Guerilla event planning at bigger conferences

Xe: So, hi, I'm XeI work for fly.io. We put your app into micro VMs across the globe or flat, plain. 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, oh, did that actually not change it? 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 utilisation 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 in the ideal spherical world where you're able to have seven people at a booth and rotate them out and 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. To begin, let's talk about the time. Let's talk about the time that not me. Yeah, let's try this.

Let's talk about the time that we accidentally had a booth. We sponsored Epic web comp, and as a result, they gave us a booth without telling us 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, especially when you are a sponsor. You get the paid shill badge around your neck. So we did something different.

We had a broken clicker. Oh, there we go. We had cookies, flowers, and we just passed out some hoodies from a previous event. We wanted to feed people, make them happy, give them something and send them on their way to do whatever they were going to do at the conference. And in the process, we came up with these three rules of engagement. You make them happy, make them nice, and there is no step three. Where is the receiver for this? And in the process, we've come up with something that we call the speakeasy Strat. We did this at K Coupon Yu. We didn't have a table. We had a party. We gave out flyers for the party at the event and talked about a tweet about it or whatever. We're supposed to call Twitter and post it on a website. It was pretty great. We also gave these lovely technicolour dream coats 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 conference parties.com might be worth checking out if you want to hang out at a conference.

However, when you have a site 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. And if you do this, you should probably sponsor the event just out of courtesy to the organisers. Another thing we tried, this should be a video, but PDFs can't have videos in 2024. And it 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 programme a backpack. It's got lots of really interesting conversations. I forget which conference it was at. Yvette knows better than I do, and we successfully 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 was 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 coded with stickers and they end up being advertisements for the people or services involved. I have stickers with me coming to see me after. We have some exclusive stickers. I did not get a collage of them in time for make 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, is this, I swear not to mention, you could 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. And here's what we tried for the future. Here's what we want to try for the future. We want to make marketing consensual. We want people to come up to us and ask questions instead of feeling like we are coming to them and telling them things. Earlier this week or 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, but TLDR, 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, Ivan z Yaso, thanks for having me. I'll be around if you have questions and stay frosty, y'all.