<aside> 👋 The first event is by far the hardest & most important. If you create a good experience with good attendance, everything will be easier the second time. A good success measure is if people will proactively reach out, because they want to speak at your event. In this chapter we will discuss everything important for the first event like name, getting good speakers & more.

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The most important thing is to have relevant topics and great speakers for the first event. Without those two things nothing will work.

What helped us get great speakers were two things:

1. The World Staffing Summit is for free.
2. We did not have any paid Sponsors.
3. Highly relevant topics by high-end industry experts. People will just leave the session if it is not relevant or somebody tries to sell something (& sometimes they won’t come back). You need to be really careful about that.

General

• [ ] Find a name + tagline → it should sound big (World Staffing Summit - The ultimate virtual gathering of forward thinking staffing owners and operators.)
• [ ] Find a theme & topics (Ask your users & speakers: What is on top of your mind and currently relevant?)
• [ ] Event format (Panels, Keynotes, Interviews,…)
• [ ] Website
  • [ ] We bought the event template "Evently" from Webflow (https://eventlytemplate.webflow.io/)
  • [ ] Webflow developer from Upwork
• [ ] Graphics
  • [ ] Logo & shapes via graphic designer on Fiverr

Finding your first speakers

Especially for the first event the speaker line up is super important. Good speakers give you trust and help you build an audience with their followers.

• [ ] Ask you board members + advisors if the want to participate & for introductions
• [ ] Confirm 2-3 speakers and then build the rest of the line-up (FOMO)
• [ ] It is really important to have a diverse speaker lineup!
• [ ] Find a moderator and ask them to bring panelists from their network

There are many conferences who have many people from their company as speakers. We didn’t do that and only had external experts, because otherwise it can easily look like an user conference or sales pitch. People won’t join that.