I had two conversations this week with two possible sponsors! If these come through I might only need one or two more sponsors to have enough money to pay for speaker travel and videos of the talks. Those are the two big expenses that I am most worried about covering. It would really be a huge win if I were to get those covered.

In other news I reached out to a speaker that I wanted for a keynote and got a no. This is inevitable. And while it is unfortunate, it also kind of broke the ice for me. I have been having trouble getting the courage to reach out to people but now that I got that first soul crushing "no" out of the way I am feeling a little better and ready to reach out to a few more people. I only really need two or three people to say yes and I have some time so I am confident I can get some "yeses" in the next couple weeks (or months).

So reaching out to a couple more sponsors and a couple more speakers is my main goal right now. I also am thinking I might open up ticket sales and the CFP earlier than I was planning, just to give people more flexibility. I don't think I need to do the whole "build excitement" thing by leading up to release date. There are some people and organizations that are good at that but it being my first year and not really having any network to build the excitement in kind of defeats the point.