Getting started

1. Invite good speakers. Speakers are what draw the crowd.
2. Pick a date and a venue.
3. Set up a website. Copy existing conference websites. Have speaker faces. Have a date.
4. Copy a ticketing system. Luma will do in a pinch.
5. Have some kind of way of tracking speaker reachouts and attendees. Highly recommend Airtable for this.
6. Create a conference calendar. Airtable is reasonable.
7. There isn’t a great conference app. Swapcard is eh. You can maybe vibecode one.

The people

1. Events are mostly about the quality of the people who show up.
2. Spend way more time than seems reasonable hand-inviting people who would be good. Don’t just blast group chats, go the extra mile, write a personalized message indicating why they’re welcome.
3. Conferences are a great excuse to reach out to people you admire online, and ask them to come to your thing. Cold outreach can be surprisingly good.
4. Think about where the people who you want to come hang out, and market there. Post links, make flyers, give talks, etc.
5. Referrals, of course. Conferences are more fun with friends.
6. Ask the speakers to help with promotion, to their audiences
7. You can set up an application process if you’re trying to curate a premier experience, and maybe get a prestige boost. Beware, though; application process is soulsucking. So ideally you can get away with just positive selection (promoting in the right places) rather than negative (filtering out people you don’t want)

Engineering great experiences

1. The best moments come from attendees making things happen. Unconference sessions, singalongs, games, lightning talks, etc.