#248: Justin Moore - Lessons from hosting his first 3-day event

Justin Moore [00:00:00]:
I can't remember ever feeling this happy, laughing this hard, feeling as connected as I have these last four days. And so even though I basically broke even, and even if I, like, don't fill out my mastermind like I was hoping to, this was 100% worth it. 110% worth it.

Jay Clouse [00:00:31]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Last week, my good friend and frequent podcast guest, Justin Moore, hosted his first in person event, sponsor games. This was three days designed to help people master their sponsorship pitch, get expert coaching in real time, connect with fellow creators, and land repeat brand deals. Now if you remember the last conversation between Justin and I, he was launching his book and feeling a little nervous about the planning for this event. I'll link to that episode in the show notes if you haven't already listened to it. But I was excited to join him in San Antonio for sponsor games. I had my bags packed and everything ready to go, and then I got sick, and I had to cancel my trip.

Jay Clouse [00:01:12]:
So as a consolation prize, Justin agreed to stop by the show and close the loop on his experience organizing this event and brain dump all the learnings he had along the way. Since you're here, I'd love for you to share on Instagram that you're listening to the show. I love seeing where people are listening and that people are listening. Just tag me at Jay Clouse on Instagram. But without further ado, let's hear from Justin. Justin, you're back on the show.

Justin Moore [00:01:41]:
Jay, I'm back on the show, and my voice might sound a bit hoarse because I just got back from San Antonio for my first in person event, and my body is shutting down. I think that's what's happening, or maybe not. It just feels like it is.

Jay Clouse [00:01:56]:
It's one of those situations where, like I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seems to be true for me, where we spend so much time getting ready for something that we don't even have, like, like, the luxury of getting sick. And then the moment we have space, our body's like, okay. I've been feeling this.

Justin Moore [00:02:12]:
It's a %. I definitely got sick a week before also. Luckily, it wasn't, you know, leading up to the event. But, dude, I have so many things in my brain that I can't wait to just dump on this conversation, you know, because, I was thinking about our our previous chat leading up to the event, and I was just I just remembered being so stressed out. And I I literally was so stressed out leading up to the event. You know, we did so much work preparing for this, but not just preparing, but also having all these backup plans in case things went wrong. And it's crazy for me to say this, dude, but, like, literally nothing went wrong. Not one thing the entire week.

Justin Moore [00:02:52]:
Like, there were literally, I feel like, hundreds of things that could have gone wrong. And I think just our, like, insane preparation led to just everything going off without a hitch. Actually, that's not true. One thing did go wrong. My BFF wasn't there. That was one thing that went wrong.

Jay Clouse [00:03:10]:
Yeah, dude. I was I mean, my bag is literally still packed. I have a suitcase packed to go to sponsor games. I just haven't even unpacked it yet.

Justin Moore [00:03:18]:
Dude, I'm I'm so bummed that you got sick. That really sucked.

Jay Clouse [00:03:22]:
Well, I watched it on Instagram from afar, and it looked fantastic. It looked amazing. Glad to hear everything went well. Actually, last we spoke on air, you were in the midst of, like, the book launch. The event was obviously on your mind, but you weren't full court press on that yet. You're talking about how stressful Q1 was going to be. At the end of Q1, you'd have this this exhalation. Are you feeling that right now?

Justin Moore [00:03:44]:
I think I'm not quite ready to exhale mainly because my inbox is an absolute cluster f right now because of ignoring it for a week, basically. And so I'm, like, digging out of it right now. And, I've also got, you know, some wrap up activities related to the event in terms of continued promotion for some of our sponsors that were at the event on email and socials, and then also the winners, like the finalists and the grand prize winner kinda wrapping up things with them and wiring that big fat five k check to our winner, Molly. And so once I kinda get past that, I will maybe start to exhale. I don't know. I feel like a lot of people have asked me, like, you know, give us the post event download of, like, learnings and what you do differently and all that. And, I don't know, man. Maybe maybe it'd be interesting to just kinda go into, some of that stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:04:34]:
I think it'd be great. And maybe before we even get into learnings, you just get, like, the 10,000 foot overview of what the arc of the event looked like. Because it was a very different design of an event than we typically see.

Justin Moore [00:04:47]:
So the event is called sponsor games. And from the very early days of planning this, I wanted it to kind of be an anti conference. You know, I've been a creator for almost fifteen years along with my wife, and I've been going to creator focused events for over a decade, like VidCon and VidSummit and Playlist Live and, basically, any creator event you could think of. I've probably been to it over the last decade. It never really made sense to me that there was no event focused on sponsorships because I would go to these events, and there'd be, like, maybe one or two talks about brand partnerships, sponsorships. And that never really made sense to me because that was, like, the number one way we were making money. And so I thought, like, why aren't, like, half of the talks about this or at least a quarter of the talks? But it was almost exclusively about audience growth. You know, how do you get more followers, get more views on your videos, you know, etcetera.

Justin Moore [00:05:39]:
And so this has been literally a dream of mine to have an event like this. Or I I was hoping that someone else would do it. That was really the thing. I was like, I hope someone creates an event like this one day, and I was I thought that for the last decade. And so, eventually, when I started educating creators myself, I realized, I guess no one's gonna do it. It's gotta be me because all the events that keep popping up are all either focused on the industry side. Oh, let's, like, network and, like, you know, people from the brand side and agency side and some yeah. Creators, you could come too, but it was always kinda like an afterthought.

Justin Moore [00:06:07]:
And I was like, let me let me do this just for creators. And so as I mentioned, I wanted it to kinda be this anti conference where I basically made a list of everything that I I have always hated about events, like keynotes and panels and workshops that were always felt a little bit detached from reality. That was literally my charge to my team when I was, like, when we've sat down nine months ago to start planning this event is, like, that was my nonnegotiables. I was, like, we are not doing like, here's a bunch of things that we're not doing. So for example, I didn't want to have speakers. Right? I wanted to be in control of the programming, start to finish. And when you have speakers, either, you know, there's unpredictability in terms of their reliability, the content of what they're gonna talk about. Is it gonna be compelling and valuable for, you know, the people who are attending? But no speakers also meant a bunch of other challenging things, which is, like, there's no halo effect on ticket sales, you know, of the people who want to hear them speak.

Justin Moore [00:07:05]:
Oh, I wanna see that person. I'm gonna go buy and go attend that event. Also couldn't lean on the speakers to promote to their audience, you know, on Twitter or on, you know, their newsletter or whatever. So that's tough. But that also meant that all the programming was on us, not just the logistics of the event. But if we're designing all the programming, that's just, like, an added aspect to making the event really amazing. And so that was like I feel like we were kind of handing our handicapping ourself from the beginning because, like, that felt like a big lift in addition to, like, doing this event for the very first time. Other things that I made wrote on my list that I hated events, food.

Justin Moore [00:07:40]:
Food always sucks at every event I've ever been to ever. So I was like, okay. We're gonna, like, literally spend almost half the budget on food. I didn't know if it was gonna be half, but I was like, I wanna spend most of the money on food. And so we went and we, you know, taste tested different caterers, and we figured out what the different options were. And so we made we made the decision that, like, when people attend, we want people to spend the least amount of money possible over the four days of the event. That was the goal. And so we had catered food every day.

Justin Moore [00:08:07]:
We balled out on coffee. We had a coffee cart, like a barista there, which they just went above and beyond. One of the guys dressed up as a wizard for the event. It was amazing. Amazing. We had a laser printing our logo for the event on top of the, like, the phone

Jay Clouse [00:08:26]:
I saw that.

Justin Moore [00:08:27]:
For the coffee, which is crazy. And so people didn't have to pay for coffee. We had a bunch of, you know, like, pastries and stuff for people. We had chips. We had we got, like, food sponsors, Low and Slow, big shout out to them, as well as Topo Chico sponsored. We also had tons of cases of Topo Chico. Blobs, shout out to them, like, little candies that we had everywhere. So, like, basically, we tried to figure out, like, how do we make people not pay spend any money? And that meant, obviously, a a much larger cost for us, but several people actually commented on that.

Justin Moore [00:08:57]:
Like, I just realized I haven't spent any money over the last, like, four days. And I was so proud of that because the the other advantage of that, actually, is that when you pay for catering, like, for lunches especially, you don't lose people for two hours or two and a half hours because, oh, let's go out. Let's go find lunch. And, oh, we're just talking. And, oh my god. We we missed the next talk because, you know, we've been out here at lunch for two hours and this type of thing. So with all the catering on-site, especially because of the tight programming schedule that we were designing, we could not afford to, like, have people missing. Right? So balled out on catering.

Justin Moore [00:09:30]:
We balled out on the venue, dude. Big shout out to the the Briscoe Western Art Museum they had. This thing called the Jack Gunther Pavilion right on the Riverwalk, and the setting was just chef's kiss, man. You look right out the window, and there's, like, the river boats going by. Like, it's just, like it was beautiful weather, dude. But all of these, like, nonnegotiables that I was just like, we have to do this means that it just costs way more than I expected, dude.

Jay Clouse [00:09:56]:
What did you expect?

Justin Moore [00:09:57]:
I mean, I thought that we were gonna spend maybe, like, 30 or $40 all in, and we ended up spending $67,000. For most of the time of this planning process up until the last, like, month, I thought I was gonna take an absolute bath. I thought I was gonna lose, like, 30 or $40 is what I thought.

Jay Clouse [00:10:16]:
Is it like a wedding where a bunch of expenses come up late in the process and you're, like, screw it, another $5,000? Fine. We need to get this done.

Justin Moore [00:10:24]:
Kind of. Yes. I started throwing money at all problems towards the end because I was just like, you know what? I don't I can't my brain cannot possibly process any other things going wrong. So, yes, solve our problems with money, I would told Sarah, my event planner. And so very much was, like, I had that attitude YOLO towards the end. But I think it was, like, it was, like, way harder to sell tickets than I expected, dude. You know, I had this, like, really ambitious vision of, like I had said, okay. We're gonna cap it at a 20 attendees.

Justin Moore [00:10:52]:
That was, like, my I never, like, stated that publicly. But, like, that was, like, what we were planning in terms of looking at the venues and things like that. Dude, it was so hard to sell tickets. Like, I think part of it is that it's the first year. No one knows what to expect. There's no hype video from the first year like there is in all subsequent years, you know, where people can, like, see, oh, wow. People go to this thing, and it looks cool, and they're learning stuff. It was kind of me being like, hey, everyone.

Justin Moore [00:11:17]:
Trust me. It's gonna be great. Like, I'm basically leaning a % on my credibility of someone, you know, okay. I'm gonna trust Justin. I'm gonna pay, you know, $600. That was, like, the first early bird ticket price was $600. I'm gonna pay Justin six hundred bucks, And I gotta pay for airfare. I gotta pay for accommodation.

Justin Moore [00:11:33]:
So, you know, probably $2 all in. I don't know. Something like that. Is this worthwhile? The other really tricky thing was that I actually had quite a few people message me and be like, should I attend the event, or should I buy your course? Because it's, like, kinda comparable price. So, like, I just wanna learn. What's the best way to learn? And, like, I just didn't expect that that was gonna be I mean, it makes sense. Right? Like, on the you know, now that I think about it, when I started getting that message. But, like, that also was, like, a tricky thing that people were trying to realize is, like, you know, because of the fact that, like, I was marketing, the fact that you'll learn similar concepts, people were just making that calculation in their head.

Justin Moore [00:12:13]:
And so I think I had quite a few people who just decided to just join the course instead of incurring the the cost.

Jay Clouse [00:12:18]:
That's really interesting because Yeah. One of the strengths of your event, in my opinion, is that it's very outcome focused, which most events aren't. Most events are, like, come Right. Consume all of this content, you know, like, just like, ah, content. And you're like, no. This is very specifically we are going to get you to be comfortable pitching. We're gonna teach you our methodology. We're gonna be very hands on.

Jay Clouse [00:12:40]:
We're gonna walk you through the entire process. And that is, in retrospect, I hadn't thought about this either, that is a very similar promise to your products, your content. So I could totally see from the audience standpoint, well,

Justin Moore [00:12:54]:
a or b. Also, though, like, I think a lot of people may have chosen the course route because they were terrified of the idea about, they were like introverts. In fact, Chanel told me this. Sorry, Chanel. I'm just shouting you out here or putting you on blast. I'm really proud of you, though, Chanel, because she told me I'm terrified of this. I don't know what to expect. I'm an introvert, but I'm ripping the Band Aid off, and I wanna learn this stuff.

Justin Moore [00:13:18]:
And so I'm going. I'm doing it. And so I think there's probably a lot of people who maybe weren't as brave as Chanel to, like, confront this this fear of, like, kinda doing this in person. Oh, really? So that that also probably prevented some people from from attending. I also very much was, like, marketing it as, like, you can't just sit on your phone and, like, play Candy Crush or, like, check out and, like, answer emails. Like, you're gonna be, like, locked in for, like, three days. And, like, I think maybe not a lot of people are used to that. And so that also probably excluded, like, right off the bat, like, people who may have just not been excited about that type of engagement at an event.

Justin Moore [00:13:55]:
But I knew that going into it. Also, we basically didn't sell any tickets for the last, like, sixty days.

Jay Clouse [00:14:02]:
Really?

Justin Moore [00:14:03]:
Yeah. So the way we did the pricing was, like, it was increasing at certain dates. So $600 leading up to, like, the first early bird milestone, then it jumped to 700 for, like, two weeks, then it was 800, then it was 900, then it was a thousand. And, like, basically, 95% of tickets were sold at the $600 tier. That was super stressful because I thought I just thought that, like, you know, I hired a bunch of event consultants, not a bunch, but, like, two or three event consultants. And, like, people said that most people don't make a decision or pull a trigger until about six weeks out. And so I was hoping that, like, okay. Six weeks out, we're gonna see a flurry of sales, but that wasn't the case.

Justin Moore [00:14:38]:
And so, ultimately, we had about 40 ticket sales total. So down from a 20, which was our initial estimate. Roughly about five people didn't end up showing up. We had maybe three or four refund requests, and I basically honored every refund request. I wasn't like, oh, no. That wasn't the you know, you didn't, you know, ask for it. You honored refunds that weren't requested. I just felt what what Jay is referring to is I sent him a refund because I felt bad.

Justin Moore [00:15:11]:
You weren't there, so I'm not gonna take your money. Like, I just I don't know, dude. I don't know.

Jay Clouse [00:15:17]:
After a quick break for our sponsors, we'll hear more about Justin's experience organizing sponsor games. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Justin Moore. Of those 40 people, what percentage of them are, like, repeat customers? Were they, like, course students? Were they Yeah. Book purchasers? Like, what type of crossover did you see here?

Justin Moore [00:15:44]:
I would say about 30% of people who attended were in my current Wizards Guild sponsorship coaching program, about 30%. Thirty % had taken my course, Brand Deal Wizard. 30% had read the book but not done any sort of coaching or course stuff. And then about 10% hadn't read the book either. So it was like 90% of people had done something. They were, like, in my ecosystem, you know, and and kind of were familiar with the concepts of what I was teaching, basically. And so that was really interesting because you very much had an advantage to compete in the games if you were, like, familiar with the principles of, like, what I teach. Basically, though, what we had is day one was a welcome party.

Justin Moore [00:16:26]:
So we rented out this amazing rooftop area called One Watson, in San Antonio. Shout out to One Watson. They did an amazing job. We had, like, amazing food, amazing desserts. And that was, like, the initial check-in day. So, basically, we did badges. So let me talk about this because this was the best thing that we decided to do. So what we did is we the format of how we structured everything was we broke everyone down into groups of four or five, and we hand curated who was in the groups.

Justin Moore [00:16:57]:
So we did an ingestion survey, like, maybe a month out, and we asked, like, a bunch of different questions. We asked, like, your content type. We wanted to get your main social handles. Are you attending with a friend? So we wanted to know if anyone was, like, coming with a friend. It was mandatory. You had to fill this out. So we had a lot of data on that type of thing. And so when we were putting the groups together, we wanted to, number one, ensure that people were on groups with their friends because that would make it way better.

Justin Moore [00:17:21]:
And we didn't want just an entire group of YouTubers. We wanted to cross pollinate. And so if we had two friends who were, like, gaming YouTubers or something, we wanted to put someone with a newsletter and someone in, like, a b to b SaaS or whatever. We wanted to kinda cross pollinate in that regard. And so that was the first pass of, like, creating all the groups. And then the second pass is I sat with Bianca on my team, and I basically kind of knew everyone. And so I changed teams around for personality fit. I was like, I think those two people will get along because I know them.

Justin Moore [00:17:52]:
They don't know each other, but I know them both individually, and I think they'll get along. And so we kinda did it, like, this last minute, kinda second pass to just, like, team fit, basically. And so then we assigned a color for each group. So we had different colored lanyards. And so, dude, it was so brilliant. When people arrived at the welcome party, you know how it can be sometimes awkward and you're like, I don't know anyone and this type of thing. I was literally going around and be like, alright. Team red.

Justin Moore [00:18:20]:
You're on team red. Here we go. I'm gonna come over and introduce you to one of your teammates. Let's go.

Jay Clouse [00:18:25]:
Yeah.

Justin Moore [00:18:25]:
And so immediately, everyone had at least, like, one person to talk to. And, oh my god, the feedback that we got on that right off the bat was like, oh my god, this is so great because I had someone to talk to. We didn't really know what being on a team meant. You know? Like, why is why are we on a team? But, like, instantly, it was like icebreaker. We set the tone very early. I did, like, this little speech after about an hour into the event. And I said everyone was, like, in different pockets of, like, the rooftop area. And I was like, alright.

Justin Moore [00:18:55]:
I got a mic. And I was like, alright, everyone. Get up. Come and make a semicircle around me. And people were like, what the heck? I was like, did you not hear me? Like, come up and do a semicircle around me. Right? And so everyone, like, gathered around. It was great. And so I basically said, alright.

Justin Moore [00:19:09]:
Who has the craziest story of what they did to prepare for this weekend? I know you didn't know what to expect, but, like, did anyone, like, try to do, like, research and, like, study and things like that? And people did some crazy stuff, dude. They trained custom GPT bots to quiz them on, like, book material. That's wild. Molly, who ultimately ended up being the grand prize winner, she asked her personal trainer to quiz her while she was doing exercises. So he'd be like, rope method, go. And she'd be like and she'd be like doing, like, a bench press. And so a bunch of people, like, shared, like, what they did to prepare. And then they didn't know this was happening, but I basically did, okay.

Justin Moore [00:19:47]:
By round of applause, who had the coolest thing to prepare? And, like, people would, like, cheer. And so the loudest applause was, a guy by the name of Doc Williams. He got the loudest applause, and so he won a Shure move mic too.

Jay Clouse [00:20:00]:
Nice. So Shure was one

Justin Moore [00:20:00]:
of our sponsors. And so he didn't know that was happening. And so, oh, that was so cool. And so it was like it was like a great tone setter because people didn't know what to expect. Like, it's like this kinda fun game, you know, atmosphere, almost like a carnival, where people didn't know they'd be winning prizes and all this stuff. Right? So that was a really cool tone setter for the evening. I gotta give a big shout out to Esprit. Devorah has an amazing podcast for women in tech.

Justin Moore [00:20:23]:
Esprit did two things that were really, really kind on the opening party. She came up to me and was like, hey. I have my mic here. Can I, like, interview people for you? And just, like, ask why they're here and, you know, like, this type of thing. And she just went around and literally interviewed every single person who came and, like, sent me a Google Drive folder of, like, 30 whatever amazing, like, interviews from people. That was just, like, so I didn't ask her to do that. That was just, like, amazing. She also got my wife, April, and I champagne to, like, just, like, have a moment, like, to toast each other.

Justin Moore [00:20:56]:
So those those are just, like, really kind. And, like, people were doing things like that throughout the entire event. I did hire a photographer, shout out to Jessa, and videographer, Isaac and Joey. They were amazing. They were captured. I have 500 gigabytes of footage for the event and over 5,000 photos that we still have to go through. That was crazy. So the opening party set the tone.

Justin Moore [00:21:18]:
It was amazing.

Jay Clouse [00:21:19]:
I I wanna get a couple of quick clarifications. So you said the total budget was like $67,000 You balled out on food, you balled out on coffee, you had this amazing event or venue. How would you proportion that total spend by some of these major spend categories?

Justin Moore [00:21:36]:
So the venue was all in, it was about $15. I've got to be a bit careful here because I don't want to divulge rates of some of the people that I hired, in case they don't want that competition public. Rough proportions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So videography, photography, and event production was about $25 to that. You know, a a big cost that I I just didn't really think about.

Justin Moore [00:22:00]:
This is stupid, but I didn't think about going into it. But, like, travel and accommodations for my team.

Jay Clouse [00:22:05]:
Mhmm. Mhmm.

Justin Moore [00:22:06]:
To have everyone there, sing in San Antonio for basically four or five nights, flying, all that, was almost $10. And then decor, signage, and swag, like this sick ass sorry. Sick hat. That you know, hat you know, we got a swag. We got pens. We got notebooks. I got a free copy of the book for everyone. So, like, signage, I I I gotta step and repeat.

Justin Moore [00:22:32]:
I chose to invest in a lot of these decor related things that most people don't in a first year event, mainly because I knew that I'm gonna be having this event every year. And so I did invest in a lot of these. And so all of that was about $10. And then the remaining stuff was catering. The welcome party ended up being about $4,500 for the welcome party. The VIP dinner so we ended up having a VIP dinner for the finalists and all the sponsors and my team and all that, and that was about $3. And then catering, coffee, all that was about $8 or so.

Jay Clouse [00:23:09]:
Okay. Well, that's that's less on the, food side than I would have expected. So some of the surprising takeaways I had from there were like, like you said, team travel was higher than I would have guessed also. I just wouldn't have had a construct for it. SWAG probably came out higher than we thought. Benefit of self publishing is that it was a lot easier for you to do your book as part of that because of the catering a little bit lower. Can you talk about the process you guys went through for selecting your event? Because this is also, I think, new to folks.

Justin Moore [00:23:38]:
Oh my God. Okay, Now is the time in the conversation where I need to give an absolutely massive testimonial for Sarah Loretta, who was my event planner. So nine months ago at CEX, we were literally sitting around a table, and I was like, I wanna have an event. I wanna do an in person event one day. And Sarah was, like, sitting next to me, and she was like, oh, really? And so she sued on that and ultimately came back and pitched me on running my event and helping me plan it. And so she put together an amazing proposal. And if you don't know Sarah, she is unbelievable. I started working with her maybe a couple years ago designing some Notion templates for me for my brand deal wizard course.

Justin Moore [00:24:22]:
She redesigned my previous website. We've done a lot of work together over the years, but I really didn't know that event planning was something that she had up her sleeve. But she's run, you know, quite a few events, over the years. And so she she basically said, like, I'm gonna come out of event planning retirement just for you because I believe in this vision so much. And that was what sold me because I was like, she knows. She understands my business. She understands the brand. And so, like, I cannot state how much she did to help bring this event to life.

Justin Moore [00:24:50]:
She This is a good ex anecdote. In addition to just all the logistical stuff, she was out there wheeling and dealing, bro. She was the one who got the food sponsorships. She was the one she got several people to buy tickets because she painted the vision. She like, a few people bought last minute tickets that she met at South by Southwest that were like, oh, there's an event in San Antonio. Like and so, like, she was just literally out there wheeling and dealing, getting sponsored. Like, it was amazing. I never I didn't realize, like, that was gonna be an element of her event planning services was, like, being this, like, hugely vocal advocate for this event.

Justin Moore [00:25:24]:
But just, like, dude, she was a storage container for us for, you know, months. Like, everything was shipping to her house, and she just, like Sarah is incredible. I don't know if you want more event planning business, Sarah, but, like, anyone listening here that wants to put it on an event, I get first dibs, so don't try and hire her during when I'm gonna do my next event. But she really is. She's she's incredible. And she's one of those people where it's like she's so accountable. Right? I never worried that it wasn't gonna get done, and I had to, like, oh, double check. Did you do this, this, this? No.

Justin Moore [00:25:52]:
She designed the entire, like, this huge Notion database for us to track everything. She designed the budget. She liaised with all all the vendors. Okay. So to back to your original question about the venue, she RFP'd. RFP means request for proposal. She sent an RFP out to 42 venues, bro. 42 venues.

Justin Moore [00:26:12]:
So going back to how we chose the venue and the time of the year and all that, I knew I wanted to do it shortly after the book launched. So, like, in the March time frame, I didn't want it to be too close to spring break. For anyone, it was tough because everyone's spring break is different times of the year. I wanted it to be in a place of the country that was relatively warm in March, and I wanted to be as kind of central in the country as possible for people to get to on both coasts. And so we were basically thinking San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, Scottsdale, New Mexico. We were, like, kind of thinking about those types of areas for climate. And so all of the 42 venues were basically in in those cities. Crazy.

Jay Clouse [00:26:52]:
Yeah. That's such a benefit of having somebody like Sarah. I would have no idea how to do, like, an RFP for 42 venues. There's probably some, like, portal for this that you just don't know unless you don't know it. But also, how do you set that up to actually get people interested in hosting your event and get the best terms? That's a huge benefit to having somebody like Sarah on your side. Totally. After one last break, Justin shares his final takeaways from hosting the first annual sponsor games. So don't go anywhere.

Jay Clouse [00:27:22]:
We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Justin.

Justin Moore [00:27:33]:
Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:27:33]:
Well, let's go to things that you would do the same and things that you would do differently, starting with things that you would do well, you pick. Which one would you like to do first?

Justin Moore [00:27:44]:
Okay. I would say that I probably would change up some gameplay mechanics for certain games. I didn't realize how much people would love the role play. We only did that on a few of the games, but, like, people were asking at the breaks. Like, hey. Can we do more role play? Like, instead of q and a, can we do more role play? Like, that was the most valuable thing. So I think, like, changing up the mechanics of some of the gameplay is something that I would do again. I would say even though I was nervous about the intimacy in terms of the quantity of people that were there, I think it was gonna be a lot larger.

Justin Moore [00:28:22]:
It was a disguised blessing because I was able to call on everyone by name. I'd be like, Jerry. Yeah. You have a question? Or this person so, like, I was able to know everyone's name because it was intimate. And so I do think we probably could push the envelope in terms of how many people attend more, you know, maybe fifty, seventy five, a hundred, something like that, but not much more than that, I don't think. Because having that intimate size, a lot of people commented on that. I would say locking in sponsors way sooner than we did would be preferred. I had several sponsors lock in right at the last minute, and that was just chaotic to try to get, you know, signage for their logos and stuff on on stuff.

Justin Moore [00:29:03]:
And so, again, I just think so many things are gonna be easier for years two and beyond because we have the hype video. We have proven track record. We've got testimonials of attendees. We've got testimonials of sponsors now. And so I really wanna start locking in sponsors way further in advance because it was just so stressful there at the last minute. I literally had one sponsor that fell through at the last minute that I was negotiating with, like, 11PM the night before we had to print all the signage. So it was just it was crazy, dude. Let me talk about something that I had a lot of fear about.

Justin Moore [00:29:34]:
So I actually launched my mastermind at the event, at the very end. I've never had a mastermind before, and it's called Wizards Mastermind. And I had a lot of fear about doing that. I've seen that pitched at other events in the past where it's like, hey. You're here, and, like, guess what? Now it's time to join the next thing. And it's, like, super expensive, and, like, you're not really gonna get your money's worth unless you join that thing. And so I was, like, really I I just had a lot of fear about it feeling just, like, not nice. You know? And so I was able to design it in such a way where I pitched the offer on the very first day because I basically revealed that the grand prize winner is going to get a free seat in the mastermind.

Justin Moore [00:30:17]:
So I was like, here's what you're competing for. You're not just competing for $5 in cash and all these other amazing sponsor prizes, but you're also gonna get one of the 15 spots in my mastermind. And so, like, I was able to just, like, really excitedly talk about it because these are the stakes. It's, like, amazing. Right? I had a a lot of fear talking about this mastermind. It was, like, really, really valuable stuff. But, again, I still felt that, like, fear inside of, like, doing this from the stage. And I also didn't be like, and if you run to the back of the room now, you, you know, you'll get this fast action bonus, whatever.

Justin Moore [00:30:47]:
I didn't do that. And so, like, I don't know. Maybe there's things I would change about the way in which I talk about the offer, but, like, like, honestly, candidly, like, that was this was one of the ways I was hoping that I would, like, not lose money. It was, like, you know, invite people to join the mastermind, and so the economics of the event would, like, make sense. But, like, that was just I don't know. I've never done that before, and so that just felt uncomfortable, I would say.

Jay Clouse [00:31:06]:
Well, I guess one of my last questions was, you mentioned that, you know, you didn't have the ticket sales near the end that you wished you had. So would you change your ticket pricing or marketing strategy the next time around?

Justin Moore [00:31:17]:
This is bizarre to think, but, like, I actually think I might increase the price. I priced it the way I did because I was also feeling as though I was kind of anchored to other types of creator events. Well, this one charges this much, and this one charges this much. But now that the event is over, I've realized that this is not like those events. This is like someone told me that it felt like coaching, a coaching experience. And, fundamentally, I feel like that puts it into a different pricing category, I think. You got personalized support for, like, basically, you know, three or four days. It's almost more kind of like a retreat or like a mastermind almost, where, you know, I've gone to these, and I'm sure you've gone to these where, like, those are, like, multi thousand dollar type investments usually, especially for the level of, like, catering and experience that we curated.

Justin Moore [00:32:13]:
And so I think I was just, like, nervous because it was my first event that, like, no one would come. Now seeing the outcomes of, like, what people got out of participating, I'll be way more comfortable pricing it relative to the value that people received. Not gonna go crazy with it, obviously, but, like, again, it was just, like I think it's it's the same thing that people go through when they first sell something directly to their audience, like a course or coaching. They they wanna start low because they're nervous no one's gonna pay. And so I think that's the same insight that I have here is, like, I'm I would be more comfortable with less people, but a larger investment.

Jay Clouse [00:32:46]:
Is there anything else that I haven't asked or that you really wanted to make sure you mentioned that we haven't done so?

Justin Moore [00:32:52]:
I would say that these four days was one of the best weeks of my entire life, other than getting married to my wife and having my kids. I can't remember ever feeling this happy, laughing this hard, feeling as connected as I do with people as I have these last four days. And so even though I basically broke even, and even if I, like, don't fill out my mastermind, like, I was hoping to, like, not lose a bunch of money, this was 100% worth it. 110% worth it. And all of the stress and strife and worry that I went through to, like, actually pull this off, if there's anyone listening here that has this dream of, like, getting together with people in person, if you can swing it, I say go for it, especially, honestly, in the age of this big question mark about AI and what this means for creators. I had this question on one of the final days. It's like, what do I see as, like, the future of the creator economy? And, like, what does this mean for educators when all information is free and we have a personal tutor in our pocket and, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. You can't replace that.

Justin Moore [00:34:00]:
You can't replace in person moments. And this made me even more bullish on doubling down on in person experiences in my business moving forward.

Jay Clouse [00:34:16]:
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know those reviews go a long way. Truly, sincerely, so please consider doing so. I'd recommend going back to listen to our previous conversation together, episode two thirty nine, if you haven't already, so you can get a sense of where Justin's head was at just a few short months ago. It'll show you what is possible in a possible in a short period of time. I think it will inspire you. And if you want to learn more about Justin, visit his website at creatorwizard.com or pick up his book, Sponsor Magnet at sponsormagnet.com. There's a link to both in the show notes.

Jay Clouse [00:34:48]:
Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next week.