Vasil Azarov

We started the community startup socials where we organized startup mixers for founders here in Silicon Valley.

That's how we build the network.

That's how we got to know a lot of people.

But I think it's about the right position in growth hacking and growth marketing overall started to become

And at the same time, knowing a lot of speakers in the space, I've been doing events for the last 12 years, helped me to bring some very talented speakers and drive the attendance.

Oh, it's been a long time ago, but I would say I think it was about $150,000 or something like that.

It's always food and venue rental.

So one of the things that you always should try to negotiate if you work with a hotel to make sure you pay zero for your room rental and cover everything for maybe a slightly higher food and beverage minimum.

to rent.

Plus you have to spend $50,000 on food and drinks.

You tell them instead, first of all, you negotiate every single thing, but then tell them that I would rather spend if they would be really strict on, you know, rental and food and beverage.

I would rather spend 60,000 on food and beverage and give me the space for free.

And they usually would do that.

Well, that's how they make most of their money overall.

So they would rather, because they charge ridiculous prices on food and drinks, for example, a meal

for attendee at the Fairmont Hotel, they would probably charge you something like $150 for a plate, right?

So they make crazy margins on it.

So for them, sometimes it makes sense to do it that way.

I think we started at about 200, $300 and, um, all the way up to $600, something along those lines.

Yeah.