Create Growth Turbo Boosts: User Conferences
And a great forcing function for the product to pull their sh1t together too :)
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The Racecar Framework created by Dan Hockenmaier and Lenny Rachitsky is one of my all-time favorite growth frameworks. It prompts you to think about your business like a high-performance race car. The same components that help a car drive faster are also the components of your Growth Model:
⚙️ The (Growth) Engine: Self-sustaining growth loops that drive most of your growth (e.g. virality, performance marketing, content, and sales).
💥 Turbo boosts: One-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last (e.g. PR, events, Super Bowl ads).
💧 Lubricants: Optimizations that make the growth engine run more efficiently (e.g. improved customer conversion, better activation, and higher retention).
⛽ Fuel: The input that your engine requires to run (e.g. capital, content, users).
Most of the time I talk about the Engines (product-led growth, product-led sales, freemium) and the Lubricants (i.e. reverse trials, profiling, activation), but today let’s talk about Turbo Boosts: User Conferences.
I organized my first User Conference at Miro four years ago. It was a virtual, free event, and we garnered over 20,000 registrants, with ~2,000 live attendees per session. We focused on engaging existing users, but ended up attracting new prospects as well. The conference had three tracks: thought leadership, big product announcements, and user workshops. Incredible speakers like Dominic Price and Jake Knapp presented (we even attempted to get Adam Grant, but he was too pricey for our free event). As a growth person, I was initially skeptical about these types of ‘activities’, but boy, was I wrong. We generated a ton of pipeline and saw a spike in acquisition and engagement. The amount of word-of-mouth and community boost this event gave us was undeniable. So today, let’s discuss how to execute user conferences correctly.
The following post is guest-written by Maya Spivak, a 15-year Silicon Valley tech marketer and founder of Marketing.fan. In the past 5 years, Maya’s teams at Segment, Mux, and Gretel have put on 6 large user conferences. She loves events so much that she’s launching a new one called The Beloved Tech Brands (BTB) Conf in SF on May 15th. Maya made a promo code for readers of the newsletter: use EVFAN at checkout to get 15% off a ticket.
Did I mention that this is the only in-person event I’m doing this year? If we haven’t met in person yet– I’ll see you in SF!
Don’t launch your user conference before answering these 4 questions
By Maya Spivak
Dreamforce. ReInvent. F8. Cloud Next. WWDC. These annual events are now iconic parts of the tech ecosystem… but how did they get started and why are they so successful?
We’ve already talked about different types of events—this time, we’re going to focus on the history of some very popular user conferences to understand how they originated and what they’ve evolved into, to address several key questions you need to answer, before launching yours:
Who’s your target audience?
What’s the right budget & expected ROI?
What’s the right size & setting?
When is the right time to start a user conference?
Internal drivers and benefits of putting on a user conf
User conferences present an opportunity to control the narrative and engage the community. But the most notable one is that it's a forcing function for the product & engineering team. Have you ever had slipping roadmap estimates, had a hard time shipping big, visionary features, or moving the product vision forward? Now try succumbing to that slog with the pressure of an annual user conference—you can’t. You have to always push the product forward, and now you have a deadline, and it's in public. The prospects, customers, and journalists are waiting for the announcement—and you have no choice but to build it in time.
Or you can always pull a Benioff: Every year at Dreamforce, Marc Benioff makes a massive announcement of some exciting new software… but it’s usually a pre-announcement. But that’s a backup option, certainly not the thing anybody aspires to do.
When I was at Segment, our CEO Peter Reinhardt said that his favorite thing about our first user conference, Synapse, was not the glitz and glam, or the fabulous customer speakers, or even what they had to say—it was the aligning function the conference served for the entire company. Rarely had every team had so much interesting and pressing work in common. It’s so tempting to run in all the different directions our orgs take us, so it’s a rare treat to feel as though you’re working on the same thing as everyone else.
By looking at the history of some really popular user conferences, we can see how they addressed the fundamental questions you need to answer, to start your own.
Stripe: The right audience and the right metrics for success
One developer conference near and dear to technologist hearts is Stripe’s Sessions conference. Debuting in 2017 as an invite-only event, the first Sessions had 350 attendees. Despite being a closed event, Stripe got news coverage for the conference and the product they launched at it, Sigma, because their clever comms team invited a couple of journalists to the “closed” session. Patrick Collison’s description of the event is a perfect elocution of every software founder’s raison d'etre for a user conference.
And Sessions has been a valuable way for users to learn about Stripe! In its second year, the event nearly doubled from 350 to 600 attendees and Stripe added regional replications on a smaller scale. In its third year, Sessions grew to 1,200 people in San Francisco and kept the regional field marketing replicas coming to Paris and London. After two pandemic years of online-only Sessions, in 2023 Stripe reset the bar for its in-person conference, advertising “A year’s worth of impact” in “a single day.” An interesting thing to observe over the years is the needle that’s being threaded in terms of their registration and user signaling. In 2023, Stripe all but holds up a sign that says “FOR ROI ONLY” when explaining who gets to go to the event. You can “join a ‘select’ group” whose “capacity is limited for a more impactful experience” where it's bringing together “business leaders and builders” to discuss the most important internet economy trends. To have “business leaders” precede “builders” is the biggest clue here—user conferences are superbly expensive, and to justify the cost, you need to carefully balance the audience makeup to be able to attribute follow-on business effects to your effort.
So, that’s the first question to ask yourself:
Question #1: Who’s your target audience?
Even if it’s just “our users,” are there particular categories or ICPs you’re focusing on? Who attends is directly related to what you can achieve with them. Which brings us to…
Question #2: What’s the right budget & expected ROI?
To manage the costs and understand the ROI of a user conference, you have to understand your:
Cost per attendee
Net new versus existing business in the room
Expansion and Retention opportunities
Everything is expensive, especially now. Set your event budget as a “per attendee” maximum. That way, you have an all-in number that accounts for everything that has to be paid for from venue to labor to every last cocktail at the happy hour. Having this number will enable you to assess every registrant’s “quality” against it. Giving out a “free” ticket to a self-service free-trial prospect who hasn’t even put in their credit card will become less appealing when measured against a $1,200 per person cost. You can be as disciplined about this as you are with your CAC numbers in your performance marketing.
Giving out a “free” ticket to a self-service free-trial prospect who hasn’t even put in their credit card will become less appealing when measured against a $1,200 per person cost.
Similarly, with a known budget per attendee and a max attendee quantity based on your venue, you can do a calculation that determines how much net new business you’d like to optimize for (versus allocating tickets to existing customers and their teammates). If all of your tickets went to existing customers, you might not be able to drive any new business. In that case, you’re relying on account expansion (and trying to awe those accounts with a new product they will be excited to expand into). All of these metrics and the choices they impact are related to each other, and yet… you’d be surprised how often a first user conference is executed mostly on gut instinct, with no attention to goals, metrics, or benchmarks.
HashiConf: Getting the setting right
HashiCorp is a beloved developer company with both open-source and hosted products. The mission of the first HashiConf, in 2015, was to “experience the future of the datacenter together.” The launch post promised 2 days of highly technical talks covering all of HashiConf’s 6 distinct tools (at the time). It also teased that the “keynote is an event you’ll not want to miss.”
This ending teaser is probably the underlying feature of user conferences that makes them the most sticky, most notable, and most legitimizing marketing event in the history of a company’s brand identity. It’s the big reveal, the “and one more thing,” the new product launch announcement. It’s also why, once you launch a user conference, you can’t go back: doing so would be a signal of wavering success or receding progress.
Just one year later, after a successful HarshiCon debut, Hashi came back with a change in vision, change in format, change in programming, and nearly double the attendee capacity, publicizing an event for 500. Instead of experiencing the future of the datacenter together, now attendees would “come together as a community to share knowledge and improve the state of software infrastructure.” That’s an expanded vision! They also added an entire optional day of training and transformed the format into a fully immersive experience hosted at a spa and resort in Napa Valley. Zero interest environment setup, sure, but let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
One major advantage: That’s a fully captive (captivated?) audience for 3 days. By isolating attendees at a resort, Hashi had nearly 18 hours a day of engaged developers paying attention to the brand and its wares. That’s a lot of deep dives and deepened relationships. But you also can’t host 18 hours worth of tech talks daily without a revolt, so a major drawback to this approach is how much “extra” time-filling activities had to be planned for each day.
HashiCorp quickly learned the lesson about being responsible for too much of attendees’ free time and pivoted to hosting future conferences in major cities—where, once your tech talks are done for the day, there are more than enough things for people to do with their own time that you’re not responsible for filling. HashiConf has been going strong every year since, settling into an in-person average of about 1k attendees annually (while thousands more follow along live online.) So, ask yourself:
Question #3: What’s the right size & setting?
Most user conferences should start out small, but both size and setting depend on your audience & objectives. Which you should already know, after answering Questions 1 & 2!
Building community & giving users what they want
One inevitable outcome of annual gatherings is repeat attendance, another community-solidifying signal. What better way to build loyalty, stickiness, and resilience to outside threats and competition, than by shepherding an annual pilgrimage where attendees reconnect with “their people”—other users just like them as well as company insiders who help make the magic happen? I enjoyed reading this developer’s hot take on how he likes attending events like these for the freshest news of the new features.
I also appreciate seeing that he doesn’t like the business side of conferences, where we marketers tend to love to invite big-name clients to a stage to talk about how big name clients use our (now endorsed by a big name) software. This is literally the difference between a developer-oriented conference and a business leader-oriented conference. This is where “tracks” make sense to consider, if we want to invite both types of personas… and we should, because we already know that both types of personas engage with us in our self-service and full-service deals.
Ironically enough, 2024 is the first year that HashiConf is introducing an official “Business Track,” calling it out as a “different way to learn” on its registration page.
Getting the timing right
The examples above give us a bright picture of user conferences that have gone well—but what about the ones that got it all wrong? What’s something these flops have in common? Poor timing.
So, in addition to the first 3 questions, here is a cluster of related questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re ready for liftoff:
Do you have enough users? It’s not called a user conference for nothing—are there enough customers out in the world that are interested enough in your product that they would commit their time to going to a user conference of yours? In person? In another city? In your city? If you’re on the fence, start small with a customer happy hour or meetup series to see what sort of in-person interest you can even generate on a smaller scale. Once you feel old-hand at spinning up smaller-scale events with a few dependable channels for getting the word out and people to register, you might be close to a user conf threshold.
Do you have a big product or feature to launch? You cannot launch your first user conference without a major product announcement. Otherwise you’re definitely just lighting money on fire that you could have spent on brand awareness any other way. But if you’re going to be spending upwards of $1k per head to corral users into a room where you attempt to wow them with content about your products—you’d better have wow-worthy content, and probably an upsell or expansion play ready, because most of the attendees are only going to be in the room because they already exist as customers on your balance sheet. What ROI can you at least attempt to drive if you don’t have something new to serve up for existing customers?
Can you afford to focus the majority of the company's efforts on a user conference (and its big launch) for at least one entire quarter? The marketing team will begin working in earnest the moment the approval hits, but have no doubt that the majority of your personnel, from eng to product to design to sales to ops to legal and even finance– EVERYONE will be all-hands on deck for your event. From writing exec keynotes (and getting said execs to agree to the theme and practice the speech) to perfecting a live working demo to staffing training and deep dive booths for the days of, user conferences have tentacles that stretch way past marketing.
This brings us to your answer for…
Question #4: When is the right time to start a user conference?
If you’ve got enough users, have something big to launch, and can afford to focus everything on this objective, the right time is… right now!
One more time
User conferences have huge potential, but getting them wrong is too easy. Remember to ask these questions ahead of time and you’ll do great:
Who’s your target audience?
What’s the right budget & expected ROI?
What’s the right size & setting?
When is the right time to start a user conference?
Once you’ve got your answers, congratulations! Your tech brand is well on its way to commercial success, and the user conf will accelerate the process by charming attendees’ eyes—and wallets—open to your powerful (soft)wares.
Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel, who has an amazing blog too.