Well the holidays are over, the CFP is closing in a couple hours, and the conference itself is now only 5 short months away.

The CFP went pretty well. As of this writing there are 92 submissions (with many people submitting more than one) which is pretty awesome. This is without me doing as much of a marketing push as I would have liked to. I really struggle with overthinking marketing and promotion. I only posted a handful of times on social media. I think visibility was boosted a lot by the Remote Ruby podcast and some friendly folks reposting my socials. Anyway, I am happy with the number of submissions we got and I am pretty excited to dig into them over the next couple weeks. My goal is to review everything, choose my top talks by the end of January and start reaching out and confirming people in early February.

With my personally disappointing performance marketing the CFP I think I need to come up with a detailed plan for the next couple months to drive ticket sales. As of this writing we have only sold 5 tickets and while there are still 5 months to go and most people plan their conferences last minute I want to make that last minute decision really easy because they have seen the conference mentioned so much.

A couple ideas (mostly stolen from other conferences):

  • Podcast appearances
  • Interviews with speakers
  • Videos of the venue and Albuquerque
  • Fun challenges to get a free ticket?
  • Fun ads? (I am not as bold as the Judoscale guys but they are an inspiration)

I also need to start thinking about the experience of the conference itself. Are we going to have a wall that everyone writes their favorite ruby method on? Are we going to have branded water bottles? Are we going to have live music? What is the Ruby passport experience going to be like? This is the part where I have the chance to make the conference truly remarkable. I don't have a million dollars. I don't have a jaw dropping venue or light show. I don't have A-list celebrities as brand ambassadors. But I can make the experience something special without all that. It just takes some creativity and effort. This is what is going to determine whether the "early adopters" of Blastoff Rails tell their friends to come to the conference in 2027 or not.

I got a simple Typesense powered "Things to do" page up on the website. You can search via natural language for food and fun activities. I used AI to generate images for each thing as well. There are still a couple improvements I would like to make but it was a fun project and I love that I got to do it using a sponsor company's tool.