People are incredibly fickle; moods and motivations seem to ebb and flow and there's no way to predict whether people will buy tickets even when they look you in the eye and swear that they will. That's because we've been trained from birth to tell people what they want to hear.

Our first conference was sold out and highly-lauded, with GOAT being thrown around. So we did a second one that aimed even higher and while we still managed to break even without sponsors - assuming we donate our time as organizers - we actually only sold about 60-70% of the available tickets.

I remember asking a guy who had said that our first conference had changed his life why he wasn't coming to the second one. "The economy, man." (ooohkay)

Doing these two conferences was a lot of fun, and encapsulate some of my proudest memories. They really helped cement our credibility at the time. However, it probably cost my partner and I half a year of productive time. Not only did we not make money for the hundreds of hours we poured into our labour of love, but that was hundreds of hours that we didn't spend building our actual business, which more than defeated whatever growth goals we had when we started.

All of which is to say that running a conference is a vanity flex, and it's basically all but guaranteed to lose money unless you have such a large social following (see: XOXO) that it literally doesn't actually matter if you lose money because your YouTube check that month could pay for everything.

So, would-be conference organizer, you have ask yourself two potentially awkward questions: why on earth do you actually want to run a conference, and why do you think anyone would pay to come?

Remember: the easiest way to get $100k running a conference is to spend $200k.

These days in particular, it's incredibly likely that the market is conferenced out. There's just so damn many events people can go to. At some point, a lot of people seem to realize that they don't need to make any new buddies. Invent a way for them to get an uninterrupted weekend of hacking time and you'll be rich.

There are a few conferences I love, but I’m unlikely to use up holiday and pay my own registration fee and travel to attend them. If it’s on my own dime I’ll probably watch the talks on YouTube.

Edit: I should clarify that this about work related stuff. I’ll happily pay my own way for hobby related things, and have helped organise a few such things and volunteer to help at them. Even more strongly than work events those are affected by the economy. They depend on people have enough spare money and wanting to spend it on attending your event. If it’s a really good event they may scrimp and save money so they can go, but your event is a luxury they will cut if money is tight.

However, there's another dimension to this, which is that there are different kinds of conferences and of course, different kinds of attendees. We were very up-front in our marketing that our event was catering to a certain personality profile; specifically, people who understood that the talks were the thing that happened between hallway conversations. This was pretty radical in 2008.

The vast majority of conferences have a cookie-cutter vibe, and I agree with you that most solo devs would cut those out of the budget in leaner times.

We wanted our event to act as a force multiplier, whether that meant elevating smart ideas or meeting the people you wanted to work with or for. It was carefully designed and high touch.

We're in the same boat (you can read my in-depth comment below), and an early takeaway for us is 2 fold:

1. In light of having to sacrifice our primary businesses to throw this conference, is there a way to leverage the exposure/in-person experience/connections made/relationships built/etc to disproportionally grow our primary businesses? Another way to look at this is whether or not there's a way to "invest" in your conference for the greatest ROI of all the sponsors? To be seen if we'll be able to pull this off after next weekend, but if you can't answer this question in the affirmative then I don't know if throwing a conference is anything other than a labor of love.

2. Much like any other business/startup advice - is there a way to hire/inspire a team to run this conference on your behalf?! If not then continuing with the startup example you're choosing to invest sweat equity into this conference, and if you can't answer #1 in the affirmative then it may not be the best investment of your time and energies.

edit: clarity/typos.

If our goal was to be recognized as awesome at a certain time by a certain group of developers, we succeeded. A huge number of connections were made, and a huge number of reputations were bolstered.

Did that translate into paying customers for our consulting business? Maybe, indirectly, but I can't remember any direct referrals. Not to say that we had a leads board on the wall... if that had been our conscious objective, that would take the prize for least efficient pathway to new clients ever. More Rube Goldberg than Business Development.

So yeah, for us, the "sponsor" by virtue of the fact that we were unpaid volunteer organizers, it was probably a crazy thing to do. We worked our asses off and lost a lot of sleep and brought a lot of amazing people together. 15 years later, I'm super glad that we did it in the same way that I'm glad I toured in a rock band that you've never heard of.

I would suggest that while I'm confident that you can hit Google and find someone happy to say the right things and take money to run your event, this is worse than not doing it at all. YC teaches us to not outsource our core competencies, right?

All of the things that make a conference memorable and impactful come from passion and sweat by true believers. To hire someone to just plop out an event is to boil fruit. It's like spending money to guarantee that nobody has fun. Don't do this.

In our case, my then business partner turned out to be a brilliant event organizer. She had amazing logistic chops and work ethic. Every hour I put in, she put in three. It was in our founder DNA, you could conclude.

Now, you could hire someone to organize events large and small, if you're at that stage of your companies' growth. If that's not where you're at, then it's too soon and I wouldn't recommend it when it would come at the cost of not hiring a great designer or something. We got lucky because one of our partners discovered a hidden talent.

YMMV in all things, of course. Either way, I really do hope that your event goes smoothly and helps everyone involved connect the dots.

ROI if there ever was one in my opinion! We started out with the idea that breaking even would be a great success, financially, but touring as the "rock bank you've never heard of" was among the strongest driving factors in this labor of love.

> "I would suggest that while I'm confident that you can hit Google and find someone happy to say the right things and take money to run your event, this is worse than not doing it at all. YC teaches us to not outsource our core competencies, right?"

I don't know what could make throwing a paid event a core-competency other than throwing paid events, and this is why I suggest finding a team to help with that.

For us, our core competency seems to be getting speakers & curating incredible content. Promoting and selling tickets could have used a boost from the pro's. I'm also very proud of the team for how we've managed to pull this off logistically, but again a team that specializes in this could have done at least as good of a job and freed us up to continue working on our main businesses.

I'd liken it to writing great software and selling great software - they are not the same thing and they required distinctly unique skillsets. I know this event will be awesome, which fell into our core competency, but it did not get the reach we had hoped at least in large part because it was our first time trying to do something at this scale (aka outside of our core competency).

Thanks again for your insights and continued participation in the thread!

If you opened a store advertising "the tastiest yams", you would not hire an external operator to source yams. It's not because you can't learn how to buy yams at wholesale - anyone can do that, if they put in the time. It's because your customers believe that you have a superior opinion when it comes to yams, and they are effectively delegating the role to you because they want to gain access to yams that they could never buy directly even if they learned a bit about yam logistics themselves.

Never outsource your yam tasting. To do so would be to suggest that you have no particular insight into the yams that you're buying, and so there's no reason for them to keep you in the loop.

I make basically the same salary as I did before inflation went into overdrive. We were doing fine before, but are really struggling now. So, yeah, the economy, man.

Why would you put on a conference right now? It seems like really poor timing.

The first conference we did was in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. One could argue that things were better by 2009, or worse. Macro analysis is highly subjective, even 15 years removed.

The counterpoint to your reaction is that a small, socially-focused (networking that feels like hanging out with friends) weekend is quite possibly the highest rate of return possible with regards to short-term career advancement.

In real terms, we had 150 attendees and 6 of those people quit their bad jobs on Monday. A relatively huge number of people ended up becoming early Shopify employees. One of the co-founders of GitHub was a speaker... in 2008. The outcomes were broadly discussed at the time, so my anecdote above was directly a response to my genuine confusion that if someone needed to make more money... surely the best place to make that happen was at our event, not by skipping it.

Not every event can anticipate that sort of outcome, but ours reasonably could. I'm proud of that. It was also 15 years ago, and things have changed.

Anecdotally, it's a mixed bag though. A couple others I know have either come in on the low side or ticket sales have been slow.

if i might suggest one way to build up to a conference is to run meetups beforehand. not many are needed, say 3-6 of them before you probably have the community trust and events experience to go big.

https://www.swyx.io/manifest-meetups

I think it’s still running even after I moved out of the country 8 years ago.

edit: Our venue trick was “Hey, if we pack your bar/restaurant on a random weekday night so you make a killing in drinks, can we have the place?”. Venues were happy to say yes.

And if you packed their busiest night, they might make some more money but it might cause them problems and stress them out. Offer to boost their deadest night.

PS - the issue is that many social dancers want to dance over being social, and alcohol detracts from it. People have jobs and want to pay to contribute. We ended up settling on a cover charge that comes with food credit so people can booze up if desired, and buy water/snacks if not. Win-win.

They all need bars to dance. They all use the same argument. And quite often they are politely asked to find somewhere else after a few months.

Like you said, just talk to the manager and say "hey I've got 50 people that want a place to hang out and order beer. Can we do that at your place or should we go somewhere else?". Easy win for everyone.

Running a conference is harder. Hotel conference rooms are way over priced. The AV prices are morally offensive.

If your attendance is under 100 you can probably do a restaurant. It will cost food and beverage but you likely just need to hit a $ minimum. Fees should be minimal. If you need conference space for over 100 I don't think there are any "good" options. And definitely no good options if you get into several hundred.

The $495 ticket price in the article also isn't especially high in this day and age but I don't consider it especially cheap either. Definitely a destination conference sort of price which has implications relative to cheap and local.

Also of course life can get in the way of speakers (who are typically not paid at tech events unless they're some non-vendor "draw"). If anyone wanted me to sign some contract with consequences if something came up I'd laugh.

If you are not high-rolling, consider getting a university, trade school, etc to sponsor or participate, as they do have auditoriums with A/V already.

Yeah, I'm surprised that was mentioned. The only way you'll get me to agree to consequences for no-show is if you pay me to show. I mean I already have consequences for no-showing -- my reputation. I've spent a long time building a reputation as a speaker who not only always shows up, but can do a talk with less than a day's notice. So I'm likely to show up so as not to ruin that reputation.

Even FOSDEM (held at a university in Brussels for free) has sponsors as does Devconf.cz.

So yeah, you could say the University of Waterloo sponsored it by allowing us to use their conference room. Somebody did have to empty the trash cans after the attendees left. But to the best of my knowledge the only money that changed hands was for the t-shirts, and as I said I think that ended up being a donation from a Foundation member.

Sponsorship is definitely a good way to save a lot of money, but it also makes you somewhat beholden to those sponsors.

I've organised a couple of conferences here in Singapore.

I find the asks by the sponsors in the article to be a bit over-the-top. Organisers need to establish firm boundaries on what they're willing to give in to (booths, shoutouts), and what is non-negotiable (anything to do with programming and content), and put that in their sponsorship prospectus.

It's the job of most marketing people to push for more, and it's the conference organiser's job to push back.

And, yes, companies will pretty much always want more for their sponsorship dollars and it's one of the jobs of organizers to push back which given a good professional relationship tends to work.

Have your speakers given a talk that's considered radical at your conferences?

At the conference I spoke at there were plenty of local attendees and as the topic was hacking, there were talks I'd imagine could be considered radical (depending on your definition of that word).

As a speaker, I wasn't restricted in what I said, nor did anyone pre-review my talk.

Echoing what the other commenter said, as long as the talk doesn't involve politics (also, religion and race/ethnic group), the government doesn't care.

There are special visas for people in the above groups [1].

[1] https://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/miscellaneous-work...

If I want this year's conference to open with a keynote documenting all the ways Windows violates user trust, there's not a sponsor in the world that can veto it. We might even kindly point out the names of product managers and higher-ups who green lit those harmful policies.

This is all just a hypothetical scenario, of course... ! ;)

On sponsors, I don't think there's always that much influence from sponsors, typically it's an exchange of money for booth presence, mentions during the conference, and some social media marketing, there was no control over content from them.

Costs are very geography specific. For example in the UK it was possible to put on a conference for 100-200 people in a decent venue for ~ £20-25k. This was not for profit obviously, but we kept ticket prices low and relied on sponsorship money to break even.

I'd agree that the first year is the hardest, we had to pay deposits out of personal cash while working on sponorships, so that's tricky unless you've got a source of funds. After a while it gets easier with sponsors as you're a known quantity and hopefully you have some cash from previous runs available for next year's deposits.

The most expensive items are anything that's per attendee. Even a small expense (like snacks or lunch) gets expensive once you multiply by 200!

The speaker contract thing was also odd to me, I've spoken at > 20 conferences and I've never been asked to sign a contract (also never been paid to speak but that's the reality of most tech conferences)

For the venue, it is possible to get it almost for free. Partnering with a (private) engineering school did work several times for me. It's free advertising for them and they are already equipped for such events. Another way is a partnership with an artist collective, provided that their situation with the municipality is well defined.

I assume this varies with the topic, and sponsorship level.

A sponsor paying £2000 for a booth won't expect much beyond the booth. But if you're running an AWS User Group conference, and Amazon is providing a venue that would otherwise cost a five-figure sum? And given the topic, there probably isn't anyone else likely to sponsor you at that level? You might want to make sure they're happy so they sponsor next year as well.

Why shouldn't they sign a contract in this case? If you fail to attend I want my money back!

[0] https://handmadecities.com/boston

I don't have the means to universally pay ALL contributors, or to pay them the same amount, but I make an honest assessment of the kind of contribution and (if it's within budget) compensate accordingly.

It's curious that even corporate-backed events are not doing this? It's no wonder people are shocked by my remarks about contracts.

Aside from a requested talk at a sales conference once for a client, I've never once been paid for I'm sure well over a hundred conference talks.

I have had conferences wanting a CYA signature that says they can use my image/recordings/etc. for marketing purposes and so forth but even that is usually just covered by some conditions you have to agree to when you register.

It is possible to kickstart conferences, but hard. One that has been going for several years is a bit more of a high-end conference retreat: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wargamergirl/valhalla-i...

Virtual conferences are not comparable to a live one, they’re as valuable as mandatory corporate e-learnings in my opinion.

Maybe it’s just me.

Personally I do watch recorded talks and lectures from conferences every now and then. This conference could have too much emphasis on networking for experienced people if the talks are targeted more towards beginners in PL though. Any advanced conference would have enough informative talks since very few people have time to read up on everything in their niche as often there's sub-niches and sub-sub-niches.

I'm also not saying it needs to be a permanent virtual event but it could start out that way if you don't get enough funding. And even if the talks are much more intended for beginners and the conference is about networking, it's better than nothing to get started with. Unless those famous people promoted the Kickstarter it was never gonna hit 50k anyway.

Surely there should be a more streamlined method to get the same? Maybe just a high powered meetup where you invite out station experts or something.

If someone is looking for "1-on-1 time with experts", most people would have better luck writing them a well-worded email or sending them a tweet.

I personally think conferences are the best way for someone to get somewhat-passive exposure to what's up-and-coming in their specialisation or favourite programming language, because all an attendee needs to do is sit there and listen.

I've got less experience with heavy corporate sponsorship micromanaging content, though I don't doubt it: for everything else, as far as I can tell this advice is gold. I've even tried to organize an event myself, knowing that it had to be vision first and the content would follow: got a little way along and brought in some good people, but one of the key fellow organizers showed he was an astute choice by having his OWN vision and running with that :)

I went along with this, as it was also a good vision and less ambitious, but covid hit and the whole thing rather fizzled. It's possible that, had it not been for a pandemic, we'd still be growing an event: we were at least somewhat interested in the process and how events take hold and grow, and we had some comparable events we'd been involved with that had recently flamed out through running into all these problems.

No, you can't Kickstart a conference, and what's more be cautious about attempting one. Think of it like a small college, except it's an event. Sayre's law applies: the reason the politics will be vicious, is that the stakes are so low. After the event, everyone will go home, including you. Therefore, anybody you bring in to help run the event will feel mighty licensed to get their way on their 'fun weekend'. Your job may well be to keep your vision intact (and, along with it, the conference itself). 'cos you likewise can't Kickstart a vision.

People wouldn't think that way once they've had a look at a conference budget, and how so many (community) conferences tread that tightrope between making losses and a decent amount of profit.

That's also probably why the article, and a lot of the comments here are all about finances and sponsorship.

Following the advice of the parent article & some comments thus far, we first packed the house with standing room only for 1.5yrs before deciding to throw a paid event. For what it’s worth, we are the largest event of its kind in the local area’s history.

We have raving fans and a mailing list and in-person attendance that has gone up and to the right since we started. People park blocks away, arrive 30-45mins before our scheduled “doors open” time to secure their seats, and come back repeatedly (we track attendance, rsvp’s, check-ins, etc).

We just recently moved into a bigger venue to accommodate our growing crowds because our core audience was starting to fall off (it was becoming too inconvenient to attend for some given the event’s popularity). Even with our having to change the days of the month (from 2nd Tuesday to the first) and moving to a new venue, our attendance has continued to increase - a huge win for audience stickiness by any event’s standards.

Our paid event has 12-speakers over 2-days, including local & national level speakers, $2k+ weekend national trainers, a nationally recognized author, and the topics are extremely applicable to our niche. We have 2 of the nicest venues in town lined up for classroom training and our VIP dinner + cocktail reception.

All of this is to say that it hasn’t been enough to drive ticket sales. We’ve announced this event at our meetup since March (80-100+ in attendance each time), we’ve hit our mailing list and everyone in our sphere multiple times, and our FB ads have had over 300k impressions (with all the usual a/b testing & landing page tweaks). We made all of our plans to accommodate 200-300 in attendance but it looks like we may just barely break 100.

We launched with $499/$799 General Admission/VIP ticket pricing (prominently placed!) and the market spoke very loudly with very low sales. So, we repriced it to $150/499 (we’re now losing on each GA ticket), refunded the difference or upgraded all of our early believers, and unfortunately it has not made much of a difference.

This has been a rather difficult pill to swallow, but it's been interesting to watch the Reddit drama play out in real time and continually read articles about the "community vs audience" or "village vs train station" dynamic. It also speaks to the difficulties surrounding monetizing a free/freemium model facing many of today’s businesses. I plan on doing a full write up and after action report so that others can learn from our mistakes.

I’ll end by saying that our event is in an income producing/sales driven industry where people are accustomed to attending paid events for professional development and education. Our outreach numbers are such that even taking full responsibility for not assembling the right team, the right lineup of speakers, the right venues, or choosing the right days (weekend vs weekdays), we believe that the incredibly low conversion rate we’re seeing is possibly a harbinger of times ahead.

It may just be a bad time to throw events ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS: I've been lurking on HN for longer than my account would suggest but I've been waiting for the perfect thread to finally spend my "first comment.” I started reading before I was involved in tech, so it’s kind of funny that my first comment is on a thread that isn't exactly about technology!

edit: typos

The people going to the weekly free meetings might not be the audience for the conference. Group meets months (weekly?) for free those friendships get renewed often and don't require an expensive meetup.

The FB ads are not working, it might be the ad content. You mentioned a/b testing but it sounds like a low % of signups. It might be the wrong medium. It's probably targeting poorly. A sponsorship deal with popular twitter/ig/podcasts personalities would have been more targeted and introduce you better.

The other thought is perhaps people don't want your type of local conference for the price you are offering. I might pay $500 to go to a conference in Europe (plus airfare+hotel) because it's an experience but I would never pay 500 to go to a conference in my city because it lacks that global experience that justifies the cost. The price drop to 150 makes it seem less valuable.

I obviously can't argue that there were issues with ad content, targeting, the landing page and even the conference's offering, but our target demographic is "easily" targeted and the unsolicited feedback we frequently received was that people were seeing our ads everywhere. I gave a talk at 1Million Cups about this to an audience filled with people outside of our target demographic and none of them had seen the ads, so we're fairly confident that targeting was at least not failing completely.

re cost: this is absolutely something we considered, and hopefully after the conference we'll get honest feedback, so standby for that!

Did you do any early bird pricing rounds?

We advertised to 4 other local MSA's within 4hrs driving distance, so we always knew that the bulk of our tickets would come in the final days/weeks since they didn't have to plan a flight or hotel even, but we didn't see any meaningful traction until we lowered the price completely.

We put out a fun video to our network explaining the thought process behind our initial pricing (pay for an ops manager to help run the events) and why we were lowering the price to a below-cost pricing scheme (to fill the room as much as possible in order to prove we can host these types of events in our area), but ticket sales have still been underwhelming.

All that to say, the conference was a fantastic time, even with the fewer people. We went in with the expectations of a much more intimate event than pre-covid, and we were totally energized and ready to kick it off next year. None of the people there complained about the groups being too small. The conversations that happened were the right ones; the people that had them were the right people.

We're also going to be recording each of the presentations and the speakers really are worth the ticket price and then some (as evidenced by either their own ticket prices or the other events they've spoken at), so we're hoping there will be some additional revenue generated from the video lessons.

We're really looking forward to experiencing the conference and making the best of it!

We're planning to lose lots of money and have a small group of attendees, and we're okay with that :)

[1] https://outland.sh

I can see why single programming language conferences are often popular. But is a "Programming Languages Festival" too broad for a conference? Are attendees mostly from academic interest?

The process of putting together one of these shindigs is pretty intense, and there's no way that a single person can do it. It's good to have some leadership, but they can't be too heavy-handed, and these things are usually volunteer efforts, so it's important to not be an asshole.

In the case of the conferences I've attended, there's often a 1- to 3-year period between concept and keynote. There's usually a lot of fundraising and awareness-building. I've never heard of Kickstarting or GoFundMe drives. In my experience, fundraisers are fun social events or meetups with an entrance fee. These also act as advertisements for the main event.

Of course, nowadays, you also have the option of paid webinars. These can be a great opportunity to project the brand, and also test out possible conference presenters.

Another option that tech conferences have, that the organization I'm involved with does not have, is branded sponsorship; especially from local businesses. Having someone that's a good glandhander is a big deal. My mother used to do that for her NPO, and I saw her land some big fish.

Insurance is a biggie, and no one ever seems to give this much thought. Poke around. Find out what it will cost to insure one of these things. Not all companies will do it, and the prices can be all over the place.

A lot of times, you can cut deals with hotels, and they'll let you have the conference rooms for free, as long as you commit to a room block (so getting the word out is important). Conference centers are usually not willing to cut breaks, but many hotels can't deal with anything of any size. I've attended a number of smaller (including tech) conferences at Holiday Inns.

Nowadays, there are some great SaaS options, for things like schedules, Web sites, badges, etc. Some may cut deals for NPOs.

And, for the cherry on top, you generally have colossal egos, battling back and forth, like a kaiju movie.

It can be great fun, but it's a ton of work.

I would not be surprised if many folks on this forum have been involved with Science-Fiction/Comic/Fantasy cons. That's a good place to find experience.

Every year was the same, we organized an installfest plus talks about free (as in freedom) software and open source products or projects for people.

Every year was thinking where to do that and start talking to places to get the space.

Every year we declined the idea of patronage from private companies to avoid them controlling something. So, the upfront cost was paid by us (think that a team could be from 10 to 20 people)

That could took us maybe 4 months to organize one day, that must be THAT DAY.

Over the years we got experience and we learn a lot from the people doing this event before, setting a schedule to start meetings, having a base of providers, having contacts to ask for space, etc. Our budget was 0 (yes it is a zero) and all cost should be paid by us, the organizers. So to recover that we made t-shirts, and souvenirs (that needed to be paid in advance) then maybe you didn't lost money when the event was finished. Because people didn't pay a ticket for it, it is a free event.

It was a huge effort to make something like that. Months sleeping few hours, people going crazy to setup tracks for talks, approving them and talking to the people that gave the talk to accommodate the schedule. Having the t-shirts on time and the souvenirs, because if not, we will not broke, but we cannot recover the founds. Having the cables and the network ready, the software and servers to install was also a huge task.

Food and water..? Yes, that is a crazy nightmare

We even developed Eventol[1], a software to schedule this kind of events. Yes it is open source also.

Organizing a conference looks easy but really, if you work and you do that, get good people around you. Look what they are good for and what they enjoy doing and give them task that make them happy. It could sound almost a stupid advice, but is not, if they are not being paid and even when they are paid, if you gives a task were they are bad to or something they don't like, it could fail and that means delays. And your conference is already scheduled and you cannot say: sorry, it will be not this weekend, will be the next one. No.

I was happy to be attendant first, volunteer for some years, then get the experience to be the manager of sooo experienced people and got milestones in the event history, from record of attendance, to earn money and stop losing it (that was for the next year event) or the software we used and it is open to everyone.

Anyway, after the conference.., you needed 8 months to relax your mind and body and start again that crazy idea to run a conference about free Software and for free.

As an acquired experience, when you got that running, you can start thinking to be a wedding planner if you wants to move from IT, because a conference is something like that when we talk about organization :v

[1] Eventol: https://eventol.org/

> It was a huge effort to make something like that. Months sleeping few hours, people going crazy to setup tracks for talks, approving them and talking to the people that gave the talk to accommodate the schedule. Having the t-shirts on time and the souvenirs, because if not, we will not broke, but we cannot recover the founds. Having the cables and the network ready, the software and servers to install was also a huge task.

> Food and water..? Yes, that is a crazy nightmare

Something to think about: maybe getting everyone to pay a token sum wouldn't be such a bad idea. It helps with guaranteeing attendance, which helps with knowing exactly how much food to cater.

You can give everyone a T-shirt or some other swag to make sure they get their money's worth, and offer free tickets (or volunteering opportunities) to those who genuinely can't afford to pay, but who would take the trouble to write in.

The catering was more to the volunteers and speakers so we knew (almost correct) how much people will eat. I cannot remember if we made something like "meal reservstion". We had coffee.

I'm doing another event (megagames) snd there you must pay in advance and that is the catch to be sure you are not saying: I'm going, and you not. Also, we don't make money from that, it is used to run the events and pay the costs to develop a megagame (prints mostly)