How we started creating conferences

Hello! “We” is just me - I create conferences for .Net developers. I started by saying that last year I gathered 200 people in total in Moscow, Peter, and Yekaterinburg. Up to 700 people are expected this year. And, as they say, this is just the beginning. About how I started last year, and how many shoals I met, I want to tell.

When the meeting was created in Moscow, I was faced with a whole heap of difficulties. It is necessary not only to attract people from another city, but also to the site of another city. At the same time, due to the spontaneity of the decision and the lack of a clear understanding, whether or not a legal entity would take off or not (even now). Ohhh ... However, in order ... Starting with the preparations for the meeting.

Before you start

Firstly, it is necessary to collect as much information as possible which will be unique and which will not find anything on the Internet. This will be highly desirable, since it is for her that people are ready to pay the money. I have as examples of this information “how to remove a dump from the virtual memory of all .Net objects”, as well as “stream cloning with preservation of the code execution location and closure of all variables”. This example describes stack and TEB manipulations.

Payment methods

Secondly, you need to think in advance how you will collect payment from the audience. For myself, I used this scheme: almost all services for collecting payments for events take a percentage (natural desire) for services. It is a pity, of course, but I understand them: labor is not easy. The second minus (and the main one) - they require that you be at least an IE, and better - a legal entity. Since the preparation time was short (2 weeks), the design of something fell off. But I was extremely lucky and I ran into a service that offered ticket booking for free. This service is timepad.ru. The tar fly service was added right after the start of payment collection. The problem was that initially they did not write anything about the fact that they only work with legal entities. by individuals. And they wrote about it after coming from the person of the first registration to the event. Those. in fact, they are blackmailing: with innuendo they are enticed to do all the preparatory work and start, but during the launch report that no one can give you money due to the fact that you are not a legal person. What makes you fly to the nearest office and pay money for expedited clearance. But I took advantage of the fact that they have in the system, when registration is in progress, a letter arrives: “a person wants to pay for attending the seminar, but cannot because you did not sign the contract” (consider that you did not become a legal entity) and below is the email of that person. Immediately deciding to raise my payment system, and remembering that I have a bank card, a Yandex-Money account and a Qiwi wallet, I began sending emails to the email address given to me about payment information. Payment finally went. And, accordingly, the budget for the payment of premises and the road to Moscow and back began to emerge. The only drawback of this approach is that you must not forget to cancel the booking time in two days (otherwise, after two days, the system will start spamming all the tickets are due to expire. And this is annoying) and when registering, the timepad will notify you that you cannot pay via timepad. This is not clear, because if they send this letter, then in fact, they substitute the organizer of the event. Like, we allowed you to conduct business on payment independently, but at the same time we will tell everyone that you are not a very good person. However, experience has shown that people treat this with understanding, and this time I decided to go the same way. Next time I will draw up a legal entity (IP) and enter into a contract with the same service, or I will do everything on my own capacities.
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Communication with students

The third is letters. If you think that it is necessary to raise mailing lists, then you are mistaken. I did not complicate even here. True, at first I missed garbage and sent all the letters one by one - manually. The most tense moment was waiting for a ban from Google for the number of letters I sent. If in total, then in a week I sent as many letters as I did not send in 5 years of using Gmail. Only two days later (!!!) I remembered that there is a beautiful field “hidden copy”, if you put 110 people in it, the letter will have to be sent only once. And all at once. However, there is a nuance: when they start answering you, Google will merge all the letters into one endless thread: therefore it is better to send 20 recipients at a time.

Location

Fourth - the venue. This was one of the most painful places in the organization. Initially it seemed to me (and all those who came were surprised that I gathered more), that I would gather about 20 people. But no more than 30. Based on this, the audience of the company in which I work and whose branch was in Moscow was chosen. However, when the number of people exceeded 30, and there were still quite a few days to pay, I realized that I was greatly mistaken. The task was to find a place with a wide range of good quality audiences and various room options. Another problem - how many people at a time - comfortable? For myself, I stopped at the figure “up to 100”, based on the size and cost of the audience. If it is higher, it becomes again not clear: will so many people come or not? If you do not come, then you can go to the minus.

And then I went to the trick, the meaning of which is to kill two birds with one stone: you can break them all up for two days. Friday and Saturday. On the one hand, this is a risk. The risk is connected with the fact that Saturday is a day when everyone wants to rest, and not load the head with an assembler and hacking with threads. If you take Saturday, you must again book the audience. How many people? Unclear. However, as I said, this approach had two indisputable advantages: if someone wants to attend a seminar, but cannot on Friday, he will come on Saturday. The second plus is that the size of the audience on the first day becomes noticeably smaller. So, the level of comfort of listeners grows.

In order to notify everyone, I wrote a letter with the coordinates of the new venue of the seminar with a request to answer the letter with confirmation, as well as the desired date - Saturday or Friday. People reacted very responsibly to the letter and to the last day before the seminar and began to independently divide into groups.

By this time, it became necessary to enter into contracts with the landlord. After 12 hours from sending a letter, 20% of the participants responded and a third of them were on Saturday. Making a simple assumption that it will continue this way, an audience has been ordered that is half the size of a Friday. By the end of the survey, both audiences were filled almost to the end. Only a couple of people had to refuse registration.

The choice of prices for the listener

The last thing I wanted to discuss was the price of participation. I wanted to put such a price that it was not a pity to come. It was necessary to pick up such a price so that it would give more or less profit and not burden the visitor. Without hesitation, the word "thousand" fell into my head. What is "tyscha"?

• Sit in the restaurant with a friend
• Sink "luxury" for the car.
• Internet pay and phone

This is the amount that we spend and do not notice it. Remember when was the last time you spent a thousand? Here I am about the same. And you could attend a useful seminar -) At the same time, if you put "two thousand", then it does not sound. It is already difficult to pronounce, and therefore it seems much more -) Based on such psychological reasoning, it was decided to put such a price.

After carrying

The workshop is over, but the work is not over. After all, now it is necessary to collect the opinions of people so that next time it can be held much better, taking into account all the wishes and criticism. In order to put all the opinions together, I used Google Forms, which provides a survey form, the results of which are put together in a neat table. All that is needed. The only thing you can not delay and rush to the survey. Too quickly - people may find that they are bored and will not follow the link. For too long - all information and emotions will be forgotten, which will give a drier review, or again, the person simply will not follow the link. Optimally - on the third day.

Schedule of registrations depending on the day (peak in the middle is the second wave of event advancement):

findings

• Saturday = one third of all registered.
• The cost per person, provided savings on coffee breaks and the train instead of air travel = 390 rubles without taxes. If you include coffee breaks, the price rises by 500 rubles. Accordingly, the ticket price rises. And in this case it seems to me that a visitor can buy something tasty for 500 rubles. If you include a flight instead of a reserved seat, then the price per visitor will be equal to about 450 rubles. But transportation and the desire to save is a personal matter.
• The percentage of booked, who eventually paid for participation = 70%
• (154 booked, 110 bought)
• Percentage of people who read an article who booked = 1% based on the results (14,000 opened a post, 154 booked)
• Satisfaction level = 4.7 out of 5

Reviews of the Moscow meeting

• “I really liked the master class, I received a lot of new knowledge, the only thing I would like to be more binding to the practice and application of this knowledge.” - Dmitry Bochkarev, Ankort
• “Expands consciousness. It is useful to hear how the CLR actually works and how it can be used to get results around the rules. But technology works unreliably and is more suitable for hacking than for industrial solutions. ", - Eugene, NVision Software Solutions
• “Overall, super. A good balance between theory and practice, a good dense feed, did not even get bored on the material already known to me. Cons, and so you know - falling examples. :-) By the way, the fork of the stream periodically dropped with me. ”, - Dmitry Kozyrev, SCAN CITY
• “Of the practically interesting things - the forks flow is very cool and interesting - I understood for myself how EBP / ESP / EIP works.
  
  All that is built from magic with getting a native pointer to a .net object and back is curious, but it has little practical value.
  
  The understanding of the internal CLR stacks is interesting, but it's a pity it was not explained in more detail how the JIT compiler works when compiling methods in runtime. ”- Kirill Orlov, OutCode

In fact, many examples have already been stabilized, but examples that are not tied to practice are intermediate, - approx. the author.

What are we going to write about next? We now held a conference with 380 participants in Moscow, and also did a webcast. Let's tell how it was done in steps.