Going Solo

When you organise an event, not only do you need a location, you also need a date. You know, things happen at the intersection of time and space.

A rough glance at the calendar made me choose early May, as it’s far away enough to give us time to put things together (some people have gasped at how short it was, but I’m sure we can pull it off), and it’s also kind of empty on the conference front. I’ve asked around and gone through upcoming, and that time of the year seems pretty conflict-free.

Then, the trouble starts. We decided to go for a one-day event to start with. This means that we expect people to fly in for a day, which… well, might seem “not worth it” to some.

My initial idea (which, after much detours, I’ve come back to) was to hold the event on a Friday, so that people could stay an extra day or two during the week-end to make the trip worth it. I even thought about motivating the local barcamp community of the city we’d be holding the event in to place a barcamp on that week-end.

Then, the headache started. Maybe Friday wasn’t such a good day after all, because with a week of work behind them and stuff creeping up to be dealt with before the week-end, we would suffer lots of defections. So, how about Monday? Well, Monday is usually a heavy business day, and people are all sluggish from the week-end, so they might drop out too. So I sent out a quick poll on Twitter, asking people what seemed the best day to organise an event for freelancers.

Needless to say roughly each day of the week and week-end was suggested, along with very good reasons for or against each one.

In the end, I listened to the voice of reason, impersonated by Suw, telling me there was no perfect day and that the most important thing was to put on a great event, with valuable content that would make it worth the trip for people to come, and that this would be the deciding factor for people rather than the place and day of the week.

In addition to that, I got feedback from a couple of tech event organisers who said that Friday could be quite good for one-day events. So, Friday it will be.

Let’s get practical: I’m looking at Friday May 9th, but before I set it in stone and we book a venue for that date, I’d like to know if you see any conflicts (1000 pairs of eyes are better than one). Is there anything with that date I haven’t thought of?

This was originally posted on Climb to the Stars. View comments on the original post.

When you decide to organise an event, other than having a good idea for the content/audience (ie, “what’s it about? what kind of event?”), two things you need to figure out quite quickly are when and where it’ll happen. This post is about the “where?” question.

My initial reaction when I took the decision to go ahead with this wacky “organising events” idea was somewhere along the line of “great! I’ll do it in Lausanne!”. A bit of a selfish reaction, as it makes things easier for me, and I really love Lausanne.

Next, I started thinking. Who is this event going to be for? Where is the highest number of people likely to come for my event? Maybe Lausanne is my favourite personal choice, but it doesn’t necessarily make business sense. From the start, I’ve thought of my event as European, with the idea to attract people from all over the continent. So of course, I expect attendees to travel — but there is always a high local population at events, as the absence of travel lowers the barrier to entry (cost, travel time, stress).

Well, quite possibly, the answer to that question (where is the highest concentration of freelancers in the tech industry in Europe?) would be “London”. On the other hand, London is horrendously expensive (isn’t it?), so, why not something nearby, like… Brighton? Cheaper, but still rather easy to get to.

At that point, I decided we needed a choice of cities, and we should check them out for venue options and hotel pricing, to see if anything stood out. Obviously, we’d need to pick cities which are easy to get to from other places in Europe. So, for starters… let’s look at London/Brighton, Paris, and Berlin. Paris is very close to London with the Eurostar, and Berlin (Germany) is cheaper than both London and Paris, but it’s still an Easyjet city. Because, if you’re in Europe, chances are you’re going to be flying Easyjet or some other low-cost airline. (I should think about asking them to sponsor the event, actually…)

So, armed with those three options (London, Paris, Berlin), I set off to Le Web 3 to start talking with possible sponsors, and also to bounce ideas off my friends and peers. To my surprise, quite a few people said “but why don’t you do it in Lausanne?” when I mentioned the location wasn’t set yet. So, I started thinking. Because even if Lausanne is a personal, almost emotional choice for me, it doesn’t mean it cannot also be a good business decision.

Let’s look at Lausanne as a possible city to host my event, with a cool business mind:

• First and foremost, it’s actually really easy to access: get off your plane in Geneva airport, walk 200m from customs, hop on the train (yes, the train station is inside the airport), and 30-40 minutes later you’re in central Lausanne. (You’re in for at least the same kind of ride to get to central London from LGW or LHR, or central Paris from CDG.) Geneva airport is an international airport which is easily reached from all over Europe, with Easyjet for example. However, it’s way less busy than CDG, LHR, LGW, which makes the arrival/departure experience much more pleasant.
• I live in Lausanne, and so do my two main partners-in-crime: holding the event in Lausanne will make organisation much smoother for us, and allow us to ensure we don’t bump into any issues with the venue due to managing things remotely. Not to mention opportunities for sponsorships by local businesses — being locals, we know who they are and have existing connections we can use. There are also many important companies settled in the Lausanne area, like Nestle, Philip Morris, or Orange Switzerland. And it’s the Olympic Capital. (OK, drifting off-topic here…)
• Lausanne is a beautiful city, in the midst of a beautiful region: it’s on Lake Geneva (Lac Léman), but as opposed to Geneva which is at the end of the lake, Lausanne is in the middle. The view over the lake and mountains is just breath-taking. If you’re coming for a one-day conference and plan to spend a nice week-end somewhere while you’re at it, Lausanne is ideal. The city is lovely and walkable, France is 20 minutes away by boat (just across the lake), and the surrounding countryside and lakeshore is also worth a visit (for example, Le Lavaux, Unesco world heritage site, is just to the east of Lausanne). I’ll be digging out photos to convince you to come if you’re not sold yet ;-).
• Even though Switzerland is a rather expensive country (by European standards), holding an event in Lausanne is going to be more affordable than London, Paris, or Geneva.
• Lausanne is a human-sized city: it’s the fifth most important city in Switzerland with 120′000 inhabitants in the city itself. It has everything one needs, but it’s not so large that you can get very lost in it or spend insane amounts of time commuting from one part of the city to the other. Public transport is very efficient.
• Finally, Lausanne will be a welcome change for all of us on the “2.0 conference circuit”, as it’s not one of the usual “conference cities”, and probably a city you haven’t visited before much (which is a pity! you should!).

Check out:

• Official Lausanne website
• Official Lausanne tourism website
• Lausanne on WikiTravel
• Lausanne on Wikipedia
• Lausanne Flickr Pool (photographs)

So, here we go. Going Solo will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland — I’m looking forward to welcoming you all here in a few months.

Now tell me — did I do a good job of selling you Lausanne as a conference-city?

This was originally posted on Climb to the Stars. View comments on the original post.

So, here we go. As I mentioned in my last post, things are shaping up enough for me to start talking about them, even though a lot is still “floating”.

I’m taking the plunge into the event business. The first one I’m organising is Going Solo, a one-day conference in the beautiful and easily accessible city of Lausanne in Switzerland, which also happens to be my home town. It will take place early May.

Going Solo will fill a gap in the current conference offerings: it’s an event for freelancers of the web industry (soloists, hence the name) and very small businesses — from all over Europe.

Being a freelancer myself, I’ve come to realise quite a while ago that there is more to freelancing than “knowing cool stuff” and having people around willing to pay for it. How do you fix your prices? Close deals? Find clients, or better, help them find you? Collaborate with others, whether soloists themselves, or employees in a huge company? Deal with taxes, contracts, accounting, and all the rest of the boring administrative stuff? Achieve that delicate “work/life balance”, when you’re one of the lucky ones who turned a passion into a job?

Going Solo will address all these issues (and others), providing those attending with valuable insights and tools which will help them become better at what they are doing in the business world. (Sounds almost like a press release, doesn’t it? I’m practising for the sponsor offerings… shhh.)

In simple words: this is the kind of event I would have wanted to attend two years ago when I was struggling with the idea of becoming freelance. It’s the kind of event I would have liked to attend a year ago when things took off and I started realising how complicated all this “business” stuff was. And it’s also the kind of event I want to attend today, having faced the ups and downs of freelancing in the fast-moving world of new media, in the early stages of starting a company, and wondering what “holidays” means now that my everyday life is split between “hang out online”, “travel to foreign cities”, and “talk about exciting stuff with people”.

Where-when-what-how-why?

I’ll follow up later with a little insight into what’s going on. Be warned, though: you’re going to be following some thought processes here, and might be faced with decisions-in-the-making and not-sure-what-I’ll-do-yets. I welcome all feedback.

This was originally posted on Climb to the Stars. View comments on the original post.