Last month, we hosted 41 creators in Boise, Idaho, for The Lab Offline Powered by Circle. It was a two-day event just for members of our membership, The Lab.
This was our second year hosting an Offline event, and we had a lot to live up to! The event was rated a 9.4/10 by last year's attendees, but we were determined to one-up ourselves.
By all accounts, we were successful! Of the 41 attendees, 35 replied to our anonymous follow-up survey, and rated the event a 9.3/10. More importantly, of the 16 returning attendees from last year, 13 said it was an improvement and the other 3 said it was no better or no worse.
Success!
Of course nothing is ever perfect, and we had plenty of lessons learned that I'll share with you after a quick note from the sponsor of our Offline event, Circle.
SPONSORED
Have You Considered Teaching A Live Course?
One of the biggest opportunities for creators right now is teaching live courses. Live courses (also called cohort-based courses) help a group of students go from Point A to Point B within some period of time—together.
Maybe you’ve taken one of these yourself. Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain course began as a cohort-based course. Three weeks ago, we kicked off our own cohort-based course called Build A Beloved Membership. It’s a four-week course based on material I had previously recorded as a self-paced course, but now we’re teaching it live to a cohort of 100+ students!
Cohorts are great because students learn and do the work together. And, when they get stuck, they have an outlet to ask for help. When you ask students what they love about a live course, they’ll often talk about the other students just as much as they talk about the outcome!
The challenge with self-paced courses has always been accountability. Given infinite time and space to complete a course, many students put it off indefinitely. But a live course provides students the structure, peers, and support to get it done. Whether you’ve already created a course or are starting from scratch, live courses are in demand (and typically sell at a premium to self-paced courses too).
This is another reason I love Circle. Circle is a natural platform for running your live course because you can share lesson videos, host your course event calendar, upload recordings, support your students, and create community around the experience.
You can easily set up payment pages for the course, add upsells at checkout, and once the course is over, you can continue to support your students with a community or paid membership — all within the same space.
It just works. Running this cohort inside the same Circle account as our membership, The Lab, has given me one central place for my students to get support from me while also meeting one another. They’re getting results while also making new friends.
And with their recent launch of Circle AI, it's never been easier to get started.
We look at our Offline events as a member benefit, and we try to run them at cost. Last year's event came up $9,143.39 in the red (woof), and despite increasing the event revenue to $30,459, we still lost $8,317.46. 😅
The economics of these events are hard — specifically because we care about two things:
Making every part of the experience awesome
Keeping the ticket price as low as we could
We succeeded on both, and that created its own cost problem.
We upgraded our meeting space this year, which meant our costs went up. But what we didn't anticipate was that the hotel meeting space prices increased across the board — not only was the bigger room more expensive than last year's smaller room, the bigger room was ~20% more expensive than that same room last year!
Here are our main cost drivers, in order:
We charged $499 for tickets across the board. We had initially planned a $499 early bird price followed by $699 regular pricing, but once we secured an event sponsor, we decided to keep ticket prices at $499. Spoiler: we should've trusted our initial math!
Our food was great...maybe too great?
The biggest point of feedback from last year was that we needed better breakfasts. Specifically, more protein options.
Heard! We improved our breakfast rating from 4.78/10 to 8.1/10; the largest single increase in the whole event over last year. Lunches received an 8.5, and dinners an 8.8.
But, as you can see, lunches and breakfasts (mandated to be hotel catering) were our #1 cost driver. Dinners were expensive too, but that was to be expected; each dinner was a multi-course, pre-fixe menu (they were amazing).
Interestingly, attendees actually wrote in feedback that suggested we don't invest as much in food! Maybe some costs to save there.
Mastermind time was still the clear favorite
Of the two days of programming, the clear favorite was the ~2.5 hours of mastermind time on Tuesday morning. With tables of 5-6 people each, each member had 20-25 minutes to focus on their business, and they loved it. In fact, next year we'll likely have a mastermind on each day.
Second favorite was an Immunity To Change workshop facilitated by Cat Mulvihill!
Assigned seating is highly appreciated
Most of our programming has assigned seating that I personally curate—even dinner on Monday evening. We heard from multiple attendees that they loved this (and that we did a good job doing it).
The entire event is designed to create conversation, and assigned seating stacks the deck in your favor that the conversations will be powerful. I think of it as engineered serendipity.
Not only am I going to keep doing this, but next year we'll even have a pre-event Zoom call for folks to get some basic intros out of the way before they even get to the venue.
The big question: Where next?
This was our second year in Boise ahead of Kit's Craft + Commerce conference. We chose Boise originally because with many attendees already planning to attend C+C, it combined two trips into one.
Synergy!
But that was true for fewer attendees at this year's Offline event. It's hard to take a full week away from your family and business. And after two really impactful days, many attendees felt that was enough!
We've also come to find that traveling into Boise is a little challenging. Connecting flights, delays, and we even had our luggage sent to San Francisco last year!
Attendees aren't just thinking about the ticket price when they come to our Offline event, they're thinking about the full cost of the trip (flights, hotels, etc).
All of this has us thinking about the location of our next Offline event. Personally, I have a few aspirations:
Two events per year — Either one on each coast, or one in the US and one outside the US.
Our own larger event — Instead of putting Offline on the front of C+C, we could host our own broader Creator Science event with a Labmates-only portion on the front end.
Bringing folks to Columbus — We live in Columbus, Ohio, and are obviously pretty partial to it. Not only that, but with a second on the way, it may just be the practical choice.
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These are just a few of our takeaways from our two-day event, but we have a LOT more. This event was planned by my wife and business partner, Mallory, and she came on the podcast this week to talk all about it.
If you want to dig into all of the economics, data, agenda, attendee feedback, and how we're thinking about next year, give it a listen!
PS: Interested in joining our next Offline event? Join The Lab waitlist — we're reopening our doors in August.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT 🎧
#312: Everything We Learned From Our Second In-Person Event — The Good, The Bad, and The Full Economics
This week, my wife Mallory joins me for only her second podcast appearance ever to break down everything from The Lab Offline Powered by Circle — our second annual 2-day in-person retreat for Lab members, hosted June 8–9 at Hotel Renegade in Boise, Idaho. Mallory planned essentially everything: seating charts, venue contracts, menus, swag, run of show. She's worked on it for ~6 months!
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture of what it actually costs to run a high-quality community event, what's worth paying for, and what we'd do differently.
The Lab very proudly runs on Circle, and it's the platform I recommend to anyone building an online community.
But new platforms can be intimidating — whether you're starting fresh or migrating an existing community. If you'd like to have an expert do it for you, this is your opportunity.
My friend Becky Davidson Pierson is a Circle Preferred Product Partner, and has helped a bunch of clients (including a bunch of Lab members) make the move.
She's offering friends of Creator Science $500 off their Circle build if you book a discovery call before August 14.
