💯 Organizing AwesomeConf 2020: Motivation and Learnings
If you haven’t read our origin story, you should go check that out first. I’ll wait.
This post shares our experience of organizing the second version of AwesomeConf. And the story begins in June 2019. Having just organized an awesome vue.js conference a month earlier, we were super pumped up with the experience that we wanted to extend it to another domain we both love - design! We created yet another WhatsApp group to start brainstorming on it.
https://twitter.com/SwapAgarwal/status/1158267198948855808
The differentiating factor we had in mind was that it will be invite-only. Rahul charted down an ideal breakup for 50 people. It would be a diverse set of people, including designers, developers, managers, researchers, etc. He also wanted to invite professors with the aim of bridging the gaps between academia and industry. To find out the preferences of our audience, we floated out a survey. We also had a landing page set up to invite CFPs (both talk and workshop proposals). Then there was the finances part, which is always a bit dreadful for us. We weren’t confident that we would be able to sell 50 tickets at $25 each, so we wanted to have some sponsors in place. There were also other costs involved, like a one-time investment for a good recording setup ($400-$1000), booking an awesome venue ($650), swag ($250), etc. so we ended up creating a sponsorship deck to finance everything.
We had initially announced the conference to take place on Nov 29-30 but it didn’t pan out. Primarily because we didn’t have a single sponsor. I had done cold outreach (in retrospect, I realize I should have done some warm reachouts!) to 26 companies but in vain. We had sorted out other things, i.e. we had talks / workshops incoming, we had a venue in mind, we had decided on which equipment to buy - but we simply couldn’t go ahead without sponsors and still have the kind of awesomeness we had envisioned (like speakers entering with a theme song playing in the background, etc.).
Sponsorships are hard! 🤯
And so, we knew it wasn’t happening anytime soon. We needed help. We involved a few designers but it became passive soon. After the lockdown, we started seeing virtual conferences popping up. This meant we could organize one without the need of any sponsors. We jumped on a call to discuss where we want to take this conference to. The first thing we decided was to increase its reach, and the best way we found was to make it tech-agnostic. We dropped talks and workshops in favor of panel discussions and kept two tracks - dev and design. We also decided to take an umbrella TLD this time (.xyz) and I quickly set up the landing page.
Most of the conferences that we have attended had sessions from people only a couple of years senior to us. We wondered, what’s the end goal? What’s the thought process of veterans in our industry? Let’s hear it from them. The first panelist we had in mind was Zainab - we both have interacted with her a lot of times and wanted to learn more from her experience. We called this panel “advice to younger self” and we brought in two more veterans. If you are looking for a diverse perspective on life in the tech industry, you should definitely check it out! We decided on the other topics in a similar way - what are some things that we feel are important but are not covered by other conferences? We might continue this next time as well. Everything’s awesome at AwesomeConf! And we intend to keep it that way.
Overall, we learnt two major things. The first one being, you don’t have to do everything by yourself. We invited awesome people as panel moderators and they guided the discussions really well. Last year we were a team of 2; this year we included 5 more folks! And the other is that donations aren’t easy to pull off. We had put up a UPI link for COVID relief funds during breaks but we didn’t receive a single donation. Perhaps if we showed a progress bar towards a goal (like reddit does), we might have gotten something. We will plan better next time.
Thanks Varsha, Nitish, Rahul, Meenal, Anirudh for being the awesome event hosts.
Znck & Swap would be back soon with the next edition of AwesomeConf!