SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1579 Growth Marketing Conf SF Dec 10th Breaks $1.5m in Revenues
20 Nov 2019
Chapter 1: Who is Vasil Azarov and what is his background?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Vasil Azarov. He's a growth marketing and startup event entrepreneur. He's produced over 500 in-person and virtual events, as well as built a network of 100,000 top tech entrepreneurs and marketers. He's the founder of Growth Marketing Conference, one of the leading growth marketing events in the industry. Vasil, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, I'm ready.
Let's do it. So I have to, I just go right to the chase. Conferences are very difficult. You and I both have a lot of friends that run conferences. Some of them make a lot of money. Some of them are burning money like you wouldn't believe.
Give me a general sense of how long Growth Marketing Conference has been around and why get into a space where there's a lot of unprofitable conferences in the first place.
Sure. So Growth Marketing Conference has been around for four years. We actually started as a startup marketing conference and as a community of entrepreneurs and founders. And eventually when we changed the main name to Growth Marketing Conference, then when we start seeing success, attracting larger companies, product growth marketing managers from companies like Adobe, Google.
And then this is the first year when the conference actually became profitable. I personally wouldn't recommend anyone to start The conference of the bat, unless you're really passionate about it and you're really thinking about it long term.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do conferences face in profitability?
For me, it's bringing people together, connecting people and running events and something that I would do without getting paid. That's why I'm still in business.
So this year, meaning the event coming up here in December 10th and 11th in San Francisco, that will be your first profitable growth marketing conference since 2015. Yeah.
Oh, no. So we've always been profitable. So, yeah, in 2015, it was our first profitable event. Startup Marketing Conference was the one that was not very profitable.
Chapter 3: How did the Growth Marketing Conference evolve over the years?
But this year is the first time when we will collect more or less sizable profit. Previously, we were investing every profit, every dollar that we made into the future development of the event.
I see. Okay. So 2015 through 2018, basically I'll break even all those years.
Pretty much.
Okay. And then give me some other texts. You know, people are always thinking, shouldn't, you know, they're running a SaaS company. They have a large list of users. They're going, should I launch a user conference like HubSpot inbound? And then they go, well, what should I, how should I price it? How do I do logistics? All that. Give me your breakdown in terms of attendees.
And then we'll go into some other metrics. So do you remember in 2015, how many folks you had?
We had about 400 people.
Okay. I mean, that's impressive for a first year event. How'd you get 400 people to show up?
Well, so our first one was actually a startup marketing conference back in 2014. We had about 300 people. So and originally you met some of a few of my partners. 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.
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Chapter 4: What strategies led to the first profitable Growth Marketing Conference?
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.
that is very simple advice for a new organizer so what does that mean so let's let's use the 150 grand in 2014 you're saying with the hotel sometimes they'll want you to pre-pay for like 50 rooms and you're saying don't do that instead offer to pay a little bit more on the guaranteed food income for the hotel don't ever prepay for the rooms they sometimes they would want to charge you for the space just the rental space so they would say they
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.
Oh, interesting. Okay. Very interesting. And why do they do that economically? Why does that work for them?
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.
Interesting. Okay, so going back to 2014, 150 grand all in expenses, mainly food and venue, 300 attendees, what'd you charge ticket price wise back then?
I think we started at about 200, $300 and, um, all the way up to $600, something along those lines.
Got it. Okay. So you had about 300 brands paying again, or sorry, 300 startups paying 300 bucks. It's like 90 grand there, some paying 600. So you get to about break even. Is that right?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. So one of the things when you start an event, you would have to give away a lot of tickets for free. So that's just the nature of it. Um,
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Chapter 5: How did attendee numbers grow from 2014 to 2019?
Uh, I think we're, so I don't want to give you completely incorrect numbers. I know this is, I think we were at about six to 700. Okay. So every single year, pretty much. Um, and we've been consistently growing, uh, around 25%, um,
revenue and attendees yeah um year after year i think this is the first year when we made slightly larger leap yeah uh and became hopefully more profitable because it's still one month and a half until the event yeah and this is something so i'm actually having a team meeting right now to make sure that everybody's excited to take us to the finish line how many people are on your team uh we have uh
12 people right now, but only four of them full-time. Okay.
So how do you, I mean, that's something else, right? So you have four full-time people. What are their job titles?
So Ala is our head of operations. She's pretty much a Swiss army knife. She does everything. She's amazing. She works on partnerships. Yeah, I know you work with her. So then we have Stephanie, who has worked with us part-time. Well, she's not full-time, but she's an integral part of the team because she's been with us from the very beginning.
She just focuses on one conference, speaker onboarding, sponsor onboarding. We have a full-time marketing manager who's really heavy on automation data.
Is that marketing manager, are they a developer that do things like they're able to scrape very effectively, or are they more like a marketing person that knows PPC?
Yeah.
So our marketing manager is very strong on email and automation and creating workflows. She's very detailed, oriented and technical, so she can work with any developer. And she also works with agencies that manage our PPC campaigns and Facebook campaigns.
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Chapter 6: What pricing strategies were effective for ticket sales?
I mean, that obviously works. OK, good. So so 600 up to 600 attendees in 2016. When did the sponsor revenue really start getting closer to 50 50 with ticket revenue? Like what was the key there?
I think the key is just being around for at least four years because sponsors often ask, how long have you been around? Making sure that they understand the quality of our audience. Some of them prefer to send a few people to the event first to experience the conference, to meet attendees. So I think also rebranding helped quite a bit. It repositioned us to the next level.
So this is the first year when it's going to be around 50-50 split. And previously it was about, I want to say 60, 40, 70, 30. So we were just ramping it up year after year.
Now, I still want to put you under a little pressure here for a second because maybe congratulations are in order. Will this 2019 event be your first million dollar event? Top line revenue, ticket sales plus sponsor revenue?
Yes. Actually, no. Well, last year we did hit a million, I think. This year it will be anywhere between 1.3 to 1.5, hopefully.
That's great. And so 50% of that are about $600,000, $700,000. It's coming from sponsors. Do you take the approach of a lot of sponsors paying a little or few sponsors paying, you know, $100,000?
Yeah. It's a split because with some of the sponsors, we structure very comprehensive partnerships when we help promote their brand to our entire community throughout the year. So I think the majority comes from our, you know, sponsorship, medium tier sponsorship that we sell, depending on if you get it a little bit early in the year, it could be anywhere between 18 to 25 grand.
Yeah. And Stephanie's handling all that.
She's handling, actually, we do have one other team member, very important team member who's in charge of partner marketing and customer success okay so she works very closely with the sponsors and stephanie takes care of all the logistics but she makes sure that sponsors are getting the right talking to the right people
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