Issue 167 15th October 2019

Greach

Greach 2020

Last year, I picked up the baton of Greach Conference organization. Shortly after, @jmiguel joined me in the organization.

I am pleased to announce Greach 2020:

Greach 2020.
🔗https://greachconf.com.
📅 26th, 27th, 28th March 2020.
📍Google Campus Madrid.
🎟Tickets start at 99 EUR (VAT Excluded).

Greach 2020 - Call for Papers Open

Don't wait to submit!. We will be accepting talks before Call for Papers deadline (January 10th).

We are looking for talks about:

Micronaut, Quarkus, Ktor, Grails, Ratpack, Geb, Griffon, Gradle, Kotlin, Groovy, Spock, Spek, Judit, Cloud (Azure, GCP AWS), Microservices, Android.

In general, anything that may be of interest to JVM developers.

Greach 2020 - Target Audience

If you are JVM developer, you should come to Greach.

If you have never been to Greach, 2019 Youtube Playlist and our 2019 Flickr album should give you an idea about the conference.

Greach 2019 - Profit and Loss

Income and expenses were in the range of 21.000 EUR - 22.000 EUR.

We almost break even but without accounting for my time (I logged XXX hours in Harvest - I am embarrassed to say the exact number), neither @jmiguel's time. So, we closed in a big red.

Moreover, we created a company to run the conference which also costs us money during the rest of the year (accounting legal etc).

I don't believe in doing this just for the community. If we don't manage to make Greach a conference which pays the bills, it compensates at least partially the time we put in to organize it and it pays for the legal structure to run the conference I don't think there will be Greach 2021. I have other side projects, such as this newsletter, where I could use this energy/time.

Let's go through some Greach 2019 recap in case you are interested:

Greach 2019 - Tickets Issued

We issued 156 tickets.

We had:

27 Speakers
38 Tickets for sponsors. Sponsorship plans include tickets for the sponsor's employees. Moreover, booth personnel gets free entrance to the conference as well.
Invitations: 12 invitations. For example, me and José Miguel are in this bucket.
Diversity: 2
Paid tickets: 77 paid tickets

That it is to say around 50% of people in the conference does not pay. Not really true because sponsors pay for their employee tickets via sponsorship but you understand what I mean.

Greach 2019 - Fixed vs Variable costs

Fixed costs. Does not matter how many attendees we get, we need to pay these costs. For example, venue rent or speakers travel and accommodation, speakers/sponsors Dinner, hosting etc.
Variable costs. Each person in the conference costs us this extra money. E.g. T-Shirt + swag, Friday Party, Food & Coffee

Fixed costs amount for 52%. I was really worried about getting more attendance since our venue had capacity for more people.

Greach 2019 - Variable cost per attendee:

Food and Coffee during the three days: 60 EUR
Misc (T-Shirt, swag ...) : 8 EUR
Party: 3 € - On Friday, we pay some beers after the conference is over.

That it is to say around 71 EUR per attendee.

Sponsors attendees cost us around 100 EUR since we invite them to a dinner the day before the conference.

Speakers which do not require travel and accommodation covered by us cost us around 100 EUR. We invite them to the wednesday dinner as well.

Speakers which require travel and accommodation covered by us cost us around 450 EUR. We invite them to the Wednesday dinner and travel and expense averages to 350.

Greach 2019 - Speakers

We had 27 speakers.

We paid hotels and flights for 8 of them.

The truth is that it is more difficult for us to accept a speaker if he needs his travel and expenses covered by Greach. I suspect that it is the same for every conference. We could not afford to pay travel and expenses for 27 speakers.

Greach 2019 - Income

We have a 54% of our income through sponsorship with 46% coming from tickets sales.

Greach 2019 - Not possible without sponsors

I want to thank publicly again Greach 2019 sponsors:

Many of these sponsors are recurring sponsors. They are 50% of the income. Literally, without them Greach would have not been possible all these years.

Thanks.