360Conferences is starting to focus
One thing that we’ve heard often, and with good reason, is that 360|Conferences is confusing. We’re told we’re a bunch of other stuff too: loads of fun, great value, community driven, etc. The good stuff is fine and dandy, but it’s the “confusing” one that troubles us. It’s one thing to be a huge corporation and confusing, but it’s another to be a 2 man shop and confusing.
John and I recently tackled this description. We weren’t denying we were confusing. If your customers tell you something, there’s no sense denying it. You just have to face facts and either ignore them or change. We’ve never been the ignoring type, so we set about trying to figure out a way to change this perception. We did some deep searching (which I’ll document this week over on the Our Startup Story site, for those interested in those kinda details). What we got out of it was a bit of clarity for us. We saw why we were confusing and are now taking steps to be more clear.
Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be making announcements that hopefully will bring clarity. We’ll have to rethink some things, drop a few things and solidfy other offerings. I think when it’s all said and done, you’ll find 360|Conferences to be more clear in purpose. It will help you, our customers, to understand what it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It will also provide an opportunity for you to voice your ideas/questions/concerns about different moves.
For a company that’s barely passed it’s 2 yr birthday, John and I have come a long way. We appreciate all of you that have stuck with us over those two years. We look forward to serving you for many more years. Hopefully, this clarity of business will enable us to grow big enough to continue to serve you. Unlike some businesses that treat their customers like a necessary evil, we realize that you’re the sole reason we exist. Therefore, you deserve for us to be the best we can be. Even if that means taking a hard look at ourselves and “trimming the fat” so to speak. We are honored to have earned your money and trust. And we look forward to continue earning it time and time again.
Would you write for us? Events are only part of it.
Jeff had an interesting post on Our Startup Story. He was talking about what a company has to offer, what’s its value?
Tom and I (slowly) are realizing that the value of 360|Conferences. Corp is two things.
The value to our attendees is our speakers, and the community, and our value to sponsors is our attendees. Sorry guys I know that sounds like you’re some sort of ‘thing’ we can sell and we don’t see attendees like that at all. Rather it’s access to attendees, sponsors want the right people to see their product/service, our attendees are those people.
We’ve also recently realized that our value is our ever growing reach, particularly to our speakers and to anyone else that wants to take advantage of that reach. To that end 360|Whisperings exists to give our community 2 things.
1. the ability to take content they’ve already got as well as new content and market it to the entire community for a small fee. We’re offering our community the ability to, with almost no effort, put their content online in the Amazon Kindle store (more on the Kindle below). Each author can set the price for their article, and collect a portion of the revenue.
2. the ability to find affordable, accurate, and expert content on the web in a consumable format. Why buy access to a website when you may only ever need a few articles? Why pay for a subscription to a monthly or quarterly print (or online) journal when you may only ever find value in a few articles the entire year?
The Kindle huh?
The Kindle combined with Amazon is the game changing device of publishing. It’s the iPod of books. Unfortunately Amazon is the Apple of books, and takes a cut of the sales. Sadly it’s a rather ridiculous cut, but the platform is a great one to be a part of this early on. AND, the Kindle isn’t our last step. It’s our first. Once we’ve got things ironed out and content on the 360|Whisperings Kindle store, we’ll begin to figure out the best paths for PDF, ePub, pdb, lit, lrf, etc. We’ll make the content available on as many platforms as we can, to make the content as universally accessible as possible.
Step 1, set up the store. Done, you can check it out now, there’s 1 thing up there as a test of the process.
Step 2, set up the author agreement, so our contributors know what they’re getting and what’s expected. Don’t worry it’s only 1 page :) Done, it’s being reviewed by a lawyer (just in case) right now.
This really is big folks. The days of journals and pay sites with subscriptions are coming to an end. Print books, have already been on their way out, and let’s be real. You work really hard on a tech book, it either becomes obsolete within 6 months of publishing, or it doesn’t sell worth a damn. Either way you’ve wasted months, and that’s not even writing. Why write something, get a 1 time payment, then see nothing else from your work? And never again be able to republish that work? Why write something and wait months to see it hit the shelves, and hope it sells?
Join the 360|Whisperings team! Email us and we’ll get you set up and can have content avaialble for purchase in a matter of days!
360|Conferences…what does it mean to you?
360|Conferences sorta got started by accident. John and I didn’t walk around as young children saying, “When I grow up, I want to get 400 geeks together and host them for 4 days in a random city.” There may be some conference planners out there that did do that and more power to them. We just weren’t two of them.
Therefore, now that we’re thinking of expanding to something beyond conferences, it’s a different ball game. 360|Conferences back then had no personality, no corporate identity. It was just a name on a piece of paper with John’s signature and mine. That’s no longer the case. While 360|Conferences is still just me and John, 2 years have come and gone. We’ve served over a few thousand customers with 360|Flex, 360|iDev, FlexCamps and one 360|MAX. Customers that now have an expectation of our company. When people hear the name 360|Conferences or the phrase “John and Tom”, something comes to mind. Something that we should probably try to stay true to.
This is where you come in. I have my own personal ideas of what I think the brand means to our customers and the world at large. (The small part of the world that does actually care that is. LOL) However, I’d like to hear directly from you.
Why do we care? Well, if we’re going to expand the business into new areas, we should do so upholding the ideals that people associate with us. I.e. I think what we’re known for in the conference space can be applied to other businesses. We just want to make sure we’re on the same page with you. :)
So spread the word, blog about this question, tweet the URL. Leave a comment or email us your thoughts (info@360conferences.com). We want to hear from as many people as possible (which should be no surprise since we ask questions of our customers all the time :D )
Be honest.
Drinking your own kool-aid is bad mmkay.
Anyone that knows 360|Conferences, corp knows that the “corp” is two people; Tom and me.
During one of our chats we came to the realization that we’ve been drinking our own kool-aid and it’s detrimental to our business.
Huh?
Basically Tom and I realized that our desire to be the most affordable event around, has kept our prices very low relative to the other events in the space, but has restricted our ability to grow, which of course has larger impacts, such as 360|Conferences ceasing to exist, being the most severe.
So…
It means we offer way more value than other events. So for the price of one of their hands on training sessions, we offer 4 full days, several hands on pre-conference training options, and more. Something doesn’t add up, what’re we doing wrong, we often ask each other.
Tom and I realized that by and large we offer more. 3 days of 80 minute sessions, pre-conference training included with registration, networking and social interaction for the entire conference, no special parties, no cliques, just everyone hanging out, talking and learning from one another. BoF’s with industry leaders, Rock Band!!, tons more.
So what’re we doing wrong? The short answer is charging too little. Plain and simple we’ve been so focused on being less expensive than the competition, that we overlooked the obvious “we offer more”. So not only are we doing more, but we’re doing more for far less. Great when it’s sustainable, but when it’s not it means you’re doomed to be a flash in the pan, which is obviously bad for business.
So what’re we doing to fix that? One huge downside of our current model is that the learning curve is long and wide. an event a quarter (you read right, there’s stuff in the works). We’re adding more shows to our roster which is good, and learning from past mistakes and starting them smaller, with more of an eye to profitability. We’re also taking our existing events and re engineering them to make more sense. Namely we realize that offering more for a lot less is awesome, and tough. offering more for less or the same, that’s still a good value proposition, and brings us closer to sustainability.
We’re announcing this week a change in pricing for 360|Flex, we’re also scaling our two new events back to 2 day events to test them out, let them scale up. We’ll see how that goes. We traditionally have launched anevent as the full 4 day affair, but have realized that it makes more sense to grow into that.
Wish us luck!
Don’t like the rules? Change them
Every once in a while Tom and I get caught up in organizing a conference and lose sight of what really makes us, us.
Sure we organize conferences, but that’s not that hard part, lots of others do it (to varying degrees of sucess). What makes 360|Conferences different is that we’re about community. What took us a while to realize is that the community we’re about is actually two communities.
We’ve served the developer community faithfully from the start, pricing our events so that anyone can afford to attend, making our events about technology not marketing, making our events about community not cliques. We take what we learn and what we’re told and grow our events based on that knowledge.
But what about sponsors? From the start Tom and I approached event sponsorship just like every other conference organizer (albeit we started much less expensive), having levels, based on minerals (why is that the norm? LOL), essentially forcing sponsors into a 3 size fits all equation.
That changes today. Why should sponsors spend 10, 20, 30, more thousand dollars for 2 of this, 1 of these, a booth table, etc. when maybe all they need is 2 passes to the conference and an expo booth, or maybe just room on the USB key, or access to email attendees?
As of this morning, sponsorship for 360|Flex is $1,000. That’s it, if you want your logo on the website, and 1 pass to the conference, you’re done. If you’d like a booth in the expo area, add that on. If you’d like to have a banner on the eventvue community site, add that on. If you need more conferences passes add those on.
Each sponsor can build the sponsorship that suits their needs, paying only for what they want out of the conference.
We think this is pretty big. Conferences charge sponsors way too much to participate, and offer way too little to those sponsors in return for their money. We want to change that paradigm, sponsors are a conferences partners, and more than that, they’re a community too, and we’ve decided that our business partners and sponsor community deserve better treatment than what they get from other conferences.
We’re more than one thing.
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
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
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 10×10 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|iPhoneiDev!
Richard Branson of Virgin on business, specifically our business
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?
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.