Sponsor Tool

Many weeks ago I started to build out a bunch of sponsor packages but then got flustered trying to craft the perfect packages. Several people have told me that different sponsors are looking for different things when they give money to a conference. Some are just showing good will to the community and want nothing in return, some are looking to hire, some are looking to spread awareness of their product. And one thing that might be really valuable to one sponsor may not be valuable to another sponsor. A company looking to hire might want extra tickets to bring team members so that they can talk to potential candidates while a company looking to spread awareness of their product might care more about a booth or time on stage.

I threw up my hands and said I would do a white glove sponsor experience. I would have a call with every sponsor and figure out exactly what they needed and craft a package and price specifically for them. But there are disadvantages here as well. What if someone is busy and they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a call. Not to mention I had a couple people ask for a sponsor deck that they could pass on to anyone that might be interested and I had nothing to give them.

So one day after another person had asked me for a sponsor deck the thought struck me to build a custom package builder. This would give me a flexible offering that would satisfy different kinds of sponsors that also wanted to do things asynchronously and I could still offer the white glove custom experience alongside it.

About an hour after having this idea, I had GPT 5 analyze the sponsor packages from a couple different conferences and Claude and I had come up with a simple calculator for the site. I am very happy with how it came out. Hopefully sponsors will appreciate it and maybe other conferences will adopt this in the future. I haven't seen anyone do this before. Maybe they had good reason not to? I suppose I will find out.

The Order of Things

Speaking of sponsors I had an interesting conversation with Cirdes Henrique, organizer of Tropical on Rails in Brazil. He did things a little differently than I had been planning, by looking for sponsors last, after he had already locked in the speakers and sold all his tickets. I had been planning on looking for sponsors simultaneously with speakers, or even before (and I hadn't even considered selling tickets yet), because how much of the speakers travel I offer to pay for will largely depend on sponsors. But Cirdes' approach makes a lot of sense. Right now I don't have anything very concrete to offer the sponsors. I have no idea who will be speaking. I have no idea how many tickets I will sell. And I have never done this before so sponsors have no idea if I will do a good job or not. I guess I am still going to keep looking for sponsors right now because I am anxious but I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world if some of them said no and then I circle back later after setting some speakers and selling some tickets.