#312: Everything We Learned From Our Second In-Person Event — The Good, The Bad, and The Full Economics

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2:09Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. We have a special episode today because we have a very special guest joining us on the show. And that is my wife, my partner, the mother of my children or child soon to be children, Mal. Hello. Hello. Second ever podcast. Yes. Had to be talked into doing this. Yes. Not super stoked about it, but it's going to be great. And she's going to have so much fun that she's going to want to come back. Today, we are talking about The Lab Offline, powered by Circle, our second in-person offline event, which we hosted June 8th and 9th in Boise, Idaho.

2:49If you're wondering why Boise, Idaho, it's because we did it on the front end of Kit's Craft and Commerce Conference, which happens in Boise because Kit is based in Boise. So we did our offline event two days, Monday and Tuesday, June 8th and 9th. We had a Creator Science audience meetup on June 10th, that Wednesday, and then Craft and Commerce technically runs June 10th through the 13th, but really is the 11th and 12th. This is our second year running this in Boise. And we wanted to run a full breakdown of what we learned, what that experience was like, what we're going to take forward into next year, and what we would do differently next year.

3:26So we have a lot of things I want to get through. I'm going to run you through our agenda. I'm going to run you through our initial impressions that we had after the event. We'll talk about the economics of the event. We'll get to some attendee feedback, the qualitative and quantitative feedback. We'll talk about the planning experience and some of the challenges we had in planning, things that we're definitely going to keep, things we want to improve, things we might test, open questions that we haven't solved yet, and priorities for 2027. So we have a lot of things to cover. This year, our event was sponsored by Circle, which we're very grateful for, because if not, we would have lost a lot more money than we did.

4:03We'll talk about that in the economics section. But just to kind of level set and tell you what the point of this event is, why we do these events in general, we look at our offline events and we have a few goals. Number one, I think of it as kind of a mid-year reset. This happens in June, so it's right in the middle of the year. It's a good time to look at the past six months. Think about the coming six months. I also hope that people who attend leave the event with some new ideas to try, things that they might not have considered before that they realized, oh, that could work for me, and they want to go put that into action.

4:42I hope there is a clear ROI from this. Goal number three is making some new friends. And goal number four is to leave feeling more in love with your business than when you came. We also think about these events as what can we do offline, meaning in person, that is uniquely better than if we were to do this online? What can we do in person that we can't do online? Because there's no point in doing things in person that we can do online since we're online all the time. And lastly, as kind of a level setting, we think about our offline events as a member benefit to the lab. So it's much more about retention and giving people some optionality for how to engage with the membership and engage with each other, rather than thinking that this event is going to be the thing that sells people on joining the lab.

5:33Although I think maybe increasingly there's some validity to that, but that's not the core goal of the event. So the agenda, to give you a sense of what these days look like. We run this on Monday and Tuesday, but we start early Monday morning. So our advice to attendees is to actually fly in on Sunday. We host this at a hotel in Boise called Hotel Renegade. It's a boutique hotel, which is fantastic. Our audience loves it. It's been consistently rated extremely highly, which we'll talk about in the feedback section. We ask people to fly in on Sunday evening. This year, folks coming in self-organized a dinner on Sunday evening.

6:15We kick things off Monday morning at 8 a.m. where we have the first hour for breakfast. We have a morning session. This year on Monday morning, we did a mid-year review, and then we had a facilitated workshop by Kat Mulvihill running us through the immunity to change framework. Then we had lunch at noon. After lunch, we had an activity called Fighting Off the Sleepies with Marlo. We have a world champion pole dancer and movement coach. Her name is Marlo Fiskin. She's fantastic. And every day after lunch, she helped us move our bodies and fight off the sleepies. In the afternoon on Monday, we did this group discussion where basically our group discussions, I would raise a topic for conversation.

6:56I would ask a question and I would run the microphone around the room to everyone. And we'd have like a single group discussion on a topic, all 40 of us. We took a break in the afternoon around three o 'clock. We had an optional afternoon activity around four and then dinner at six. That format is very similar on Tuesday, but the big difference is on Tuesday morning, we spend pretty much the whole morning doing group masterminds at your table. That ended up being the highest rated part of the event for two years in a row. We had lunch, we did fighting off the sleepies, and then we had more group discussions in the afternoon.

7:34Questions like what's working for you right now with memberships? What's working for you right now with sponsorship? What's working for you right now with selling programs or services? Then we had kind of a final remarks. We had a happy hour and then dinner at 6.30 on Tuesday. Wednesday, we had an optional morning hike. And then our Creator Science meet up in the afternoon around four o 'clock. That is the format. That's the template. It's not super heavy because we really want to create as much space and excuse as possible for people to have conversations with each other. So every little block inside of those large blocks I just shared is designed to get you talking to people either at your immediate table, around you, or with the group as a whole.

8:21So those are the goals. That's the agenda. I thought this year went very well. Let's talk about our initial impressions from the event. Now, how did you feel during, after the event? So before the event, I was nervous. I feel like that every year, only because I feel like so much of the event's success is based on the work that I've done. Like, I feel like a lot of it falls on me, which I'm sure you feel the same way. No, I don't feel the same way because I should have mentioned this in the intro. Like, this was your baby. You spent, I mean, you could make an argument, like as much as six months planning this yeah i mean i don't know i feel nerves around the logistics of it so that's kind of how i felt going into it we also had like just an awful day of travel and leading up to it like our plan was to get there on sunday at 2 p.m and we did not get there until like 9 30 or 10 due to just like some airline delays and stuff so which a lot of people had a lot of people this year had airline delays yeah it was it was actually very nerve-wracking because i don't know the state of air travel right now is just like crazy and we have our whatsapp group chat with all of the attendees in it and it just felt like 80 of people were having delays or Their flights were being grounded.

9:58And it was like, oh my God, is anybody going to make it tomorrow? And we're starting at 8 a.m. the next day. All I kept thinking is like, so long as we make it to Boise by like 5 a.m., even if we don't sleep, it should be good. But my God, I was exhausted and I'm pregnant and I was very sick on the plane. Would you rather have this year's travel delays or last year's loss of luggage?

10:28Oh, that's tough. Honestly, the travel delays, like so long as we got there on time still, I'd rather the travel delays than losing all of our materials. I tried to think ahead a little bit more this year and I sent everything to the hotel. So I knew all the materials were there, but I was like, what are we going to do if we don't make it there? So that was super stressful. so we got in at like 10 o 'clock that night and I like did not sleep leading up to it because I was so nervous but yeah when we got access to the room and got everything set up I immediately felt so much better I'm like okay we're here people are showing up and it was great and we all had already been chatting in the whatsapp with each other so everybody was kind of aware of everyone else's travel situations.

11:17So like we knew who to approach with like a sympathetic, you know, hello and who like had a great time coming in and whatever, but it was amazing. I felt better immediately after seeing, I think the first person I saw, I think was Josh Summers. And I was just like, ah, a friend. Like it just felt good. Cause I, I don't know. It was like, okay, it's really happening. People are coming and people are getting here. So yeah. Poor Martin, he was coming from Uruguay and he had a 23 hour delay. So he missed like the full first day, which is a bummer. But the note I had from the experience this year is I felt a lot more at ease this year than last year.

11:59Again, like you're doing most of the run of show. So I was comfortable because we had a full year under our belt of you doing that and running the run of show. And we brought my mom along for the second year in a row. So she's watching Nora and babysitting her. So we really could put our full time and attention to this for two days. So that was nice. Last year, opening up the space and setting things up, we didn't get in as early as we would like. And we kind of ran up against breakfast and getting like the table settings and everything ready. And we're really nervous about that this year. But this year, we got all that set up.

12:35We had a better process and got all that set up in like 20 minutes, I felt. Yeah, we just had, well, we made some of the hotel staff come in like an hour before their actual start time. which I felt bad about, but I was like, listen, we need all the time we can get. And then we ended up getting everything set up in like 20 minutes. And it turns out we didn't even need them to be there that early. And so when we were done, they were just standing around and I was like, oops, sorry. But like, I felt better having it all set up and being ready before people started showing up. So that was nice. I remember this pivotal moment of when people were coming in when I saw Tanya and Charlotte come in and hug each other.

13:20And I was just like, that moment. I was like, okay, you know what? If everything sucks, people are still experiencing that. Yeah. This year felt a lot more like a reunion, even though it was year two. I don't have the exact number on this, but I looked at this earlier. I know it was roughly 50 % of this year's attendees were repeats. So this year we had 41 attendees, not including you and I. Last year we had 39. And I believe about 20 of this year's attendees came last year as well. So it felt like a reunion, even though we had half these people were new, but everything felt like the event itself felt like it went as smoothly as it could have gone.

14:03I was actually kind of uncomfortable at the end of day two going into Wednesday because I felt like I had not gotten really any feedback. I was like, does this go well? I haven't gotten any constructive feedback. Like nothing has failed or we haven't had any like fires to put out, you know, and we had a couple of those last year. So I was just like, is this going really well or am I just, is nobody comfortable telling me what's wrong? Which is so crazy because I feel like I had, I don't think there was like a single person there that didn't walk up to me at one point and just be like, this is amazing.

14:41Thank you so much. So I love that no one said anything to you, but they were all coming to me. So I felt good about that. Yeah. So I'll give one quick attendee feedback number, and then I'm going to get the economics and we'll get into all the attendee feedback. So the overall experience rating this year was 9.3 out of 10 on average, and last year it was 9.4. but nobody who came this year and came last year said that last year was better everybody who came both years rated this year as better so i would say that we continue to improve the event and here's what you'll like what was our biggest point of feedback last year on the event that we needed to improve the food the breakfast specifically yes so i have numbers okay last Last year's breakfast rating out of 10 was 4.8 on average.

15:37So upsetting. This year was 8.1. Woo! So huge improvement in breakfast. We did it. We improved breakfast. Yeah. And lunches and dinners improved from 7.1 to 8.5 and 7.8 to 8.8. So big improvements on all food across the board. We did get a lot of feedback on the food though, which we can talk about here in a minute. something that we can learn from on that. Okay. Well, I guess since I'm going down the numbers, I'll go down through some more numbers. Our hotel was rated 9.5 last year, was rated 9.5 this year as well. Makes sense. Same hotel. 100 % of people said they met somebody new. 91 % of people said they are very likely to come to the next event.

16:22So nine out of 10. 89 % of people said offline is very important to my membership. That's up from 80 % last year. 34 % said that the ticket price was underpriced. And last year, only 13 % said that and tickets were priced higher this year. Yeah, that's so that's telling the experience is better and worth it. And we had 74 % of people report that they are open to traveling internationally for the offline event, which was up 17 % over last year. We had attendees rank their favorite aspects of the offline event this year. Number one, and it wasn't particularly close, was the small group masterminds that we did on Tuesday morning.

17:12That was last year's most popular event as well. Number two, do you want to guess what number two was? No. Okay. Number two was Kat's Immunity to Change Workshop. Oh, I actually knew that. I knew that. That was very highly rated. Number three were the group-wide discussion topics that we did at the end of day one and the end of day two. Number four was Marlo's Fight Off the Sleepies. I'm not surprised. Very popular. It was in eight people's top three, but it seems like it was pretty anchored in top four. Number five was the individual writing exercises that I led and facilitated, but those are very polarizing.

17:56Number six was the group dinners, which was a, I think a pretty big drop from last year. We'll talk about the dinners and what we learned about that experience. Number seven was our trivia activity, which I loved. This was honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole event. It was my favorite part, hands down. Okay. So we're going to talk about it. We On Monday, we rented out a brewery before dinner, and you found an independent trivia company. Yeah. To come in and run trivia for us. Yes. And the host was like, so funny, so personable. So funny, so nice. Everybody's talking. Yeah. It was super fun, and I love that we did it on the first day because, well, we didn't choose the teams beforehand either.

18:40So everybody was just kind of like, all right, go ahead and self-form these groups. And everybody did such a great job. It happened so fast. It really did. And like, it was super cool to see who was choosing who for the table. First of all, we were all fighting over one person. We all wanted Tom on our team because he's a screenplay writer. We also wanted Liz because she's a big history buff. She's a historian. Yeah. It's like, what? so we were all fighting over a couple people but everybody like formed these groups and had so much fun it was super fun it was a really good way to like kind of throw everybody into a situation where you're like forced to talk you're gonna be laughing like it was awesome yeah i thought it's a perfect activity because there's just a little bit of structure where everyone's like focused and then there would be downtime and music and drinks and our final question for trivia was a custom round that we put together where we had 10 unique facts that you would match to 10 members of the lab, all of which were at offline.

19:45So it was like, here are 10 unique and obscure facts. Like you wouldn't easily know that Rose Griffin is an incredible harp player, but that was one of the facts to match or that Chad Carson has helped create dozens of miles of walking paths in South Carolina. So that was really fun, but it was rated 7th on the 9th. The trivia? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, that's a bummer. I loved it. I loved it as well. And then we had guest speaker Nathan from Kitcom. That was 8. And Wednesday Hike was 9. Something had to be 8 and 9, and those were the things. Yeah. So that's the quantitative feedback. I'll hit some quick economics.

20:34numbers, and then we'll take a little bit of a short break and get into some of the things that we learned from this year and that we would change and do differently. So from an economic standpoint, last year we had 39 attendees, six of which came from outside the U.S. I took note of that because I had a sense that fewer people traveled into the U.S. from international this year than last year, which is technically true, but not to the degree that I thought. But we did get a lot of feedback from international folks, meaning non-US folks in the lab who just do not feel comfortable or interested in flying to the US right now.

21:10So we had 39 attendees last year, six non-US, 41 this year, four non-US. So what is that like a 33 % decrease? Last year with ticket sales, tickets were priced at$399 and revenue last year was about$16 ,760. Costs last year were$25 ,950. $103. So we lost$9 ,000 on the event last year. And that includes, we had a photographer and a videographer. So we created a video asset that was a big cost last year. And we are also capturing our travel costs in this. So flights for me, Mel, Nora, and my mom, hotel rooms, two hotel rooms for each of us for a full week. Those are large costs. Rental car. And rental car is captured in that as well.

22:03So those costs are pretty high. So last year we lost$9 ,100. This year, we increased the ticket price to$499 across the board. And revenue went from$16 ,760 to$30 ,459. Our costs climbed from$25 ,900 to$38 ,800. And so this year we lost$8 ,300. So we lost less. Hey, it's less. We lost less. We brought in$14 ,000 more. We increased our costs, 13 ,000. So we lost$1 ,000 less. And I'm going to guess that the two biggest factors. I have it right in front of me. Go ahead and guess. The food and the venue. We spent far more on the venue this year and far more on the food this year. The hotel rental fee was increased.

23:04I forget the number. I think we paid 40 % higher rate for the hotel room this year, which is a function of picking a bigger room in the space. That's the biggest one. But also they raised the rates on all rooms. So when we put out the ticket price and did our initial math. It was based on last year's room prices. It was based on last year's room prices, which we knew it would be more expensive, but we didn't realize it was also increased from last year's rates. Right. So hotel rental itself was our third largest cost driver. Our second largest cost driver was our travel. So our travel that I mentioned was$7 ,000, including room, flights, rental car.

23:50Yikes. we stayed a couple days longer too this year than we did last year nope no same number of days six nights okay or actually it might have been five nights six days but yeah same number of days because we're staying we get in on sunday we fly out on saturday we did that both why was our travel cost so much was it the rebookings no actually we haven't captured that i don't think we captured that so i think i think i'm still fighting with american airlines i know those rebookings were about$200 a person. So I think it was like 600 bucks additional. Well, that wasn't captured. So second largest cost driver was our travel.

24:28If we take that out, we just about break even depending on how we want to account for this event. But I think we should keep that in because it's real costs for us doing this. Number one cost driver was the hotel breakfasts and lunches, which is outside the hotel rental fee. Yeah. Which we increased. I don't have the breakdown of last year's specific line items, cost drivers, but our big priority this year was better breakfast. We need protein at breakfast and lunches. And we wanted the food to be good. We really wanted the food to be good. And the food was, as we can see, marked by data, much better.

25:05So hotel lunches and breakfasts were$8 ,500. Our travel was about$7 ,000. Hotel rental alone was about$6 ,400. dollars and again this is for two days our tuesday dinner was the fourth most expensive thing we rented out a space in the lively that was about six thousand dollars monday's dinner was forty five hundred dollars which was the fifth largest and then our hoodie order our hoodie and sticker order was about thirty nine hundred and then everything else was kind of a rounding error like our audience meetup was behind that our trivia activity was 845 dollars and our print materials were 550 so if we were going to cut anywhere probably actually need to cut back on breakfast and lunch which is like it's so tough because right i tried to do that the first year and it was rated very poorly, which I mean, I totally agree with the rating, but it's just like hotel catering is so expensive.

26:13I remember the first day we were getting ready for breakfast and we were like, okay, we need to absolutely nail this breakfast. Like we are, this is the comeback tour of breakfast for us. And so we did it up with the omelet bar and all the works. And someone from the catering department came up to me and they're like, hey, hey, did you want this coffee refreshed throughout the day? And we're like, oh yeah, totally. We need coffee throughout the day. I had no idea that was going to cost$860. Pretty crazy. I don't know how they justify$800 for caroffs of coffee and tea. Obviously, you can't bring in outside beverages.

26:51I could have gotten everyone their own personal specialty latte drink from the cafe downstairs with their name on it. and exactly how they wanted it for less than$860. So it's just stuff like that that is like, it's super hard. How do you scale it back without making it disappointing? Yeah, pretty tough. The five top cost drivers are where we would trim back and it's breakfast and lunch from hotel catering, our travel costs, which is dependent on the city we're traveling to and the venue we're hosting in, hotel rental. so these are three things that are all related to the cost of the hotel and then tuesday dinner monday dinner i don't think that the tuesday or monday dinner costs are inappropriate we went pretty all out it was like both multi-course prefix menus which was delicious i mean the food was great day tuesday dinner food was incredible amazing so i don't want to scale back on all these areas but uh and we don't have to necessarily either like we could try to find the break even in economics other ways, but these are the levers that we would pull.

28:01We're going to take a quick break for our sponsors and we're going to make our dinner order on DoorDash. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the planning challenges we had and then the lessons we learned from this event. Things we want to keep, things we want to improve, things we want to test, open-ended questions and what we're going to do in 2027. So stick around. We'll be right back.

28:23As we approach the holiday season, it's time to start thinking about your Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaigns. I know it sounds early, but for years, I ignored this time of year because I thought it was for e-commerce and not for content businesses like mine. But then I ran a campaign in 2024. And do you know what happened? Not only was it my best month of revenue for the year, but it was my best month of revenue ever, nearly$98 ,000. I'm now convinced that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a huge opportunity for creators like you and me, and we run a sprint in the lab every year because of it.

28:57We're about to reopen the lab to new members on our waitlist. If you're a full-time creator earning more than$100 ,000 per year or on pace to earn$100 ,000 this year, I invite you to join us. Head to creatorscience.com slash lab to get on our waitlist, we'll invite new members on October 1st, which is the perfect time to join our Black Friday sprint. That's creatorscience.com slash lab. You'll be glad you did. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra, Palmolive's most powerful formula, removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

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30:19And we're back. Okay, so you had on your list that you want to talk about planning challenges. The biggest challenge of planning an event in a state that you do not live in is not being able to view venues in person. I had to do multiple FaceTime calls with the restaurant managers to see the space. I have to think through, okay, will 50 people fit in here comfortably while I'm looking at a phone? It's like really hard. whereas if you're planning in person obviously I would just pop in and see for myself so that was super tough another thing that's always really hard I mean I'm even dealing with this right now just planning our daughter's second birthday party but dietary restrictions super tough thing to work around which a lot of it falls on the restaurants of course but when you're making menu selections for 49 50 people you have to take into account every dietary restriction that every person has.

31:25And you don't want to make the mistake of leaving someone with nothing to eat. And on the venue front, one of the things that obviously we learned was challenging about our dinner venues was that the acoustics in both were not ideal. Yeah. And that's also not something that you can really anticipate through looking at a tour on a phone. Right. So night two, dinner was very, very loud. I don't remember night one being as bad, but it was very loud night two. And I'm hard of hearing as it is. And so I was struggling. And I was at a table away from most of the group, but not something we could have anticipated without going in person and also going when the restaurant is completely full.

32:19Right. Because it's not even just being there in person. It's like, how do we simulate what this is going to be like when there are 40 people who are all animated and excited? Tom Vaughn actually had a really great point about this. He was like, well, because the acoustics Tuesday evening were so bad, it narrowed the scope to who you could talk to, to like the person right next to you or across from you. Yes. Which means you're actually having more conversations across the table, which means more people are talking over one another. If it's quieter, you can have like four to six people participating in one conversation, but when it's too loud and it shortens it, you have more overlapping conversations.

33:00Totally. So I don't know how screen for that i don't know and it's a lot of the venues that we choose are like cool and trendy and we don't want it to feel stuffy and they have high ceilings and exposed beams and lots of woodwork and part of that is bad acoustics so i'm not sure what we do there maybe we'll bring our own sound blankets um that was a joke i think it's i was i was looking at my notes it's not that it wasn't funny babe um did you have other planning challenges that you wanted to bring up okay i just want to like read a couple things from my notes serving different types of attendees because i have been both people at a conference i've been someone that has walked into the room know nobody there and been nervous and you know quiet not really wanting to like involve myself or not finding my group of people right away.

34:01And then you have people who are like super outgoing and know everybody. So designing kind of these connections to make it feel more natural for people to fit right in was something that was important to me this year. I wouldn't say it was like a challenge so much, but it's just something I'm thinking about all the time. Because the last thing you want is someone walking in and feeling like alone in a crowded room. But again, I think that this year, honestly, I think about it so much because the first year that was me. I feel like, you know, you knew everybody in the community a lot more than I did.

34:35And I had really just started working in the business and in the community. So I didn't really know anyone. But like you said, the second year was like a reunion experience. And so I felt a lot better, but I didn't want any of the newcomers this year to feel that way. And so that's why, like we made the strategic decision to do trivia on night one and like the assigned seating at dinners, which I didn't think was going to go over as well as it did. People loved that. So the first night we had assigned seating, everybody came in, found their name tag and sat down and Jay chose all of those specifically based on who he thought would like connect with one another the best.

35:15And day two, I had people coming up to me asking, are we going to have assigned seating at dinner tonight. And I'm like, Oh God, why are you asking? Like, was it horrible? Like, did you not like being forced into these conversations? And they're like, no, I loved it. And like, are they the same? Like, are the assigned seats the same? And they were different night two. And they were excited about that because it like forces them to get to know other people that are just in your vicinity. But just designing that connection is something that I keep in mind a lot. We did get some feedback in the survey that some of the folks who are more on the introverted side of the spectrum felt like, well, like the big group discussions, for example, I saw a note where they felt like that format appealed more or accommodated better to extroverts who are comfortable presenting an idea in front of the entire space.

36:08I could see that. So I could see that too. The hard thing is like, there are 40 people here. And if we're talking about these different ideas, many of which I knew are going to be new to others. If I force those conversations into small groups, you just lose the aperture of what you get exposed to. Yeah. So there's always just a give and take with the same thing with assigned seats. I love the assigned seats that we do. I put together seating charts for our like in venue time, day one and day two, They were different day one to day two. Day two is the mastermind day. So I thought about those seating charts as like, what is the best groups of masterminds that I can put together?

36:53Dinner on night one was different than your seating on day one. But I also tried to put someone near you that had been at your table. So there was always like somebody near you that was a safety blanket. There is kind of a limit to how many times you can shuffle that deck and have it be meaningful before it starts to get kind of random. Yeah. But I think we towed that line well. Seeding charts were obviously perceived well. People said that's definitely something to keep. I think having some times where you don't have that is good because if you opened a loop earlier in the day and you want to meet and talk with that person, well, great.

37:28Maybe they're on your trivia team and you can talk about that in between rounds. Yeah. So that was on my list of things to keep, which was the next section after planning challenges was things to keep. I have more challenges. Oh, more challenges. Okay, sorry. More challenges. Sorry. I just looked at my notes again. kind of circling back to a lot of what we said is just every single decision that we made every decision is a trade-off and so that's also really tough to think through and anticipate if we have better food it's harder to keep the tickets more affordable yep the better the venue the harder it is to keep tickets affordable if we have more guest speakers which sometimes people like and sometimes they don't.

38:10That's like taking away from peer interaction. So every decision you try to think through is a trade-off and it's tough. But the biggest challenge every year, no matter what, no matter what event you're planning, is budget constraints. And this year, because thankfully we had our awesome sponsor, Circle, we had a little bit more of a budget to work with, which was so great. But I think I went a little too hard with everything else. Yeah, we probably. We should have maybe kept the tickets, the price that we had originally offered them. So I don't know if we have talked about that yet. We had originally planned that tickets were going to be$4.99 on early bird and then$6.99 afterwards.

38:59We went out early, we went on a month earlier this year to make tickets available. I I think we started selling tickets in March this year. So we were a month ahead of last year. And I think we had that March ticket price available until the end of, I want to say, April. Yeah, April 15th or something. And then we were going to move to$6.99. When we got the sponsorship from Circle, I said, let's just keep the prices for everybody$4.99. And we even went back and refunded a couple of folks who paid$6.99 the difference. but that's hard for me because I want to get as many people there as possible because I look at this as like a huge member benefit.

39:37Absolutely. And so if I can charge cheaper ticket prices, I want to do that, but I also want it to be a great experience and I also want great food. So it's, it's definitely a hard balance. And part of what we have to consider here is the cost of travel beyond just the ticket price. Cause the ticket price pays for all of your meals, but you still have to book your own travel. You still have to book your hotel room. So the all-in cost of this is something that attendees have to think about. And the reason we do this on the front of Craft & Commerce, or at least that's the reason we did it in year one, was because the thought was, well, people are already booking the flight to go.

40:17So you save on the cost of two flights. You add on the cost of a couple of nights of hotels, but that's what the community wanted. So yeah, all these things, they're all trade-offs. It's all tough to decide which compromise are you gonna take. Things to keep, things that went well based on the feedback. We gave some of the data. Really, my first bullet point under things to keep is almost everything. The two-day format has been validated two years in a row. People like that it's two days. If anything, they would want like an extra half day but we kind of accomplished that with what we did on Wednesday this year.

40:54I did think that the audience meetup was like a net positive. We didn't have a ton of people join the community from that, but I got to meet people in person I hadn't met before. We had a couple of folks join, shout out to Steve. So I liked that experience. I think that was worthwhile doing it on another event. But people did say like two days is perfect is what we've kind of landed on for this type of event. Assigned seating, we talked about people love that. You got so many compliments on your design this year. of the deck, of the print materials, of our swag. That was really nice. Well, I didn't design the swag.

41:31The swag was designed by someone I know, Nicholas Marslop. He was awesome. So the merch looked great. But I really wasn't expecting all of the kudos I got for the design. People were like, did you go to school for design? I'm like, no. So that was really nice. Super good. Super good. But the only thing I missed this year was our fortune cookies, but I felt like we couldn't do that two years in a row. Yeah. It was hard to top the fortune cookies. We sat right here on this couch and wrote every single one of those fortunes. Yeah. Which is fun. People will open their fortune cookies to get their custom creator fortunes.

42:08And it'll be like, you will have your highest open rate ever soon. Yeah. That type of thing. That was very fun. And of course, the WhatsApp chat. the whatsapp chat is like literally still going and it's almost two months later which i love shout out to emily she was like hey i'm going to create a group if anybody wants to follow up on all of the like promises we made ourselves and you know all the stuff that we talked about that we wanted to implement during offline we can get together and have these discussions and she's led i mean this was like her own thing she's led like three calls with a bunch of people just following up on this and making sure everybody's sticking to the plans that they came up with.

42:52And that is so cool. Yeah. Shout out Emily Mills. Emily, you're the best. Thank you for leading that because that's huge. And that was something that was requested in the survey. So you've been addressing that request without even knowing it. Fighting up the sleepies with Marlo. That's something I definitely want to do somehow next year. Hopefully Marlo comes back. If she doesn't, we've got to do something that's movement oriented because that was so popular. People loved that. And it was so funny to watch everyone be like, what are we about to do? And then just totally get into it. I honestly think that that was like the best icebreaker you could have for day one.

43:34If you're listening to this, obviously you probably weren't there. So you're not picturing what we experienced. When you hear that we had like a movement coach fighting off the sleepies, You might think this is intense, full body movement that maybe is like exclusionary to folks who can't do certain things. But it was actually like extremely inclusive and open to interpretation. A lot of stuff was like opening the palm of your hand as wide as you can. But then it was just kind of like moving around the venue. It was doing whatever you want to do. It basically made the weird thing the normal thing, which was great.

44:10Yes. Because it was like awkward at first and then everybody leaned in and it was like, wow, this is actually really great. Why do we have to sit in chairs all day? It was really fun. And also, I just loved Marlo through the whole event because this girl was like, I'm not sitting in a chair all day. I would look over and she'd be like laying on the floor with her legs up in the air. Like, I was like, okay, I actually love this because like I'm the type of person when I'm sitting, I always sit like in weird pretzel styles. Like if you catch me at home, like I've got my legs up on my chair, but I'm not like doing that in public.

44:45And Marlo had me thinking, you know what? Why not? I'm more comfortable sitting this way. Nobody was like, hey, weirdo, you can't sit like that. Yeah. She's just laying on the floor. Like it was cool. No, no. We should do that more. Anything else on your list of things that you would absolutely keep and carry through to next year that we didn't talk about? No. Okay. Things to improve. We talked about a couple of these things. number one on my list was venue acoustics though i just have no idea how we're going to improve that we're going to need like somebody on the ground to go shout i don't know it's it's a really really tough one it's like the conference rooms are perfect because they're set up everything in there like it's got soundproofing and so i don't think it was too loud in our venue itself but I don't know how you can control the acoustics in a restaurant.

45:38I don't either, but it's something that we're going to have to try and come up with some mechanism for next year. Second thing on my list was more mastermind time. This was requested last year to a degree. It was requested again this year. People want more of the event to be these small group masterminds. I don't think they're asking for like more time with their small group. I am reading this as like more mastermind sessions, probably with different groups, but maybe I'm wrong. I mean, we had 25 minutes per person with groups of five to six this year and we each got a hot seat and I did feel like, okay, that was a useful 25 minutes.

46:18I didn't feel like I was super hurting for more time. Could have probably filled some more time, but if I was given like an hour, it's probably overkill. Yeah. Probably would want to do multiple problem sets with multiple groups. So I'm thinking about how to add more mastermind time to our agenda next year. We got a lot of feedback in the survey that if we're going to have speakers, quote unquote, they want it to be workshop style, like what Kat led. Yeah. And what's awesome is our whole community are people who are like also presenters. So we don't need to bring in like outside parties to do this we can just find people who are coming to the event and say would you be up for leading one of these sessions yeah because that was awesome i wish we would have given it more time cat warned me ahead of time she's like i can do it in 60 minutes i can do it in 75 minutes i would really like 90 minutes and i forced it into 75 minutes and i should have given her at least 90 minutes yeah i think everybody liked that people were moved.

47:22There were tears shed. I cried. I cried. I wasn't even going to be a part of the, of that programming, but I got called in because one of the tables had an, uh, an odd number and someone didn't have a partner and it was sort of a partnered activity. And I was like, you know what? Yeah. I don't know how much I'm going to be able to help you, but I'm going to be, you know, an ear for you. And I was crying. Like it was great. And my partner got a lot out of it somehow. So that was nice too. Two other bolts I had for things to improve. I got a lot of feedback in the forum this year that people weren't super into the solo writing or journaling exercises.

48:00And I hear that. I feel like that doesn't necessarily need to be an in-person thing. I was trying to set the context for some of the group sessions we did, but I feel like it probably doesn't maximize our time there. So if I'm trying to find more mastermind time, that's an obvious place to pull it from. and I already mentioned trying to make it easier or safer for introverts in some of the larger group settings. That's something to still try and solve for. What did you have on your list that we haven't touched on? For improvements, nothing. I did want to mention one thing that was different that we did this year was our event space had like a balcony, but like it was connected to the rooftop.

48:42And so when we got to break up into these groups to do our mastermind sessions, people were going outside to the rooftop and people loved it. I mean, the weather in Boise was like perfect while we were there, but it was nice to have that space to spread out. So going back to what we're going to keep, I think that would be something that's really beneficial. Just some outdoor space. Nobody wants to be like in a conference room for nine hours. That was great. That really made the lunch like a nice breakup to go out and eat outside. That was really nice. And also be so close to the venue that we had no problem getting people back into the room either.

49:20The bathrooms were just like between the two. So it was perfect. Okay. Things to test. I want to hear your list of things to test because this is on your outline before I made this. So I'm very curious what you came up with. Yeah. So pre-event connection, this is something that I experimented with in a previous community of mine where basically you can add like an optional networking session, like a virtual networking session before the event for people to get to know each other. And so you're going into it feeling like you have a friend. If you couldn't tell, I just really don't want anyone want to feel left out.

50:00If we did that, do you think that we should try to do breakout rooms with the table that you're going to meet with on Monday? Okay. That's a really good idea. However, I fear that if it doesn't work out for someone, maybe because of their schedule or whatever for a virtual meeting like that, that you're walking into that room and you're like, cool, everybody here knows each other. And now I'm just going to be at this table. and that might actually feel worse. Another trade-off though. Than feeling like not everybody knows each other. Yeah, yeah. I really like this idea. I had the same point on my note, which probably is because we saw it in the feedback.

50:39I like this idea. I feel like that risk is probably worth running for the benefit of the people who are able to make that time work. Yeah, especially because if you're not an introvert, this isn't even something you're thinking about. You're just like, cool, I'm going to this event. I'm stoked. And you're not like, oh my gosh, I hope I find somebody to talk to or find a group to fit in with. So maybe you're not going to be as inclined to go to that and that's fine, but I don't know. It could work. Another thing for testing out would be evaluating if craft and commerce is what we want to base our event around.

51:23Okay. Put a pin in that. That's going to go in open questions. Well, those are the only two things on my list. Okay, great. Well, our food was dropped off. So let's wrap this up in five minutes. Here we go. Here's my list of things to test. Then we'll get to that open question. I think trying to find a happy medium with the food cost, we got literal write-in answers on our survey. They're like, the food was great this year, maybe better than it needed to be. Yeah. I don't think we needed to ball out on both dinners. Maybe we ball out on one dinner and then the other dinner is just like, we're going to a brewery and getting like burgers and pizza or whatever.

51:55And then this is a two-pronged approach. I guess this is a three-pronged approach. If you take our happy medium, the food thing, if I'm trying to find equilibrium on the budget, we could also explore additional sponsors. Although there's a challenge here because part of the reason we're able to secure the sponsorship with circle that we did is because they were the exclusive sponsor. So if we had multiple sponsors, It would probably be at smaller rates. And then we have to balance, okay, how do we get those sponsors a good experience and ROI and not have it detract from the overall member experience?

52:32Which Circle was super great to work with. Not only were they just so open to all of my ideas, but they sent our attendees hats, great hats. Yeah, dropped off like some swag. It was perfect. I'm troubled because I would love to just work with Circle. And so if we only had one sponsor again next year, then the other lever to pull is to try a higher ticket price, which might be worthwhile. I mean, it makes a meaningful difference. Another thing to test is different break activities that aren't bar located or alcohol centric. It's not that we are drinkers. In fact, we cannot get our audience to drink.

53:11like we have we have we have had several dinners and happy hours now both at the offline event and just things that are attached to other events and i just like open up a tab and i'm like go nuts and no one goes no one no one has like more than one or two drinks and a lot of people don't drink at all so it's like maybe i always budget a ton for it and then it's like oh yeah we should have invited all of them to our wedding Okay, let me see here. One idea that people had in the feedback forum was to have, we tried this last year with the sticky note activity, like a wall of asks and offers. I'm trying to find someone who's really good at lovable, or I'm trying to find someone who's really good at lead magnets, and then offers of like, I'm really good at breaking down funnels, I'm really good at design or branding.

54:03Some way that people can matchmake on the fly. That was well-received last year, but we had this quirk of like, oh, you can't put this on the wall at the venue. Yeah, the venue was mad at us for putting stickers on the wall. I just couldn't think of how to solve it this year. Topic-based interest groups as part of the agenda. So everything is very programmed right now where I have seating charts and put people around. but one idea was, why don't you have, maybe it's a mastermind, maybe it's just replacing the large group discussions where you have like, the table over there is YouTube, the table over here is memberships, the table over here is Instagram.

54:40Whatever you're working on and care about right now, go find your table, make friends, and talk to them for the next hour. I thought that was a pretty good idea. You mentioned the pre-event Zoom intros. I think that's a good idea. People asked for post-event accountability. Emily took that on and is running with it. So those are my things to test, which leads us to our open questions of, do we do this on the front of Craft & Commerce next year? Analytically, I asked this straight up. 16 people who responded had no preference on whether we attach it to craft and commerce six people preferred that it would be standalone meaning not attached to craft and commerce 10 people preferred that it was paired and then we had three with very nuanced write-ins so essentially out of the 35 people who gave us feedback 35 people out of 41 gave us feedback this year which is great so it sounds I need to go find six people.

55:43But 10 people said that they definitely want to keep it on the front of craft and commerce. So I'm leaning no. I am leaning not doing our offline on the front of craft and commerce. But I have a second open question, which is, I still feel strongly that we should do two events per year. And so maybe it's not that we don't do it on the front of craft and commerce. Maybe it's that we have a second event that is not on the front of craft and commerce. the consideration here is that being there for a week feels long people do love if they're going to craft and commerce they love having like momentum and built-in friends going into that event but if you fly in on sunday and you're there and fly out on saturday and it's like all a learning and development experience it's exhausting it's pretty intense yeah and it's also really tough for people with families to justify.

56:38It's far harder to justify six or seven days than three days. And even though it's logistically simpler to go to an event on the front of an event you're already going to, Boise is not a logistically simple place to get to, nor is it cheap. So I don't think we're actually saving people money doing it at Crafting Commerce. and if we're thinking about raising the ticket price and that makes you think about the overall investment by members, I think we would be able to justify a higher ticket price. It'll be a lower cost for everybody involved if we make the event hosted somewhere where traveling is simpler.

57:23And there are like no direct flights to Boise. None. Which if you're carrying a stroller in a car seat, that kind of sucks. Interestingly, also this year, we had several people on night two Tuesday not attend dinner because there are now like competing events being organized in front of Craft & Commerce, which is not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to spend six months planning an event so that two days beforehand, it's like, oh, I got this other opportunity, which honestly I would take two. If I was with the same group for 48 hours and then I got the opportunity to go to a dinner that was invite only with people that I haven't met before, I would absolutely do that.

58:03Totally understand. But also we're not like, we're not planning this event for that to have to even be a concern for anyone. Right. So I'm thinking. We're also not trying to like step on toes of like, we made an effort to, we had our audience event wrap up before like the welcome party for craft and commerce. Cause we didn't want to make people choose one or the other. Right. Nope. We want to be collaborative we want it to fit so i'm currently leaning towards depending on whether we want to attend craft and commerce ourselves next year maybe we do like a dinner ahead of it like we did two years ago but currently i'm leaning towards trying our next two-day event somewhere else which may be columbus i think columbus would be perfect not to mention just in our personal lives.

58:52We will have a newborn at that time when craft and commerce rolls around again next year and traveling with two children. Oh my gosh. If we had the same travel experience we did this year, next year, I don't know if I could handle it. So if we did it in Columbus, not only is it easy to get to Columbus airport, best airport. Listen, I know I could plan this event in like two weeks if we did it in Columbus, because I already know all the venues, you know, I've been there before. the acoustics. We could go into a restaurant and yell and see what it's like. But if we were to do two in-person events per year, Columbus could act as our East Coast event and we could find one on the West Coast.

59:34Yep. San Diego or something. I also want to do one outside the U.S. at some point. Maybe the answer is Toronto. I want to go to Canada so bad. Maybe the answer is Toronto. East Coast. Maybe. We'll see. write us let us know what you think about toronto because i would like to do two events per year i would like one to be international there's also a world where we do the lab offline on the front of a creator science event that is for the broader creator science audience and then we have a day or two on the front end just for members of the lab i actually really like that future i don't know that's a 2027 future?

1:00:16I don't know. I mean, I like the sound of it. That sounds really cool and I would love to plan like a larger event. I don't think 2027 is the year. She's shaking her finger at me. I mean, all I can, look, I'm six months pregnant. All I can think of is babies. But, I do like that idea. I really want to plan a conference that doesn't suck. Because, I mean, Craft and Commerce is like the only conference that I enjoy as a conference experience. experience everything else i'm like i don't really love the way this is organized i love that our friend justin moore is innovating on events i love that our friend layla pomper is innovating and doing her event on a ship i love yeah she's she's hosting an event on a ship wow yeah very cool that's so cool it's like so there's so many areas that can be innovated upon and more imaginative economics of events are hard time putting into planning an event is hard so lots of things to consider there.

1:01:15But I think there's a world where instead of doing the lab offline on the front of Craft and Commerce, we do the lab offline on the front of the creator science thing that we do every year. So those are our thoughts. We'd love to hear what you think about it. Once again, thank you to Circle for hosting the lab offline powered by Circle. Couldn't have done it without them. Would have lost a lot more money. And our notes may have been, actually, we're never doing offline events again. But thanks to Circle, we have the membership as a whole. It runs on Circle. If you want to try circle out head to circle.so there's a link in the show notes thank you to circle thank you to everybody in the community who attended the lab offline if you've been thinking about joining the lab it's a great time to get on the wait list we're actually closed to new members right now because we are reimagining some of the experience but we're going to be reopening that if not by the end of july in early august so head to creatorscience.com slash lab that's creatorscience.com slash lab.

1:02:12Also a link in the show notes. We would love to have you and host you at our next offline event. Thank you for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

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