In short6 min read
- The founder validated demand with a landing page for under $500 before booking a venue.
- Cold LinkedIn messages to people with culture job titles got about a 25% response rate.
- Year 1 brought $75K revenue and $60K profit; year 5 reached $500K revenue.
- His newest conference struggled with old tactics, so he now advises building an audience first.
Most side-hustle stories are about software or digital products. This one is about a live event, and it is one of the clearest examples of “sell before you build” you will find. A tech program manager started a conference on the side, couldn’t sell a ticket at first, then found the right buyer and grew the business for five years before selling it.
The founder shared the full arc, including his revenue and profit numbers and a recent event that nearly failed. If you are thinking about any business that requires a big upfront commitment, his approach to validation and his first-customer process are worth studying closely.
In this article
The Starting Point: No Audience, Little Cash, Limited Time
The founder had spent a decade as a program manager in tech, mostly in Silicon Valley, and kept running into frustrating company cultures. He didn’t work in HR. He just wanted to learn how to make workplaces better, and the events he found were expensive and aimed at HR executives. His idea was a conference about building better company culture “for the rest of us.”
He started in 2014 and worked on it alongside his job for two years before going full-time. He was candid about his starting position:
| Resource | What the founder had |
|---|---|
| Experience | Two years organizing hackathons; had never attended a conference |
| Cash committed before selling | Under $500 for a domain, hosting, and a WordPress site |
| Existing audience | None, and no network |
| Time | Nights and weekends, about 10-20 hours a week |
He says the lack of an audience and network was where he struggled most.
Validation: Sell the Event Before Booking the Venue
The founder had read The Lean Startup in 2012 and believed in validating demand before building. For a conference, that meant selling tickets before spending real money.
He built a landing page in 2014, set the date as Summer 2015 in San Francisco, and offered a no-questions-asked refund at any time to make buying easier. Just as important was what he didn’t do: he skipped the venue deposit, because it would have locked him in before he knew the idea worked. He also notes he didn’t have the money for one.
The refund promise is the clever part. It lowered the risk for early buyers, which made it easier for them to commit to an event that didn’t fully exist yet.
The Wrong Buyer, Then the Right One
At launch, he tried to sell to founders, assuming culture came from the top. It didn’t work.
So he went back to customer development and interviewed ten founders. They cared about culture, but they cared more about making payroll and keeping the business alive. Then one founder said he was too busy and would send someone in his place. That was the turning point. The right buyer wasn’t the founder. It was anyone in a company who could make decisions about culture.
That insight gave him a precise target: people whose jobs already focused on culture, such as Chief Culture Officers, VPs of Culture, and anyone with “culture” in their title.
How He Sold the First 200 Tickets
The founder describes a four-step process:
- Find people on LinkedIn. He searched for culture-related job titles and cold messaged them. His response rate was about 25%.
- Pitch softly. His message said, roughly, that he was putting together an event in SF on building company culture and invited them to take a look. He didn’t want to give away free tickets but was nervous about asking for a purchase, so he kept it open-ended. People who replied and saw what he was building bought tickets for their teams at $299 each. His first sales email from Eventbrite was for $1,200 because one person bought four tickets.
- Call the buyers. He emailed the first 20 buyers to thank them and asked for a short call to learn where he could find more people like them.
- Tap their communities. Buyers told him about communities they belonged to, which at the time were Google Groups. He asked them to share the event, and they were happy to.
The first year sold out through word of mouth. In the discussion thread, he added that his first speakers came from founders and CEOs he knew as hackathon mentors and judges, and that later he cold messaged speakers he wanted. His biggest first-year speaker was the VP of Employee Experience at LinkedIn, and in year two he landed the Head of HR from Facebook.
The Numbers Over Five Years
Here is how the founder reports the first five years:
| Year | Revenue | Profit |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $75K | $60K |
| Year 2 | $180K | $80K |
| Year 3 | $350K | $170K |
| Year 4 | $425K | $200K |
| Year 5 | $500K | $250K |
Year one’s margin was unusually high because costs were tiny. The venue was the basement of a coworking space, and he admits the production quality was low since he had never been to a conference. After attending an industry conference, he realized he needed to level up, and he says profit settled at roughly 50% after that.
He sold the conference in 2021. He describes it as a decent exit, not a huge one, and says he was extremely burnt out and that COVID slowed growth.
The Warning: The Old Playbook Stopped Working
The most important part of the story may be the ending. Last year, the founder started a new conference for HR and AI leaders. He says it was extremely hard to sell tickets and find sponsors. Two months out, he was about $20K in debt, and he barely turned a profit once the event happened. He had to give away 90% of the tickets to fill the room.
In his words, everything he had done 10 years earlier to get people there no longer worked. That is a strong reminder that a case study describes what worked at a specific time. Results depend on the market, timing, and execution, and copying old tactics step by step is no guarantee.
What He Would Do Differently
The founder names three changes:
- Run smaller events first. Even a 300-person conference is a huge commitment. Once you sign a venue contract and pick a date, the clock starts. He would build community with smaller events before going all in.
- Build an audience before anything else. He argues that in the age of AI, creating content and building an audience is the only moat left. With an audience, selling becomes much easier.
- Network before you need it. He compares a network to a garden. Build goodwill when you don’t need anything, so it is there when you have an ask.
How to Do It
Use this checklist to validate an event or any high-commitment side business:
- [ ] Define the gap. Write down who is underserved by existing options and why, as the founder did with expensive executive-only events.
- [ ] Start small. Plan a smaller meetup or workshop before committing to a large conference.
- [ ] Build a simple landing page. Keep upfront costs low and set a date and location.
- [ ] Reduce buyer risk. Consider a clear refund policy so early buyers feel safe committing.
- [ ] Delay big commitments. Don’t sign venue contracts or pay deposits until demand is proven.
- [ ] Interview potential buyers. Talk to about ten people and listen for who actually makes the buying decision.
- [ ] Target by job title. Find decision-makers on LinkedIn and send short, low-pressure invitations to take a look.
- [ ] Call your first buyers. Thank them and ask where you can find more people like them.
- [ ] Ask for community shares. Request introductions to the groups your buyers already belong to.
- [ ] Start building an audience now. Publish content and network consistently, before you have something to sell.
Want to validate your own event or side business?
Today, write down the exact job titles of the people who would buy your idea, then find five of them on LinkedIn. Send each a short, low-pressure note inviting them to take a look at what you're building.
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