Defrag Blog

Due to popular demand (which is to say, people emailing asking for another couple of days), we’re extending early bird pricing until this Friday, Sept 4th (at close of business). It’ll be your last chance to save $500 bucks.

All of which has some of you wondering (I’m sure), “what’s the point of early bird pricing anyway?” Or maybe more pointedly, “isn’t early bird pricing just some marketing ploy?”

Early bird pricing is a long-standing practice in the tech conference world. For large technology conference producers -and by large, I mean those that are sitting on cash reserves big enough to handle logistical swings — it really is just a gimmick. For the smaller, independent guys (and gals) like myself, it actually plays a pretty critical role in things. Let me explain…

I often tell people that the only proprietary thing that I have for running tech conferences is a spreadsheet that tells me approximately the percentage of my total “audience” that should be registered by what date to result in a given total number of attendees. It’s a spreadsheet that’s been built in the trenches — time-tested, recession-proofed, and as sacred to me (for business planning) as a document can get. I just don’t doubt this spreadsheet. If it says we’re on track, we are. If it says we’re not, we’re not. (For the record, we’re running ahead of pace this year.)

The reason that’s so important is that we can control our cost per attendee if we can make an educated guess about our total numbers earlier. We order hundreds of fleeces, books, bags, etc - and we also plan for wifi, food, beverage — you get the idea. The more we know earlier, the better an operation we can run.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that for us, early bird does matter. Hence, the incentive (save $500 bucks) to register early. That said, when I get emails as early bird is ending from people asking me to extend it for them, I can say “yep, we’ll slide it a couple of days.” But beyond that, we really can’t.

So, do something good for yourself and register by Friday (and you’ll be helping us with our planning as well).