{"id":9006,"date":"2016-03-23T10:34:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T17:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=9006"},"modified":"2020-08-18T13:08:35","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T12:08:35","slug":"announcing-our-inside-intercom-world-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/announcing-our-inside-intercom-world-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing our Inside Intercom world tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re delighted to announce we\u2019re taking Inside Intercom on a world tour, starting in early May.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s our chance to connect with you, our readers, our customers, and friends. These events will be unique and exciting. And so is the thinking behind how we build them.<\/p>\n

Hosting events are a great way to grow relationships with current and prospective customers, and promote your company in a unique way. Yet often tech events can be lazy, cookie-cutter productions\u00a0with washed-out projectors, badly-lit hotel rooms, and bad coffee. It\u2019s not a great way to present your company.<\/p>\n

Last year we started our events small \u2013 our cupcake<\/a> event was just 100 people in our office. We\u2019ve been slow but deliberate in learning \u2013 getting great feedback from attendees and growing in scale. Now we\u2019re taking the next step. We\u2019re going on a world tour \u2013 Inside Intercom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Four ingredients of good events<\/h2>\n

1. Share more than just success stories<\/h3>\n

When a project goes wrong at Intercom, we often joke \u2018That\u2019ll make for a great talk\u2019. We laugh, but we mean it too. Startups that are truly innovating will get things wrong as often as they get things right. And there are often better stories to be told in the former.<\/p>\n

For example, at our last product event Gavin Joyce spoke about building our new message composer<\/a>. The easy but inauthentic way to give this talk would be to present\u00a0a slick demo of the final product, while giving shout-outs to his team members one-by-one. High fives, finger guns, you know the type. Instead, he told 650 people about how we spent half a million dollars building a text area. Twice. Hearing about failure and success gave the audience something they could relate to.<\/p>\n

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\nProduct Engineer Gavin Joyce talks about why we built our message composer twice to get it right<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Keep the schedule interesting<\/h3>\n

Unless you\u2019re giving\u00a0a formal conference your audience will appreciate content that\u2019s unpredictable, syncopated, and irregular. Mix short talks with keynotes, and switch between big speculative ideas and\u00a0small practical ones. Present product management beside research, and engineering beside design. It\u2019s very easy for your schedule to get same-y. If it does, that\u2019s when you\u2019ll see phones in the audience start lighting up.<\/p>\n

3. Match the venue to the company<\/h3>\n

A venue probably has the biggest effect on your event’s ambience. Yet every day companies try to inspire people to change the world from a stiff, formal conference venue with elevator music playing in the background.<\/p>\n

Choose significance, applaud difference, and bring people to a place that they could or would not normally go. For our Intercom on Capital<\/em> event, we hosted an intimate panel with our CEO and investors in an underground comedy club in Dublin. It was probably the last place you\u2019d expect to find a group of Silicon Valley VCs. It was brash \u2013 and it worked for that exact reason.<\/p>\n

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\nAn intimate panel with our CEO and investors was held in an underground comedy club in Dublin<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Remember to make the venue your own. At last year’s An Evening with<\/em>\u00a0Intercom: On Product<\/em> event, our engineering values sat above our guests across the venue. Showing people what makes the engine move every single day gives attendees a singular experience. No other company will represent themselves in the same way.<\/p>\n

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\nThe Intercom Engineering values displayed at An Evening with Intercom: On Product, Sept 2015<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. Put a fair price on it<\/h3>\n

Jerry Weinberg once wrote that \u201cPricing has many functions, only one of which is the exchange of money<\/em>\u201d. Not charging for an event is a broken tech tradition. Charging a small fee at your event gains you two simple things.<\/p>\n

Firstly, it sets the right expectation. People who pay, even a token amount, are infinitely more likely to attend your event and engage with it. Having an audience as committed as you are on the night is paramount to a great event.<\/p>\n

Secondly, you\u2019ll get the right audience. Filling a venue with the wrong people who\u2019ll happily attend any free event is easy, but it hurts your event.<\/p>\n

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These are just four lessons we\u2019ve learned as we\u2019ve scaled events at Intercom. Our World Tour probably means we\u2019ll learn a whole lot more, and we\u2019ll share those too.<\/p>\n

Today we\u2019re inviting 7,000 people across the world<\/a> to hear our stories and also, to give them a platform to tell theirs. We hope we\u2019ll see you there.<\/p>\n

Tickets are now on sale for our European leg:<\/p>\n