Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en so let me explain to you guys um a little bit about how i started my events and what i would what i would do if i was starting again which is basically if i was starting again i would do mostly the same stuff but i think everyone in the next if you’re listening if you’re willing to spend eight weeks working 40 hours a week dedicated to this i think you could make at least 100 000 profit starting probably in september because that’s when uh i think events conferences are going to be okay so anyway um the the biggest thing that you have to do here is your email list is the most important thing so the hustlecon.com i launched that website on june 6th okay and within just a few weeks we were averaging around a thousand or 2000 unique visitors a day and the email list jumped from about 200 people to about 2 500 people in seven weeks keep in mind at the time i didn’t even have a twitter so there was no twitter i mean there was but i didn’t use it and so what i would do is hustlecon.com was basically a landing page where it explained what the event is and then you’d enter your email and that was called the front door the side doors were all these blog posts so i would write two to three blog posts a week on each speaker i would post that on hacker news people would come to the website via the side door only five percent of them would say this is interesting what’s this website and they would click the home page and i would collect their email there and then once i collected their email i would send them a variety of other blog posts that i’d written and at the end of each blog post that i sent them it would say ps this person is speaking at hustlecon on uh august 1st in september you can get a ticket right now for 10 off if you buy the next 12 hours right by the way the next 12 hours that code was working all the time it was always the next 12 hours the countdown clock there’s a simple plug-in that you could buy and it just starts and shows up so sorry guys i’m sure everyone knows this now but i don’t even shopify wasn’t popular at that point so um not everyone had that technology but that’s what we did pretty easy pretty basic and in doing that i’ll give an example of the blog post because i remember like i remember vividly the one you did about i cracked um which you kind of did like as infographic i remember the one of pandora so i would do but explain what yeah explain what you did and like also these were speakers so you got speakers to agree legit speakers to agree before you even had an audience or anything yes which is the second thing i’m going to talk about is how to land a speaker but the the blog post i basically would just use forbes business insider all these places and just write a biography on the person but i would do it in an interesting way and eventually what happened is we would create infographics so um i had john who worked there and i would say um john um here’s the here’s the bulleted points of their life turn it into an infographic please and that’s what we did we had infographics it could have been a blog post which is what i used to do we this time we made infographics and it worked quite well and it was basically i read the book made to stick and i just copied that so i took uh information about their company and i made it really easy to understand so for example pandora streams this amount of music per hour which is the equivalent of x y and z uh they the reason why they were able to do that is they were one of the first people to launch on the iphone um and then i like i just tell that story pretty simple i thought it was simple very effective now that’s how we got our initial sales now the thing about sales for events it’s incredibly stressful the reason it’s stressful is typically 20 of your sales come in the first five to seven days and then 20 sometimes more 30 of your sales comes in the last like four or five days which means that dead time so you you won’t you have to get you got to kick ass right out of the right out of the gate so your first launch series you need to kick ass your first email launch series you need to do really well then there’s a fair bit of dead time and it feels we’re failing we’re failing we’re failing and then the last 10 days or so you get a wave of sales and it all comes down to the last minute and it is incredibly nerve-wracking and anything can ruin it for example a pandemic or if there was a terrorist attack if there was um um um bad weather as simple as bad weather you’re and so you’ve been working for seven weeks and now eventually in our case a whole year on this event and you’re screwed so it’s very stressful but the way that you can actually make more money and this is a something that i didn’t learn until later on for the tickets you actually want to charge higher than you than you can so let’s say you want to make a hundred thousand dollars and you want to get a thousand people to pay you 100 you always charge 250 and then you give more you give discounts in order to get to 100 average sale price and so you want in my opinion you want to be very generous with discounts but you want to charge a lot of money so it anchors it at a high at a high value yeah correct and one other thing that you want to do is you want to run this like an ecom site so for an ecomp site you say well i want to make 100 grand this month therefore i need to get um um you know a hundred thousand people to my uh a hundred thousand high quality people on my website of which three percent are going to convert i know three percent are going to convert because i’m constantly tinkering with my landing page the average sale value is going to be x dollars therefore this is how you do it now i just need to get people to my website that’s what a lot of conference people don’t do that’s what you should do and it works quite well um and then finally time is one of the best ways to create sales so you have to give discounts early on and at the end and you and the goal is you want to have five three to five tiers of pricing so you want to have early early bird and then early bird and then middle bird and then you’re late okay seriously this is the last reminder late like you because if you actually look so can you actually see um if you log into that doc i actually put a chart of my very first event uh from july of 24. you’re gonna see big spikes every single one of those big spikes was a new ticket tier ending and there’s a direct correlation between the amount of revenue that i made that day and the amount of like the tier ending and um me sending an email blast reminding people and i would email some two or three times a day in order to remind them wow [Music] you