and I fly across the country this night, You know, because in person events, again, you know, you have so much logistics.

Just as a speaker, you gotta fly somewhere. You gotta go to the hotel.

How far is the actual venue from the airport to get a flight? It's it's just a lot of time. It's a lot. Yeah. You're spending all this time there. Is it going to be worth it for you? And so that's something that you as the organizer have to convince others that it is. So if this is your 1st time running a conference, Your job in that regard is a bit harder. So you have to have so this goes back to to me and my personal story of of building A brand around Real World React and running the meetings that have a higher cadence. And, you know, we put a lot of effort into those because For us, that was also business. You know, I've been an entrepreneur since, like, 2014.

It wasn't just like, oh, let's do, you know, these meetups because it's fun. It was lead gen for us. Right? Because we ran, like, a a a React training business. Right? We we started with public workshops, and our goal was to be, you You know, training in house before the end of the year, and we and we were doing that. Like, I think 6 months into Real World React, we were training NerdWallet in their office.

Then we trained Pinterest, and we trained a bunch of other companies. And we even, you know, flew to Chicago. We flew to New York. It was it was a lot of fun. But, honestly, my my conference rid Business really really started to take off, and I I spent a lot more time in that. And that's really where my passion lies.

And so rid. I would organize workshops with conferences as well and tie them together. But, yeah, to answer your question about speakers, it's really important, I think to have a number of invited speakers.

And then for me, personally, I like to have a CFP or call for papers, a call for proposals, or Call for speakers, whatever you wanna call it. Yeah. Basically, inviting people to submit their talks. Some conferences, like, I think React Rally. Rid Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they just operate on CFPs, which is great. It's a community conference run by 2 amazing individuals, engineers, Or maybe more. I don't know.

I think it started

with just 2. What are your thoughts on paying speakers? One thing I hear a lot from rid People is when they're complaining about a conference, they say, you have to pay all your speakers tons of money and pay them for their time, and then you also have to have, like, re Super well catered lunch, and you also have to have x, y, and z. And sometimes I hear these people complaining. I'm like, you rid Don't know how much it costs to run a conference. It's very expensive to run a conference, I think.

I'm not saying you shouldn't pay speakers. I I just say that, like, There's a lot more that goes into it, and I'm I'm saying this as somebody who has been to a lot of conferences, talked to a lot of people like you who run them. Yeah. I I would encourage

Anyone who, like, doesn't really have an idea of how expensive a conference is, just to request a catering menu rid from a hotel and look at the price of coffee.

It's ridiculous. Coffee at a conference of, like, 500 people Can literally cost you many 1,000 of dollars.

I'm talking, like, 5, 6, 7, up to 10 for just 500 people For, like, a 2 day conference.

It's insane. It's so expensive, and everything is so expensive.

And this is why, Actually, I started my own catering company.

So I started a company called Lifted Plate.

And, Actually, when I was running Jamstack Conf, fun fact for you. The the last in person event that we ran at the Cityview of Metreon In San Francisco, about 500 people.

And we got estimates from catering companies. And literally, it's rid Like the bare minimum without breakfast, we're looking at $200,000 plus.

It's insane.

And this is not counting the AV.

This is not counting the venue itself.

This is not counting the labor.

It's the Wi Fi is sometimes The Wi Yeah. The Wi Fi is nuts.

Like, people why does the Wi Fi suck? Well, because it costs $10,000 per megabyte.

It's it's it's really insane.

And so when you hear people complaining, it's you just have to be You have to, 1, service that. You have to address those complaints. But I think Yeah. You're right, Wes. I think there there could be a a little more understanding and empathy on the other side What's going on? And this goes back to to the transparency. Right? Okay. So you have all these expenses. Do we pay speakers? Well, it depends on who's running the event. If you're If you're Amazon running a massive conference, maybe I shouldn't call it a specific company not to pick on Amazon. But if you If you have record profits Yeah. And you're running an event and you don't pay your speakers, may it probably doesn't look good for you. Yeah. Right. Because giving a talk is It's a lot of work. You know? I gave a lightning talk at DevRelCon SF last year, and, you know, it's just 10 minutes, but it took me days.

Rid And you guys have given talks and anyone else who's given talk. You know how much work goes into it and how much care goes into it. And then pop not that's not even counting, like, polishing your slides and making them look rid. Right? So it is a lot of work.

So for me as an independent organizer who does this for a living, I need to make a profit to, you know, pay my own bills.

Rid. I need to make sure that the event itself is making money, and I need to make sure that everyone is is happy that it's that it's still a good event.

Rid So what I do for my speakers, I don't pay them with cash, but I provide, you know, round trip flights. I I put them up in a nice hotel for the duration of the conference, and I provide a really good speaker dinner.

And the speaker dinner to me is really important rid. Because having talked with all these potential speakers and the speakers that we confirmed for months Meeting up to the actual event itself.

When it happens, you wanna have some place where where the speakers can come together and meet and just relax. And they've all worked rid on their talks while doing a full time job and taking care of their families and maybe the 20 other conferences that they're speaking at.

And so I Put together, like, this nice dinner for the speakers to come together and casually hang out and meet. And then that makes the conference experience better for them too because, a lot of these people are meeting for the 1st time in person or meeting up again from a conference they've met before.

And so coming to the event, This gives them a chance to to, you know, hang out and meet each other and then go to the event and have a friend and have a friendly face that's that's around the conference for them.

Yeah. Some of those little little touches and and whatever, they go totally noticed by the people attending conferences because I've been to a lot of rid of comfort isn't I think, like, some of the things that have always stood out about the comfort system we went to that you ran were like you said, the speaker dinner, Excellent. Every time, had great conversation, met some people that are talking to on Twitter for a long time, but just, like, set up in a way that definitely invoked that sense of rid. Camaraderie and, you know, just getting to really experience the people that you're there with. But, also, Wes has a note on here about your Your speaker goodie bags and the speaker goodie bags were fantastic. And I kid you not, my wife yesterday rid. This goes, you know what? I really love this Reactathon mug you have. It's just like it's a it's not just a crappy mug. It's a nice mug, ridged. But you I used mine yesterday. You seem to go all out in the goodie bags and the boxes and whatever. And, yeah, I think that those are those are just, like, really fantastic

rid of those mugs. Those mugs have a sordid history.

So I ordered I ordered a box of mugs. I'm not gonna call out the company who did it because They they made it right, so I'm not gonna give them bad press. But the 1st time it shipped, everything is broken. And I'm like, okay. Great. Now I have, like, a couple months left, and I need to order more. They sent more. These weren't broken. But then, like, a few weeks later, I see, like, these $2,000 charges On my on my bank account, and I'm like, what the heck? And it's from, like, Russia. Like, great. So I I got the mugs. They're broken. Now I'm hacked by Russia.

Oh, no. But but, yeah, like, guys But we got the bugs, and they're fantastic in

Yeah. And and and this goes back to, you know, your motivation. Like, is your love of, like, this event, this technology, this Whatever it is, this community, going to show in what you're doing. You know? Because, like, running a conference isn't just, oh, I'm gonna put a schedule together and find a venue and Things will work itself out. It's like running a it's like running a new product within a company or even more running its own company.

Right. You're managing a mid 6 figure or 7 figure budget even, and you have these deadlines, and you got Sales, and you got marketing, and just you have all of these aspects coming together in this one event that is just much more happening under the scenes than you can never imagine.

I'm gonna just say my favorite thing from the goodie bag was the Jamstack jam, where we got 1 JavaScript, rid One APIs and one, like, markup jam, and my kids loved it. It was they, like, they gobbled it right down, and, I tweeted a picture of it, and people loved it. I thought that was interesting thing way to go down is just

to have jamstack jam. I I think it was I think it was someone from the Netlify team. I think it was Jessica Parsons or maybe Phil Hawkesworth that that posted that in the company Slack.

And I just thought it was hilarious, and I was like, rid Right. I'm doing that as part of the gift. So I buy the stickers. I buy I buy the jam. I remember just the the night before actually, You know, completing, the packages just you know? It was such a long time to get the original stickers off Of those things though, man, not fun.

Sitting there in the sink with, like, a razor and

So if you all of a sudden see some $2,000 charges for some mugs from Russia that you bought, you wanna keep track of how you were reimbursed for that, you re You should probably reach for one of our sponsors to keep track of your finances, and I'm talking about FreshBooks. Wes, do you, you you have a personal anecdote to talk about FreshBooks with? Rid. Does it involve charges from Russia? Let's talk about expenses with FreshBooks. I think that's a good good lead in. So FreshBooks will hook up to your credit card, rid. And you can auto import your things right from your credit card. So you would see $2,000

worth of Russian mugs that are broken as a line item in your FreshBooks, And that should raise a a flag too because you'd be able to filter for like, something I'll do every now and then is I'll I'll go through my top, like, rid. 20% of expenses, like, the really expensive ones, and then see, like, okay.

Make sure making sure they're all valid. And and if there's places I can cut them down even 10%, that's significant. So read. FreshBooks would spot that for you through your reports and all that. So check it out. If you are a small business that needs to Do your accounting, your invoicing, your expenses, all of that. Check out FreshBooks .comforward/ syntax. Oh, FreshBooks got a new logo.

Rid If anything, go to this URL for the new FreshBooks logo and make sure you use syntax in the how did you hear about a section. You're gonna get a 30 day free trial rid With that URL. Sick.

Last note about real life conferences is just catering. I can't believe you started your own rid because the food was so good Fantastic. Versus the like, usually, conferences give you a box with a super cold apple

ready. Cold bread.

A sandwich that's been in the fridge for 3 days Yeah. And, like, a bag of chips. And they're cold as well because they're They freeze these lunches or whatever, and, they're awful. They're I usually then and then everybody says, oh, thanks. They throw it in their bag, and then they go and buy their own lunch. But It was amazing. And so you just, like, started your own catering company? Just Well, it didn't it wasn't just me, and I'm more the the rid. Sales and marketing and lead gen, like, arm of the company.

I have the good fortune of having a better half who has her own company. Mhmm. And it's it's assisted living. You know, they they run like a 30 bed assisted living, which is extremely hardly to try this industry. Yeah. That's a that's a whole other topic, but, They've been running it for a number of years, and the assisted living they run actually was was famed for their food because their grandmother who started it, You know, she started it out of a hatred for the industry because when she put her own mother in an assisted living home, rid Like, when she went to visit her the 1st time, she was wearing men's pants, shoes that were, like, mismatched and didn't even fit and was just, Like, the food was just terrible. She said, so she started her own assisted living where she focused on, you know, actually, like, Not just assisting them.

And more importantly well, not more importantly, but is equally importantly, is providing them with amazing food. And so when when my my fiance and her her brothers took over the business, they really Worked hard on even improving that even more. So they became basically professional chefs.

And when my event business started taking off and I showed them how much Money like these catering companies are charging, which is Yeah. It's fine because it's really expensive and, you know, you have your ups and downs in catering.

We said, well, we can do this. Right? So when we cater Jamstack Con, for example, I told you that it you know, we got estimates for, like, 200,000 minimum to do this. Well, we saved them over $90,000 because we we you know, I gave them friendly rates. You know, they're paying me as an event organizer. And I say, Here. I I'm gonna give you guys I'm gonna give your your company this amazing product for rates you you won't get anywhere else. And that's kind of our our pitch now, you know, is that we can provide, like, very top tier catering at rates you won't find anywhere else.

Vertical integration conference company. Yeah. You can get the jam and the Stack.

And the stack. Yeah. It's rid the stack of jams. So, obviously, we're living in a, like, a post pandemic or active pandemic society currently.

I would imagine that this would be pretty detrimental to the in person events and catering businesses.

When you first started having all this stuff in your mind space, was any sort of event that would prevent in person events ever on your radar. And if not, like, how did you immediately react to it? And what we're now almost like a year later, how has that reaction changed, and and how do you see this space evolving?

Yeah. So that's a really good question, rid. And I think to answer your first question, was something like this on our radar? I would say no.

I think for most people, A pandemic that completely shuts down the entire world economy kills hundreds of thousands I don't know. Is it millions at this point? I don't know. It's a lot.

You have a backup plan? And I'm thinking to myself, oh my god. Like, there is no backup plan for this, right, in in this industry. Rid Because the contracts you sign, it's like there's no insurance for this for an event like this. Right? There's there's force majeure, and that's it. And When it completely decimated the industry, like, this event this industry has completely gone to 0. Right? And I saw the writing was on the wall Pretty quickly, when I saw that the national guard had quarantined an entire city in New York, when I saw what was happening in Italy And then in Spain, I knew that this was something that is a once in a century event.

And, you know, in the events industry and every industry In the past, what, 6 years or so since this booming economy, we've all just been coasting. Right? It's just been easy to find money. It's rid. Easy to to make sales. It's been easy to build a business.

Nothing is easy, but Comparatively speaking, right, to a recession or I don't I don't what do you call this? Is it a depression? Is it it's it's an entire ship now. It's Yeah. It's it it's its own category. Right? Because, like, at least the great depression was It was it was caused by economic forces. I mean, can you classify a pandemic as economic? I guess you could, but it's just it's just so rid off of everyone's radar. But I think, Scott, to answer your question about going forward, as I mentioned previously, I think in person events rid. Are done for at least through 2021, if not into 2022.

There's a lot of uncertainty around this, of course, but I think that uncertainty Leads to confirmation that this is not coming back anytime soon because as I mentioned, running an event is enormously expensive. It's there's enormous amount of uncertainty around it.

And if I'm an event organizer thinking about running a big conference, like, how am I gonna convince people, 1, that it's safe, And 2, that is actually gonna happen because I need to confirm sponsors.

Now many sponsors many companies who sponsor events, rid They now have policies against sponsoring in person events.

Many companies have policies against sending their people to in person events.

Right? And so that reduces your potential pool of attendees, potential pool of sponsors, just overall revenue.

And I haven't really looked at budgeting, but I don't think things are going to reduce in cost that much. Right. You probably see special deals here and there. But, again, with all that uncertainty, how many people unless your pockets are really deep, like, unless you're a Google or Microsoft, How many people are going to risk that planning 6 months ahead of time, 6 months, a year, 2 years? Like, you look at For the big conferences like the ones that take place at Moscone Center, for example, in San Francisco, which is our big convention center, booking out two and a half years. Oh. Yeah. Do you have to plan, at a minimum, two and a half years for your event coming up? So the big events, what happens to those? And then you look at the smaller meeting scene. Right? The events that happen at company offices. Right? So let's say you're a company that used to host events. Now let's talk about you considering hosting these, let's say, in 2021, q 1, q 2.

Let's say for argument's sake that you have welcomed your employees back to your office. You've instituted strict guidelines, rid Health and safety.

Everyone's abiding by them. You know, you're taking temperatures of everyone.

It's very tight. Very tight security.

Okay. That's great.

You're doing that for your employees. You're taking a risk there, but you're doing it at from a measured approach.

Are you going to welcome hundreds of strangers into your office to potential super spreader events? Yeah. Probably not.

Yeah.

So I think the conference scene is done, and so is the, you know, smaller meeting scene.

Probably through 2021. Unless something like basically a miracle happens, like our president said to happen.

And so when I saw this was happening. I saw it pretty early on. I saw how severe it was, and I was looking for solutions for taking events online.

But everything I saw just was not adequate.

Right? The main things out there are you got your Slack, got your Discord, and then you pair that with, like, a YouTube live stream.

You hack it together on, like, a website. Use your OBS.

You're dealing with RTMP. You're dealing with streams. Rid Yeah. But everything's still super hacking fragmented.

It's just it's it's not a good experience for the organizer, for the speakers, Sponsors, like, what what are the sponsors even get in an online conference? Right? The attendees, you don't really have the serendipitous nature of, rid. Number 1, just the excitements and thrill of being in a in a in person location with other like minded people.

And then just bumping into people in these random conversations because, you know, a conference is so much more than the talks. Right? It's running into people that are like minded from any part of the world and having great conversations and saying, hey. You wanna go grab dinner? You wanna go grab a beer? It's these connections that conferences really facilitate That make them so amazing and which and which is why I love them so much.

And so with online events, you're never going to replicate That experience, you're just not going to. And anyone who promises that is is crazy or is just, you know, selling snake oil because Whether you have VR or AR or what's that, like, video game that they're like rid. Armvyl or whatever they're playing now that's, like, attending an event, like, I think, personally, I think those are really sad.

Yeah. I think you need to go to an event, and it's like, I need to go, like, like, on Zelda into the You're in Animal Crossing. Rid Yeah. You're in Animal Crossing. You're wearing your React t shirt that you painted on yourself. Yeah. Believe it or not, my character in Animal Crossing rid It wears a level up tutorials logo tee that I made. If I were to ever arrive at a online conference, I'd be wearing it. Very, very nice. Yeah. So

I think that online conferences, online events should not try to replicate that experience because you're just not gonna get it.

But there are other things that you can focus on that are more conducive to the online experience.

That can actually be more beneficial.

And I think the main thing That is being overlooked and something that we're working on right now is facilitating smarter connections with people. I'll give you I'll give you one example.

So At an in person event, one of the main problems for sponsors is measuring their ROI.

Right? How do you measure the number of people you interacted with? How many of those turned into sales or recruiting, whatever your goal was, and how to classify them.

And then how inefficient or efficient are you in connecting with the right people? Right? If your goal is hiring and you're talking to people who aren't looking, that's a waste of time. Right? And the organizer can can help alleviate this and facilitate this to create hiring events and certain things that appeal to certain sponsors, and you can help that rid. For sure with with event design.

But it's not perfect, and it's always going to be limited to the amount of time and the amount of resources you put in. Right? Amount of people that are there at the events and what your strategy is. But online, you can do some interesting things. So one thing we're working on with this new company, Eventloop, that I cofounded and am the CEO of.

We're working on dynamic sponsor booths.

So rid Full stack engineers. There's front end engineers. There's back end engineers, and there's and there's DevOps engineers. Right? It's an engineering conference.

Now If someone from DevOps shows to your shows up to your booth, do they want to see information that's just very general? They want to see stuff on front end, or did they wanna see stuff on DevOps? They wanna see stuff on DevOps.

So With an online experience, you can create these dynamic booths so that the attendees that show up into your booth see relevant content,