4 ms·

Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business. I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and g

Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business. I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.

marklittlewood 13y ago
Not nearly as good a business as you might think I can assure you and we make a lot of effort to have a single customer - the delegate. There are no sponsor panels, exhibition booths etc that make events a lot more profitable. We have consciously decided to avoid these and focus on making the event as valuable for paid attendees as we possibly can. Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business. We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.
runako 13y ago
I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.
  - user24 13y ago
    Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      True
wikwocket 13y ago
Lesson one in the "business of software" (or, in "business"), is price things according to value, not cost-plus! Of course you can get lunch in a hotel and someone to talk to you for less than $2500, but what value can you derive from these particular speakers on these particular topics? Plus, free lunch! We can be shocked and complain about the price, or we can say, hmm, maybe there's something to this "provide demonstrably great value and charge an appropriate price for it" idea... ;)

marklittlewood 13y ago

Not nearly as good a business as you might think I can assure you and we make a lot of effort to have a single customer - the delegate. There are no sponsor panels, exhibition booths etc that make events a lot more profitable. We have consciously decided to avoid these and focus on making the event as valuable for paid attendees as we possibly can. Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business. We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.

runako 13y ago

I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.

jiggy2011 13y ago
That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.
- user24 13y ago
  Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    True

wikwocket 13y ago

Lesson one in the "business of software" (or, in "business"), is price things according to value, not cost-plus! Of course you can get lunch in a hotel and someone to talk to you for less than $2500, but what value can you derive from these particular speakers on these particular topics? Plus, free lunch! We can be shocked and complain about the price, or we can say, hmm, maybe there's something to this "provide demonstrably great value and charge an appropriate price for it" idea... ;)