28th of Sep - 2nd of Oct. This year. Varberg, Sweden.

Tickets are now on sale. The Early Bird started yesterday. It lasted for 3 hours. We're very pleased that people are so excited :)

Those who dare speak will find our Call for Talks.

Seriously though. We want speakers of all experience levels from all parts of the world. Take a look. The previous conference was a blast.

I sell a bunch of stuff

Shirts, conference tickets, sponsorship slots, talks, workshops, consulting contracts, open source frameworks, programming languages. Some I charge for and some I just sell in terms of trying to improve adoption. I do okay. I'm not an expert but I'm decently practiced.

No-one wants to be sold to. I rarely respond well to someone pushing their new exciting thing on me unless it meshes very well with my own current exciting thing. This is why I spend a lot of time in a community of folks that have largely similar tastes. Many people do love buying into something though. We're all looking for clarity, good solutions to annoying problems or things that affirm who we are and make us feel good about that.

It was not my flashing of white teeth or fancy salesmanship that sold out the Goatmire Early Bird tickets. No trickery. It was the successful marketing of the first event, carried through in the wonderful execution of that event and then just being consistent about shaping things to deliver another good one.

Similarly I don't knock on doors or cold-call anyone for contracting work. I do way more marketing than sales. So I have just about enough inbound that I don't do much outbound which is a much less painful process. Highly qualified leads come to me and we talk through their needs. Whenever I'm without client I certainly start doing a bit of outreach but it is rarely what actually saves me. I am consistently saved by something I did 6 months ago.

The shirts are barely a business. But we sell them on the promise of quality and us being a small mom-and-pop shop which we are. The mom does logistics and the pop does the visuals and marketing. I doubt that we'd see a huge return on ad spend and you don't do outbound sales on a t-shirt. Thankfully it is not expensive to maintain but please buy more shirts.

Talks are easy to get the chance to sell, conferences want submissions, you can just submit. They are less easy to get through. You benefit a lot from having either a name for yourself or past talks to show. But you can have a good shot as a new speaker if you have a solid topic, a good angle and wrap it up into a creative theme. I get more rejections than I get accepted. And I tend to speak at 3-4 conferences a year right now. I get most accepted by conferences I already know and I get my rejections when I try to reach a new event. If I was more diligent I'd reach out and try to see what they are looking for and bla-di-da.

Generally I just market at a relatively steady intensity and show up consistently. Consistency is very important. You can do similar things with explosive outbursts but considering how fragmented the social sphere is now it is really hard to permeate it well. Being around a lot is one of my major contributions in the Elixir space. This means people know my name. I attempt to contribute without expectation of a direct return. I see a lot of indirect returns. People I want to reach respond to my messages. On cold outreach I often get responses from Elixir CTOs that are a bit excited because they recognize me. I can ask people in the community for things and they often just do them. And of course when I get asked I tend to respond in kind.

Whether sales, marketing or community work I try to maintain trust and clear communication. And I try to be consistent. Over time you'll find that you build a lot of credit with your environment.

I don't frame this as sales to be cynical. I frame this as sales because I think a lot of people go off the rails the moment they start trying to sell things.

I'm here on email or on Bluesky and the Fediverse if you want to reach me :)

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.