Why We Decided To Launch A Conference

When we announced that Drift’s first annual conference -- HYPERGROWTH -- would be happening this September, a lot of people reached out and asked me…

Why a conference? 

So here’s the full breakdown of why we’re hosting HYPERGROWTH, as well as the reasoning behind our 1,000-person attendance goal.

Bringing the Community Together

The conference really came out of what Dave Gerhardt (Drift’s Director of Marketing) and I do on our podcast, Seeking Wisdom.

When the podcast came out, it was not Drift-specific, and not company-specific. It was just a podcast about the things that we were learning. Hence the name, Seeking Wisdom.

But then the community around the podcast just started to blow me away, and blow all of us away, just in terms of how into the podcast people were --- people from totally different worlds. 

Every candidate who comes into the Drift office, prospective customers, they’ve all heard of it and listened to it. 

The podcast turned into this bigger thing, bigger than Drift as a company, bigger than the podcast itself, and that kind of sparked the idea:

Let’s bring the community together. With no other agenda than that we have something here, and we want to make it into something bigger.

That’s how HYPERGROWTH was born.

Growing the Drift Brand

In the back of my mind, while I’m thinking about this community, I’m also thinking about what we want to invest in as a company from a marketing standpoint, and from a company standpoint. And one of those things that we’ve talked about in the past is building a brand. 

Not just a “tech brand,” but a brand. A global brand. And so to do that, we need to invest in areas that are not easily measurable.

Quick side rant:

One problem with modern, data-driven marketers ( and for the record, I love marketers) is that they only want to invest in things that are super measurable.They want to be able to measure every click, interaction, pixel, etc.

That’s cool … but the problem with that approach is that if something is perfectly measurable, from a marketing standpoint, by definition, the arbitrage a.k.a. the opportunity in that channel is probably already gone. 

Why? 

Because if it’s perfectly measurable, everybody’s going to move their dollars into those perfectly measurable campaign types or activities, and then that means that the arbitrage goes away. 

Here’s the perfect example of this: 

There was arbitrage in the early days of Google. Across almost all the categories. So there were a lot of ways to make money on Google. Now, it’s become so efficient that the arbitrage is gone from most of the categories. So you see a lot of marketers move to Facebook and other platforms. 

And so the same thing will happen again. Once everyone’s figured out how to perfectly measure it, and spend money in that system, then the arbitrage goes away. 

That’s the thing about those “other” channels, like conferences, or podcasts, or video, or some of the other things that we do: They’re not easy to measure in terms of ROI. Therefore, it keeps marketers from going there and that means the arbitrage is there. The opportunity is there.

The other problem with marketing is that when they go into an activity, like an event, or a podcast, they want so badly to measure it that they screw up the experience of the activity. 

Your typical event, because marketers want to -- need to -- measure this freaking thing, they put lead generation goals ahead of experience.

At one conference I was at last year, I didn’t go to a single booth, and yet I still got like a hundred emails from vendors: “David, so great to have you at the booth. We’d love to give you a demo. Thanks for spending 15 minutes with me…” 

I didn’t go to any of these booths! The vendors had the list and they emailed everyone. 

So that’s an example of marketers taking events and just making the experience shitty. Because all of a sudden they have card scanners, and automatic emails being sent to people, booths, and giveaways, and trinkets, and a pink dinosaur dancing outside, and all of that weird stuff.

That’s not the type of conference that we want to create.

The HYPERGROWTH Vision

What we want to do is bring like-minded people together so we can help each other grow.

And we’re not just going to talk about growing marketing and sales, we’re going to talk about personal growth. We’re going to create this new type of conference that I have not seen out there.

That’s the growth mindset coming out. Because the fixed mindset person would say, “There are so many conferences out there. Why do it? There’s so much noise.”

The growth mindset says, “Great, there are a lot of conferences out there and most of them suck. So we’re going to do it our way.”

Because now, most conferences all feel the same way, so it’s easy to stand out -- there’s that arbitrage opportunity. And I think we can create something bigger that creates this halo effect around Drift and around what we’re doing on Seeking Wisdom. 

So that’s the “why” behind September’s HYPERGROWTH conference.

And with that “why,” I also set some guardrails.

1,000 HYPERGROWTH Attendees

We knew that if we were going to do a conference it had to be remarkable in terms of attendance. So we looked at past conferences.

Mike Volpe did the first INBOUND and they had about 350 people. Most company conferences are in that 200 to 300 person spot. Sometimes a little smaller and more intimate.

So I said, let’s go the other way. 

I thought, what’s the craziest number I can think of hitting in the first year, never having done a conference before, not having a dedicated events team? With those constraints, what’s the biggest?

And we were starting to talk about 500. And I agreed on 500. Then I slept on it, came back, and said, “Double it. A thousand.”

Crafting an Experience

With brands today, you pay for the experience. So we want to use HYPERGROWTH to deliver this experience in person. And I’m not talking about the conference experience, but the Drift experience. 

It doesn’t matter that it’s in the form of a conference. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of a podcast or a video or the software. It’s all part of the brand experience.

Our goal is to be able to remove the Drift logo from all of these channels and activities and still have people know that’s us (just like you can with a Nike ad, or a Patagonia ad). So that’s the brand we’re trying to build. We’re just at the beginning. 

It’s the first inning. 

Final Thought: The Long View

We don’t consider HYPERGROWTH to be a revenue-generating event.

It’s an expense. 

And guess what? We’re totally fine investing in that.

In fact, we’re going to continue to invest in conferences and non-traditional things where we think there’s opportunity, and we’re going to take a long-term view in building this company.

To learn more about the HYPERGROWTH conference -- and for 3 reasons why you should go -- drop by the Drift Blog.