What it's like to start a new in-person tech conference, from a financial perspective.
SquiggleConf is a community-oriented local conference run by Squiggle.Tools, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our mission is to promote developer education and bring as wide a range of people as possible into expert developer tooling circles. We don't have any major corporate backing and pay for expenses out of our organizers' personal budgets. We also believe in being open and transparent so others can see what running a conference like ours entails.
SquiggleConf 2024 operated at a net loss of approximately $9,050:
We knew coming into SquiggleConf 2024 that conferences are expensive and that most -especially first editions- almost always lose money. It's worth it to us because we love the conference, love the people around it, and believe we're making a positive impact on the web development tooling community. 💙
SquiggleConf 2024 incurred total expenses of approximately $57,350:
This was the smallest set of expenses we felt we could reasonably commit
to without drastically worsening the first edition of the conference. For
example, we saved an estimated $5,000 by only catering light breakfast and
snacks: attendees were given walking guides to the local Faneuil Hall
Marketplace for lunch. Selling t-shirts separately from tickets instead of
including them the way many conferences do saved us another $2,000 or so.
We were also fortunate to be able to reduce costs by performing much of the
expensive A/V setup ourselves. The quotes we received from local vendors were
all well over $20,000 (some double, and one triple that). We instead used our
own equipment and staff, driven over from Michigan TypeScript.
Still, tech conferences are expensive. Flying speakers in from
around the country and boarding them in a hotel for several nights comes
out to an average cost of more than $2,000 per non-local speaker. Renting
a venue for a day is also costly, especially factoring being locked into
on-site catering.
SquiggleConf 2024 brought in total revenue of approximately $48,300:
Traditional conference wisdom suggests you should plan your budget around
the expected income from ticket sales, then use sponsorships as a safety
net. Post-COVID-lockdown conferences like us find it difficult to make
that happen. We've heard from others that expecting roughly a third of
revenue to come from sponsorships is common.
Ticket sale revenue was somewhat evenly split between regular tickets and those
with early bird or other discount codes:
Roughly 70% of tickets came through the last month before the conference. That was terrifying. Other conference organizers warned us about this too, but that only partially alleviated our worry during the earlier months.
We're expecting that future iterations of SquiggleConf will be slightly
less expensive per day. Some purchased items can be used year-over-year
and we've also learned which costs can be avoided if needed. We project
that SquiggleConf 2025, which will be 2 days instead of 1, will total
roughly $100,000-$110,000 in expenses.
We also believe we'll be better positioned to make up money as we grow the
conference organizing team and gain credibility from past successful events.
We hope to bring on team members who can specialize in particularly valuable
tasks such as corporate sponsorships and ticket sales.
Our goal is to stabilize the conference organizing flow in 2025, break even
in 2026, and start to make back our money in 2027 onwards. We're committed
to running at least 2025 and 2026 iterations of SquiggleConf.
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