An Experiment with Livestream Tickets

This year, for the first time, we’re selling livestream tickets for The Lean Startup Conference, December 10 – 11. In the past, we’ve offered the livestream free to community groups. But over the years, based on attendee feedback, we’ve fine-tuned the livestream and are now confident we can provide you not only with a great live experience but with a very useful bundle of recordings, too. Selling livestream tickets means we can offer them to individuals, not just to groups, and we can guarantee better quality video, too.

But, of course, there’s more. We’ve spent years refining the way we shoot the video, the software we use, the tech-support we provide viewers, the onscreen chat we moderate during the event, and the Q&A participation we offer. All of that means that livestreamers enjoy a lot benefits. You will:

• Catch all the main-stage talks and our most popular breakouts live on December 10 and 11. You get high-quality video of every talk in the Grand Ballroom. That includes all keynotes in the mornings, and our most popular breakouts in the afternoons.
• Get a downloadable video recording of all conference sessions, including all breakouts that take place outside the Grand Ballroom. The recorded video is a special perk for livestreamers, and we’ll send it out shortly after the conference. (For in-person attendees, the recorded video is available only as part of our our top-tier tickets.)
• Participate fully in Q&As. We field questions via an online form, even for attendees in the room, and you share equal opportunity to ask questions. Livestreamers are not second-class citizens for Q&A.
• Connect with other livestream attendees in our special moderated chat. Our terrific livestream coordinator, Michele Kimble, moderates a dedicated chat session with all the livestreamers. You not only meet other remote attendees, but you also have Michele on hand to answer questions, make sure you have all the key info and troubleshoot any technical problems.
• Meet other attendees via our conference social network. We have a dedicated social network for the event, which livestreamers and in-person attendees alike can use to connect with any conference participant.

The pricing is simple: A livestream ticket is $300, and you can register today. It covers both December 10 and 11, our main conference days. Plus, we’ve set it up so that you pay per screen, not per seat; if you have several people watching together, you pay for just one livestream ticket.

In addition, because we like helping build community, we’ll give you a $100 discount if you choose to be an official livestream host. Official hosts allow anyone local to attend your screening, and when you register for a livestream ticket, you must share your event URL with us so that we can list it on our site (here’s what that listing looked like last year; hosts mostly used EventBrite to let people reserve seats, though you can set up any web page you’d like). This year for the first time, we don’t require that official hosts guarantee a minimum number of attendees. Of course, you’re welcome to charge people for your local event.

(One caveat: We intend the livestream for people who can’t attend in person. If you’re based in the Bay Area, we ask you to join us at The San Francisco Fairmont, and we aren’t offering livestream tickets for local groups.)

Selling livestream tickets is an experiment for us, building on our previous test at Office Optional, where livestream tickets were far more popular than we expected. It also takes into account the fact that our international audience has grown considerably, and the logistics and cost of wrangling a free worldwide livestream have likewise increased; as a startup ourselves, those factors require us to adapt. Our hypothesis is that we can offer you really good value for a great livestream experience (plus video bundle), and we believe the per-screen pricing and group discount will make the livestream accessible to almost everyone. We’ll measure our success in ticket sales and attendee feedback. If you have questions or ideas for how we can make the livestream experience even better, don’t hesitate to email Michele Kimble, our livestream coordinator.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but while our livestream ticket sales are new, we have a great track record of delivering an amazing experience. Here are just a few of the many great comments our virtual attendees shared last year:

“Our simulcast was really well received. Even inside a big company, participants took away a lot of valuable ideas. Looking forward to next year! –Microsoft

“We had wonderful attendance. This event helped to build our community and provide substantive content and topics for future Startup Evanston events.” — Startup Evanston

“Our community of entrepreneurs loved participating.” –Spain Lean Startup

Whether you’re new to Lean Startup or a veteran, whether you work in a brand-new startup or in an established organization, our conference is designed to improve your success and speed building new products and services. We hope you’ll join us in person or via livestream in December. Register today!