We’re in the process of planning our first annual conference for our open source product, dbt. So I’ve been thinking a lot about ticketing strategy — pricing, promotions, etc.
I wanted to share my thoughts on this on the off chance that it would be valuable to someone else, or (even better) there are folks out there who can bring additional nuance to my current thinking 🤗
What are my grounding prices?
The general admission ticket grounds our pricing at the top. The price point here is an expression of what we think the event is worth as well as our product positioning:
- Venture backed SaaS companies typically host events for cheaper — the have 💰money in the bank and you’re already paying them for software.
- Open source projects typically host events at higher price points––the software is free, you pay for events and education.
We released a SaaS version of our product about a year ago, but the majority of the 1200+ companies using dbt are using the open source product. We want to price accordingly.
Then I used an “Average Sale Price” price point to ground pricing at the bottom. This is far from being a profitable event for us, and tickets are central to helping us offset the costs of the event. This is the average…
