Guerrilla event planning at larger conferences

Sat Jul 20 2024

This was a lightning talk at DevRelCon NYC 2024.

Video

Transcript

<Cadey>

This is spoken word. It is not written like I write blogposts. It is reproduced here for your reading convenience. The primary output of my talks are the words I speak and the slides are meant to accent them. As such, I have pruned most of the slides from this transcript.

Hi, I'm Xe. I work for Fly.io. We put your app into microVMs across the globe (or flat plane, we don't judge), and then we let people access them from anywhere. We recently started a DevRel team and in the process, we wanted to avoid this:

Conferences want you to have a booth, but this is what you get when you have a booth: you have a sad table with some stickers on it, low turnout, low conversion rates, low utilization of financial resources.

So as a result, we've changed ideas. We want to make memories between people instead of fostering a sad booth full of people that look like they need a break from reality for a week.

Okay, okay. Booths do work well in the ideal spherical world where you're able to have like seven people at a booth and rotate them out in shifts so that you can make sure nobody's burned out to heck. But who's going to pay for that? I work for a startup.

Surely there's got to be a middle path between having a table like the one before and something terrible, right?

Today, I'm going to talk about what we've tried, what we've learned, and what we're going to try next.

That one time we accidentally had a booth

To begin, let's talk about the time that we accidentally had a booth. We sponsored EpicWebConf and as a result, they gave us a booth without telling us.

[Laughter]

We thought we were just giving them money for the sake of giving them money, but it turns out it had strings attached and the strings were a booth.

Then we had one mission:

Pull this off without going full capitalism.

When you have a booth, people stop seeing your interactions as personal between people. It becomes very transactional. Like, "Oh, here, have a capitalism object. Would you like to use service? Thank you for being a loyal customer!" This is especially bad when you are a sponsor and you get the paid shill badge around your neck.

So, we did something different.

We had cookies, flowers, and we just passed out some hoodies from a previous event. And in the process, we came up with these three rules of engagement:

1. Make them happy.
2. Make them look nice.
3. There is no step three.

The speakeasy strat

And in the process, we've come up with something that we call the speakeasy strat. We did this at KubeCon EU. We didn't have a table, we had a party. We gave out flyers for the party at the event and talked about it, twate about it on whatever we're supposed to call Twitter, and posted on conferenceparties.com.

It was pretty great.

We also gave these lovely Technicolor Dreamcoats out, and all of this is drawn by a human, an actual human that has a heartbeat and a soul.

And in our testing, we found out that most of the people showed up were from the internet. A significant number of people also came from conferenceparties.com. Might be worth checking out if you want to hang out at a conference.

However, when you have a side event with a conference, you need to be really careful, because you could accidentally end up eclipsing the actual conference itself. And that tends to make conferences kind of angry. If you do this, you should probably sponsor the event, just out of courtesy to the organizers.

The Backpack

Another thing we tried is a backpack that is programmable and animated and says stuff about how you can do AI workloads with GPUs or something. This was a great nerd-sniping tool because people didn't know that you could program a backpack. It's got lots of really interesting conversations. I forget which conference it was at, Yvette knows this better than I do.

And we successfully relled developers with this. Maybe because the backpack was moving and the squirrel-brain activated. Not to mention, people didn't know fully programmable backpacks existed, and frankly, neither did I. And as far as a $120 experiment goes, it's pretty great.

Oh, developers, stickers, get on it. You know this. I would gesture to my MacBook lid right now, but I don't have it with me. My laptop is coated with stickers, and they end up being advertisements for the people or services involved.

We have some exclusive stickers. I did not get a collage of them in time for the slides. But we have exclusive stickers for places where DevRel lives and specific events. We had one for DevOps Days KC, as I'm sure the person in the blue hair can testify. Not to mention, you can put QR codes on the back of stickers. Every sticker becomes a coupon for 50 capitalism dollars of credit.

Try it, maybe it'll work!

NYC Event

Here's what we want to try for the future. We want to make marketing consentual. We want people to come up to us and ask questions instead of feeling like we are coming to them and telling them things they may not want to hear.

Yesterday we ran a solutions architecture and chill meetup in a bar.

I'd love to have photos on it, but I had to submit the slide deck before last night.

And it was pretty great. We just hung out in a bar, had free drinks, and some people got their nails done. We're going to do more stuff like this in the future, but we don't know what the capitalism line impact of it was yet, because I haven't looked at the metrics. I don't have my work laptop on me.

Conclusion

But TL;DR:

• Your booth sucks.
• Make memories, not booths.
• Make people feel happy to attend by giving out exclusive stickers and use the fear of missing out to your advantage in a non-toxic way.
• Let people come to you to find out more. Don't go over to them to tell them things they may not want to hear.
• Developers, stickers.

And with that, I've been Xe Iaso. Thanks for having me. I'll be around if you have questions and stay frosty, y'all.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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