Interview: Marty Haught
The one where I interview Marty Haught about organizing conferences
Transcript:
00:15 Are you ready? I’m ready. Alright, sounds good. OK, so.
00:45 Just a quick introduction. You are Marni Haat. You are currently the director of Open Source at Ruby Central. You’re also a long time organizer of Rocky Mountain Ruby, as well as Boulder Ruby, as well as RubyConf and RailsConf. Is that right? It is right. Okay, cool. And you just got…
01:12 back from a conference a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you? Yeah, Ruby Kaigi in Japan. Okay. How was that? That was great. Fantastic. Yeah. Have you ever been to Japan before? Yeah, no, that was first time. Japan is super cool. It was very interesting. I was there for two weeks. So I enjoyed the food. I enjoyed just seeing everything there. I did some tourist stuff first to adjust to the new time zone. Yeah. And things are just so different over there. It’s quite delightful.
01:42 novel and always something to explore. I was surprised by how they don’t start as early in the morning and I’m a morning person. that was like, okay, got to figure out breakfast and some places don’t open till eight or even nine. And you’re like, really? I mean, there’s probably a factor there where I, my body wanted to get up real early and I’d stay in bed till six and then I’m like, what do do now?
02:09 Um, but, tons of fun and a great adventure and the conference was fantastic. Uh, there’s over 1500 attendees at Ruby Kiki, which is a quite a large Ruby event for Ruby events. That’s pretty darn large and just very vibrant. Great conversations, love excitement. So definitely, certainly if you ever consider going to Japan for a conference, Ruby Kiki is fantastic. Awesome. Uh, did you.
02:35 Like take anything from the conference? Did you get any ideas that you maybe want to bring back to conferences here? Yeah, I think the one thing that stuck, uh, first of all, I would say that there’s a lot of things they do that are uniquely Japanese that you can’t replicate. However, they, uh, had a code party, which they called and it was like old fashioned hacking. You know, they set up tables and they had space.
03:04 They had some food, but it actually wasn’t, was sort of like someone went and bought a packaged food from a grocery store and brought it. And it was like, if you need food, it was, it was something, but it wasn’t enough. And so like, don’t plan on it for dinner. I didn’t do that, but it was really quite pleasant. it made me think about that. Sometimes in the evening, it would be.
03:33 good to give attendees the option to come and hang out in a large space and just hack. Like it’s not drinking, it’s not a party, you know, it’s not even structured. It doesn’t have to be structured. It could be loosely structured. And by giving that space and, setting it up and letting people know it’s that’s happening, that can be quite nice. And I I’ve seen this at
03:59 Events in the past and it’s not something we really think about so I thought oh what a great name code party first of all Yeah, I want to like hack space or hack hack night or something. Uh-huh Cool. Yeah, that is a great great idea Okay, so jumping into some conference First conference specific type questions because
04:28 I’m planning to organize a conference and I’ve never done this before. I’d like to hear about your first conference. How big was it? How did it come together? How did you feel afterwards? Right. So actually the first conference I was involved with was not my own. Okay. Mountain West Ruby Conference in 2007. And I helped Mike Moore with some others to
04:57 execute, organize that. So I got to see a lot of the behind the scenes and the details and working through putting together a conference without actually being on the line like it. know, that was in Salt Lake City. was here in Longmont, Colorado. And so I helped from afar. And then I helped once we got there, but I got to see a lot of it. So, so there’s, there’s that. And then I had three years of that, the way, 2007, 2008, 2009.
05:27 Okay. And in 2010, I split off and did my own thing, which was Rocky Mountain Ruby. It was called Mountain RB in the first year, but apparently people names are important by the way. So people got confused between Mountain RB and Mountain West Ruby conference. I’m like, really? People were so confused. And so by, calling it Rocky Mountain Ruby, not confused. Gotcha. Yeah. Like, okay. So anyway, uh, but.
05:56 I had had enough exposure that when I did Rocky Mountain Ruby for the first year, I already had a sense of what I wanted to do with the event. I had been to conferences. So I saw from an attendee and a speaker standpoint what the experience was like. And so I had opinions and I had thoughts about what I wanted to do. So that was, I think that’s pretty important as a first time organizer is getting clear about
06:27 What is your event like? How is it like something else? How is it not like something else and capture those details. And I would capture it in, and I think with Rocky mountain Ruby, I thought about the, you know, the experience leading up to the event, the event itself, and then how to, how does things sort of proceed after the event? So I would, I’d write out like an itinerary. I’d write out the timeline of everything.
06:55 and all the details as much as I could, could think through. Because a lot of times with events, it’s just a lot of details. Right. miss something then that, mean, depending on what you miss, guess, it’s not like the end of the world, but it can sour the event depending on what that is. Yeah. Gotcha.
07:24 How big was your, how big was the first Rocky Mountain movie? We were, I think about 190. 190, okay. And one thing I’m kind of thinking about right now is how, I guess, I don’t want it to be huge because I don’t want the added
07:51 complexity of that or to make the logistics harder and also to mitigate financial risk, I guess. I also, you I don’t want to go too small. And I guess it also largely depends on what venue I can get and what venue I like. that maybe the right way to go about it to maybe just go out and look at venues?
08:19 And if I find one that I like that can hold, you know, between a hundred and 200 people, then go with that as the number. mean, I that’s good. I certainly wouldn’t suggest you go over 200. Okay. Yeah. Like I, there’s, there’s nothing wrong with, uh, erring on the side of smaller. There is a point where, you know, if it’s too small,
08:45 The format may not work so well. So if we had like 30 people, right. You know, that’s a meetup. Okay. You know, it can be in a retreat. Now you could do a retreat where it’s like a small groups and it could be that size. But again, that kind of comes back to format. if you’re thinking of like the traditional, have speakers, there’s a stage and all of that single track conference. Uh, then you know, you’re, you’re talking like that 75 to 200.
09:15 range and venue is a really important piece of the process. And I recommend you do that first. Once, you get clarity about what you want, because if you don’t know what you want, then as you look at venues, now, as you look at venues, it may like crystallize. Okay, this is a great space. I will make this work, whatever that is. And there are lots of interesting spaces that can work with a smaller group of folks.
09:43 Cost is not linear as you get larger. It gets ridiculous. And if you pick a venue that has its own catering and requires you to use that catering, you’ve just three X, four extra cost. So I would say avoid that if you can. For example, Rocky Mountain Ruby is now, well, originally it was located in the Boulder theater. They don’t actually do that anymore. They had daytime rentals because they’re a nighttime.
10:12 performance venue, fantastic venue, gorgeous venue. And during the day it sits empty. So I was able to like secure it for like 4,000 a day for it and no obligations for catering. So like from a cost standpoint, that’s fantastic. And I could have put 800 people in there if I really wanted to. We considered up to 300 our max, but what Rocky Mountain Ruby does now is there’s a place called E-Town and it’s an old church.
10:41 It used to be a church and it’s now been converted to like a radio program. So they do like a live show there and they do like small music performances. And so it can comfortably seat, I think like 225 or 250. That’s great. And there are going to be plenty of venues that you will find that can go up to that 200 number or so that will, that will have like that classic sort of stage seated audience kind of configuration.
11:11 And so like, look around your, your little community and see what those are. Uh, they, they like, they’re usually places that will perform. They’ll have performances of some kind. And depending on many of these do things at night. during the day, they might be very amenable to having you rent their space. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s good. Good to think about, um, is that typical like, uh,
11:40 Prices for for venues is like four thousand plus per day Well, no, it’s all over the place. Okay, I’d have to ask spike what he’s paying for Rocky Mountain Ruby now but his the rate he has with e-town is very Favorable and that allows him to not have to worry about Running a larger event. I think that and it’s been a while since I’ve
12:09 I’ve run an event of this size, but I could see that you would spend 30 or $40,000 on the event total. So yeah, it can be a little daunting because then you’re like, well, what if no one buys tickets? Right. That was, that was kind of one of the things I mentioned in the checklist is that you want to small, you want to start small and you want to run your budget. want to look at what’s the venue rates, like how are you going to handle everything else? And oftentimes.
12:39 I know if I mentioned this in the checklist, but there are nice to haves. So you have the critical things you have to do. You can’t have the event without that. And, but then there’s things you can do if you start to sell tickets, if you get sponsors all of sudden now we’ll add in this item, we’ll add in that item, but you don’t do that until you’re confident that you’re going to make enough revenue to cover the cost. I would recommend that because you probably don’t want to lose money. I’m just guessing that’s probably it.
13:09 Yeah. Okay. So you have like a start out with the, uh, like base of necessities, and then you can have a wish list that maybe, you know, once we sell this amount of tickets, we can add in this thing. Once we sell this amount, we can start to pull from that, that wish list, but at least we know that baseline budget and the, yeah, that we can have a conference.
13:38 at that baseline. Yeah. So if you can avoid food, that’s great. It all costs. Yeah. You you have your venue cost. You’ll have to think about AV that oftentimes AV will be bundled into the venue, but it might not be. So you need to be very clear about that. So what kind of AV setup do they have? What kind of internet access do they have? Both of those are pretty important. I think these days I would be shocked to see a venue that didn’t provide those or have like in-house
14:07 AV or in-house internet provider that you can work with. But those might be separate costs. They might not, they might be bundled in. just depends on the venue. But you’ll want to make sure those are sort of like the key bits. You’ll want to understand how their staff works and when can you set up because there’s set up before the event. Are they going to set up? Are you going to set up? Usually the venue will
14:36 configure the room in the layout that you wish, assuming that it can be adjusted. Some places can’t, like if you’re in a very traditional theater, it’s like, there you go. It’s just, you know, there’s nothing to change, but some places it’s an empty floor. And so you can work with the staff on configuring how the space is laid out, which is lovely if that’s an option, but yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.
15:09 So one of the big questions that I have is I know that I’ll probably need to start some sort of LLC or organization or something like that, but I don’t know the details on that. How are these typically run and what is like the simplest version of that that I can do? You don’t have to do anything. Okay. But you should understand how
15:38 how savvy you are with taxes and all that, but you have to understand that you’re going to have revenue and you’re going to have expenses. And ultimately you want them to cancel each other out or as close as possible. So oftentimes people will set up an LLC because they don’t want the liability and the entity that is running everything to be themselves personally.
16:05 But depending on how you set up an LLC, it’s still a pass through entity. So like from a taxation standpoint, you’re still having, you know, revenue, income, and, you know, expenses or deductions that you need to factor in. So I would, you will want to talk to a tax professional just to be clear about your situation and how to navigate that. But generally speaking, people just say, look, I will either set up an entity and deal with that complication.
16:35 So if you’re familiar with that, then you might be like, yeah, I know how to do that. Not a big deal. Usually setting up an LLC is pretty lightweight, but there’s a little bit to it. depending on, you know, if you, if you’re not sure, like if it’s just by, if you’re just by yourself, then there’s probably less motivation to set up an LLC. And an LLC can be nice because if it’s going to be a group effort and if you, if it’s going to be more than a one-time event, then
17:02 You, you can use that entity and structure going forward. can have other people take over, but you don’t technically have to do that. The venue is happy to just sign a contract with you and you pay the bill. And they don’t care. Generally speaking, they might, there might be depending on the venue, there may be some insurance requirements that you’ll have to provide. And so you’ll have to look into, uh, event insurance or assurance of a certain kind. It just depends on the venue and what they.
17:32 they require. And usually you want some level of insurance just in case something goes wrong. You don’t want to be completely exposed, but I think you can, you can ask other organizers since I haven’t done a personal event in a long time. I’m not as like Ruby central has its own insurance, it’s a different, right? Right. Yeah. Like asking spike like spike, what did you do?
17:58 or some of the other regional conference organizers, what they’re doing now for insurance. I think that’s a good thing to check in. Right. How would you determine ticket prices for like a small first event? Are you like calculating that based off of like maybe some numbers that you find out about the venue or something like that? Or? Yeah, you should do a budget. So your budget should be
18:25 Like what are all the expenses you know about? there’s venue, if you’re doing any food, if you’re, if you’re doing like t-shirts or, know, your AB costs, you just start to add those things up and you’ll know where you stand. And at that point, then depending on how, like, if you are able to find a very affordable place, then you have tons of options. so pricing is, an exercise. It should be informed by what.
18:55 you know, by your budget, by what you calculate, what you forecast. So how many people do you expect to be able to pull into the venue? What happens if you can only, like, let’s say you’re shooting for 125 people. What happens if you only sell 50 tickets? How does that play with the budget? You know, you can always give away tickets. You can seek out sponsors. And so sometimes people will find a sponsor to.
19:22 before they set ticket prices because they’ll use the sponsor to help cover costs to lower ticket prices. So if your ticket is too expensive, then people won’t come. The other thing you have to think about is how attractive is your conference from a content programming standpoint? If your program isn’t very compelling, then people may not buy tickets no matter what the cost is. So you have to think about the draw of your event.
19:52 Do you have any sort of more well-known larger name type people in the community that are speaking about something that’s, that’s fairly motivating, engaging. you know, you, when you start thinking about programming, you think about who you’re keynoting or who’s entering your conference. And, um, you know, how confident are you that you can pull in speakers? Now, if you’re doing a Ruby event.
20:18 there is a speaker circuit. So there’s speakers that love to speak at all the events. so like speaking, getting speakers is not a concern for Ruby events, generally speaking. But that’s not true for every space. So I think like when you think about the event, what’s the purpose of it? What are you trying to accomplish with it? What are the goals? And then from a programming standpoint, how do you meet those goals? So I…
20:45 Like as you’re scouting venues and thinking about budget and thinking about prices, who can you get in? Sometimes they might ask for money to speak at your event. That’s certainly through keynoting. That is a reasonable expectation. Now there’s, there’s plenty of folks in the Ruby community that are happy to speak at your event and not ask for much of anything really. those are all things you’ll want to start to feel out. And a lot of times
21:13 event organizers will do all this before they announce anything. They don’t, they don’t announce that they’re having the event. They don’t sign any contracts until they have some of these details figured out. can talk to venues. The one thing to note is that venues will book up their space. So if you, if you don’t start early enough, then you may find that you, you find a great venue, but they don’t have the dates available that you’d like.
21:40 Think about that. That’s why you want to start early. I think if you start a year out or so you’re fine. Some venues will have space. So you could six months out, you you know, line up the space. It’s just like you’re, you’re, you’re a greater risk of not having dates available. And the other piece is you need at least three or four months. I would say that you get a website app. start communicating. It’s going to take a while. You have to convince people. is.
22:09 legit and worth their time to come to. So like, there’s a lot of that initial planning where you get these big details figured out and then you say, okay, great. This is a go. Let’s sign the contract. Let’s, you know, if you’ve got a keynote speaker or two lined up, great, that sort of thing. And then you can, then you do the math on the ticket prices and with ticket prices,
22:37 You, you can look around and say, what do people pay for events now? You know, how many days is it? You could do a one day event, which is great. If you’re expecting mostly local people at one day event might be a little bit harder to convince someone to travel for. just, know, but you never know. Someone might be willing, especially if you’re in a great place that they would like to visit, then, then that’s fine. And you can, uh, sort of coordinate, um, sort of fun activities around the event with.
23:05 with people to come in. Yeah, yeah.
23:12 What was your…
23:17 I guess, well, no, I think I’m gonna…
23:22 Jump to a different one. Did you have sponsors for your first conference and how did you get sponsors when you didn’t have reputation or audience that can pull sponsors like that?
23:42 Well, um, in my case, I, I already had relationships because I did not West and I was known in the local community because I’ve been running Boulder Ruby for, you know, four years at that point. So I already knew some local companies. like Pivotal Labs, Labs, they had hosted us in Boulder Ruby. So I had like a short list of four or five local companies, tech companies.
24:12 that would be willing to sponsor. it doesn’t take a lot. You could be like, Hey, $2,000, $5,000. Like, you know, we’re not talking massive amounts of money. And oftentimes, especially companies with a local presence, once they see your plan and like, like with Ruby events, they know that Ruby events have been successful. So part of it is like, what’s your local population? Like, do you have a regular.
24:40 a number of Rubyists or whoever who are attending meetups or whatever that you could start to talk up this event and get them to tell their friends and their peers. You could find maybe a few local companies that would love to send their engineering team to the event. You can do all that ahead of time. As you start to build that up, one, that’s the natural thing for them to become sponsors.
25:10 I I think Spike’s first year of doing Rocky Mountain Ruby, he didn’t have that many sponsors, but he also, when he did his financing, he didn’t count on those sponsors. So again, that was a nice to have enabled upgrades at the event. Yeah. Okay. Um,
25:37 All right, let’s, we got about five minutes left here. What is, can you think of like a small thing that you did that maybe had an outsized or unexpected impact on a conference? Maybe something that you didn’t really think about it when you did it, but afterwards people came up to you and like mentioned it, raved about it.
26:01 I mean, one of the things that I did that I was surprised by how well it did was the guides and scholars program. Okay. Yeah. And that really, you know, blew up in ways that were just delightful. And it’s that concept of like pairing people who are new, who are maybe intimidated by the event with people who are nice and can
26:31 guide them along, help them answer their questions, be a familiar face in the crowd. And also the cohort model with that was pretty fantastic. you know, these newer folks could band together and then they’d had this great, you know, they made a friend and now it’s less intimidating because they did that. So that was something that I didn’t expect to have as much impact as it did. But I will say on that note,
27:00 I was always willing to experiment and try new things. And so there are things that I tried that didn’t go so well or just didn’t do amazing. And there’s other things that were fantastic. And I was always willing to experiment and try things out. Okay. Do you have a favorite conference and why?
27:25 Um.
27:28 I mean, I don’t know if I have a favorite. Certainly, was an event called Aloha and Rails back in Hawaii that was pretty special. was, I spoke at that event and it was in Hawaii and the people were great. That was kind of at the height of hype and excitement in 2009. That was pretty fantastic. I also love the design and sort of how they really brought out.
27:58 Hawaii in everything with the event. I enjoyed New Orleans 2010 really stood out for me, RubyConf. Is that again because of like the local piece, like how it tied it into where it was? mean, yeah, definitely. think that the events that really stood out, it was a new
28:25 a number of factors for me. One, it was like the location and what it brought to the event, but also like what was happening, you know, in the program, in the hallway track, sort of like things that sort of happened after the event, the, you know, the hanging out with folks. The 2010 there’s still, there’s a pretty heavy drinking culture. that was.
28:51 maybe a little excessive, of course we’re in Orleans, so I guess maybe that’s on fire. But it was just a lot of fun. think there was just, it was that connection to people. Usually that’s for me, the conferences that make the most impact are that connection to people. And so I think that’s important. There’s a book by the way, if you like reading called The Art of Gathering by Rhea Parker.
29:18 And this really talks about sort of the intentions of when you’re putting together event, what you want the experience to be and why, and how you go about being intentional with, the logistics of an event to really have that impact. And I think that’s something that as a smaller event, you have more control over. Yeah. Or options, know? Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I would definitely check out that book. Um,
29:49 Okay, just one or two more. Is there anything that you’re, I guess, besides guides and scholars, like a cool thing that you’ve done at your conference that, or at a conference that you’ve helped organize that you’re especially proud of?
30:13 not sure what I would say to that. think that paying attention to…
30:24 giving people space to talk and food and drink is that’s a magical combo that like how the room is laid out, how food and drink is handled and sort of like, you know, enabling conversation and gathering. think that’s always, those are fantastic things to think about at your event and how you can pull that in. And the thing is,
30:53 Once you set the space, just happens. Magic happens. So, and that’s true of a lot of events really is you, it’s all the prep that goes into it and then things just happen when, when people get together. So, don’t know that’s a great answer, that’s- No, no, I like that. I like that. Okay. Last question. Um, who should I talk to next? Uh, specifically organizers, I guess people that- Yeah. I like, I think Spike.
31:21 Lackwa at Rocky Mountain Ruby is a great person to talk to. Okay. Because he’s, he’s doing it. He’s been, he’s dealing with all these things and it’d be a similar size. Um, there, think there’s a channel in the, um, Ruby central community Slack for, for event organizers. I’ll have to look to see if that’s true.
31:50 Remember we have one for an organizer, it was just meetup organizers, but that Slack has all those organizers are there. And so even if there isn’t a channel dedicated to it, I’m sure there’s a, you could just post in the social random channel. the, that’s where I would seek them out because there’s plenty of their organizers that have done this lately at this size there.
32:20 You should. Awesome, I will do that. All right. Thank you so much for your time, Marty. Yeah, it great talking to you. Good luck. Thank you. You’re all about it. Let me know. I am doing a whole kind of blog on the process of organizing it. I haven’t started it yet, but that’s also part of my marketing plan is that maybe if I can kind of document this process and show it to people.
32:46 that will also interest them in coming to see it because it’s the whole story of how it came together and then you want to be there because you saw it come together. Yeah, definitely. Networking is fantastic. You should always network. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I’ll send that to you when I get that up. again, thank you and we’ll be in touch. Sounds good. All All right. Take care.