Trade shows are terrible businesses

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My opinion about startup conferences has… shifted over the last few years.
And when you are paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a ticket, plus flights and hotels for you and your team… you just can’t ignore the question of ROI.
I am attending a bunch of conferences this quarter.

And the question is still there for me. Is this ticket worth the money?

I’ve been asking myself this for years, and we finally got down to find out why these tickets are so damn expensive. Who is keeping all this money?
Because for a bootstrapped startup founder that $1,000 ticket or that $5,000 booth on the ‘Startup Alley’ is a big decision.

And for them conferences tend to promise customers, investor intros, round tables, and meeting Lupita N’yongo for some reason, and if you’re looking for that- a conference might not be the place.

So I sat down with conference organizers who agreed to share numbers they hadn’t shared publicly before. We looked at dozens of industry insights, and the main thing we learned is that conferences are an extremely risky business.

Despite the expensive tickets and the super expensive sponsorships and booths, organizers barely make any money, and a fair share of them close at a loss.

So, let's talk about the actual numbers behind startup conferences in today’s Company Forensics.

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