The guide to organizing an event for your startup
The questions you should be asking yourself
Last time, I wrote about our event strategy at The Family, where we organize 300+ events per year all across Europe. Now let’s talk more precisely about how to design a kick-ass event 💎
As an event manager at The Family, a lot of people ask me how to build an event: How do we set up and decide to do an event this way or that way? This article dives into the heart of any event’s success or failure: its design.
Do it only if it’s relevant.
The first question you need to ask yourself is the relevance of doing an event. Just because everybody else is organizing events and trying to get eyes on their startups this way doesn’t mean you need to follow the trend. Make sure to think about your specific context first.
Events don’t scale. They are low-ROI investments of your time and money. If you want direct, concrete returns, there are usually better ways. Events have a lot to do with karma: You give, you broaden the funnel and you have no clue what will come out of it.
At The Family, events are really important. One pillar of our mission is education, we need to build a welcoming environment for future entrepreneurs & we want to double down on our strong identity. It’s how we build our community.
Choose a concrete goal.
Every event is singular. Every event has its own objective. You must choose. You can’t get into a confused state where you think you can achieve a lot of objectives with the same event. You may get various returns, but you must maintain your focus.
🤝 Lead generation
You build an event to promote your solution/product and to get people who can become clients into the same room with you. This is the way to offer an offline experience of your startup and to talk to people in order to close them. Your team needs to be among the speakers and as an organization you need to be active to generate deals.
👐 Community
The goal here is to gather people and pay-it-forward. It’s all about giving. You can offer them great content (knowledge) and/or a great experience (curiosity/entertainment) and/or good networking moments.
👏 Content creation (rare)
This is when you consider your event as a source of content before everything else. Here, you create a context where the content you are trying to generate can be really well expressed.
🙌 Internal cohesion
Don’t forget about throwing crazy parties, doing off-sites and having tasty dinners 🎉
Our event strategy at The Family is, as I mentioned, quite particular:
- As we want to create a welcoming environment for startups, we cover many fields.
- As we do a lot of events, we diversify our goals and the types of events we design.
Basically, it means we do all of these options 😊
Most of our events are community-driven. Then when we organize events with/for our startups, it’s more about lead-generation. And when Oussama wants to create an amazing video, we put on an event that’s concentrated on content.
Get the best people & pick a topic related to your objective.
It’s not “topic first, speakers second”; switch it around. At The Family, we sometimes decide to address a broad topic and look for speakers who fit. But that takes a really wide range of people who you can reach out to (whether for industries or themes like product, HR, tech…).
You should never try to impose a precise topic on speakers. You need to always be in a discussion with them and stay flexible, adapting your event to their affinities.
Picking the right people to talk on stage comes from a mix of your goal, their knowledge/expertise, their ability to speak well in public & their ability to educate. Often you have no clue for those last two — follow your instincts, try things and learn.
Define the format(s) that will serve the vibe you are looking for.
An absolutely crucial and underestimated part. There are basically four types of format you can choose from and each of them relates to a certain vibe:
📝 Talk — Insights
A talk is the best way to structure thoughts and clearly present ideas. If you are looking for concrete examples to make a point or teach something, this is the best way by far. One downside is that it takes more preparation time, and the rockstars of your industry (for us, amazing CEOs) rarely have the time needed to prepare this format.
🔥 Fireside chat — Inspiration
A fireside chat is for intimacy. An interviewer and an interviewee together sharing stories. It’s when you can dig into the personal aspects of the person you have on stage to inspire people.
💪 Debate — Confrontation
This is a rare one because there is less care. It usually doesn’t serve the community aspect very well as it divides people according to their opinions. You don’t know who will be the best performer so you don’t know if it will bring you value. It can be relevant in some cases, especially when you have more high-level topics and you are pretty confident your side is right.
🗝️ Panel — Perspectives
A confrontation of ideas can also occur in some panels, especially small ones (two people plus a moderator). But debate isn’t the main goal of a panel. A panel is about listening to varied perspectives on the same topic, getting many experts smartly covering subtle subtopics inside a broader one.
An event can happen by choosing one, or figuring out a way to combine formats to meet your goal, the topic and sometimes the opportunities you can get in terms of speakers. But never try to do more than two parts in a single event, otherwise it’ll get too long.
If you want to do two small panels because you have two populations of speakers you want to separate, you can do it. If you want to do a talk and a fireside chat to get insights and inspiration, you can do it. Feel free to combine. The most important thing is to have empathy for your speakers and your audience. You need to understand the essential benefits of their time with you and focus on that.
For example, for D-code (our series dedicated to CTOs) we do two talks because we want to cover broader topics with two insightful interventions and honest storytelling (the fireside chat could also work for this one but would be less dynamic).
For events where we try to cover super interesting niche markets like e-sports or protein alternatives, we do a panel. And when we host events with exceptional CEOs like the ones from Trello, TransferWise, Zuora or Meero, we do fireside chats.
If you can, stay at home.
I really do think a lot of people come to our events just to visit The Family. This is the moment your community can meet you in person and immerse themselves in your universe. You shouldn’t underestimate the power of this proximity. This is when people will truly identify themselves to your company.
Many early stage startups don’t have an office. You work from your apartment? Fine. Do something at home. Bring people to your place. Buy a few beers & snacks & start a conversation. Be informal. Bring the first members of your community, your first users as close as you can to you. It’s an amazing opportunity to create a sense of belonging and to learn a lot from them 🍷
10 people having a truly unique moment with you & talking about it to everyone around is way more valuable than 100 people coming to an event in a coworking space with zero charm. Take the care a step further.
✨ Bonus ✨
Find the extra sparkle. These are the small things people will remember. Heetch had candies in their cars, for Young Tigers we turned the stage into a boxing ring, that sort of thing.
The steps I mentioned will help you to align your goal, your speakers & your audience. Everything else comes down to the level of intensity you are ready to put into this particular event. It comes down to your caring, daring, creativity, involvement & meticulous execution.
💎 Wanna speak at The Family? Have someone to recommend? Ping me :)
🤝 Wanna keep up on the next events? Join our Meetup group!
🎁 Check out everything we do across Europe in terms of events.
LOVE 💜
Vlad
