← Creator Science with Jay Clouse
Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#248: Justin Moore - Lessons from hosting his first 3-day event
00:42:02
Justin Moore is the author of Sponsor Magnet and host of the Sponsor Games!
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- [00:00]
Justin Moore
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.
- [00:32]
Jay Clouse
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. 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 @jclouse on Instagram. But without further ado, let's hear from Justin. Justin, you're back on the show.
- [01:41]
Justin Moore
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.
- [01:57]
Jay Clouse
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 the luxury of getting sick. And then the moment we have space, our body's like, okay, I've been feeling this.
- [02:12]
Justin Moore
It's a hundred percent. 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? Cause I was thinking about our previous chat leading up to the event, and I was just. I just remembered being so stressed out and 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. 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.
- [03:10]
Jay Clouse
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.
- [03:19]
Justin Moore
Dude, I'm. I am so bummed that you got sick. That really sucked.
- [03:23]
Jay Clouse
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 were talking about how stressful Q1 was going to be. And at the end of Q1 you'd have this exhalation. Are you feeling that right now?
- [03:44]
Justin Moore
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, kind of wrapping up things with them and wiring that big fat 5k check to our winner, Molly. And so once I kind of 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 kind of go into, I think some of that stuff.
- [04:35]
Jay Clouse
I think it'd be great. And maybe before we even get into the learnings, you just give 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.
- [04:47]
Justin Moore
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 15 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, et cetera. And so this has been literally a dream of mine to have an event like this. Or 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 going to 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 can come too. But it was always kind of like an afterthought and I was like, let me, let me do this just for creat. And so as I mentioned, I wanted it to kind of 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 sat down nine months ago to start planning this event is like, that was my non negotiables. 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 going to talk about, is it going to be compelling and valuable for, you know, the people who are attending? But no speakers also meant a bunch of other challenging things, which was like, there's no halo effect on ticket sales, you know, of the people who want to hear them speak, oh, I wanna see that person. I'm gonna go by 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 out handicapping ourselves 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. Food always sucks at every event I've ever been to, ever. So I was like, okay, we're going to like, literally spend almost half the budget on food. I didn't know if it was going to be half, but I was like, I want to spend most of the money on food. And so we went and we, you know, taste tested different caterers and we figure 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. 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.
- [08:20]
Jay Clouse
Amazing.
- [08:20]
Justin Moore
We had a laser printing our logo for the event on top of the, like, the phone. I saw that for the coffee, which was 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. So we 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 spend any money? And that meant obviously a much larger cost for us. But several people actually commented on that. 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 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, we balled out on the venue. Dude, big shout out to 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 riverboats going by. Like, it's just like, it was beautiful weather, dude, but all of these like non negotiables that I was just like, we have to do this means that it just costs way more than I expected.
- [09:56]
Jay Clouse
Dude, what did you expect?
- [09:58]
Justin Moore
I mean, I thought that we were going to spend maybe like 30 or 40 grand 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 going to take an absolute bath. I thought I was going to lose like 30 or 40 grand is what I thought.
- [10:17]
Jay Clouse
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?
- [10:25]
Justin Moore
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 that 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. Did you know I had this like really ambitious vision of like, I had said, okay, we're going to cap it at 120 attendees. That was like my. I never like stated that publicly, but like, that was like what we were planning in terms of looking at 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, trust me, it's going to be great. Like, I'm basically leaning 100% on my credibility of someone, you know, okay, I'm going to trust Justin. I'm going to pay, you know, 600 bucks. That was like the first Early Bird ticket price was 600 bucks. I'm going to pay Justin 600 bucks. And I got to pay for airfare, I got to pay for accommodation. So, you know, probably two grand 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 kind of comparable price. So like, I just want to learn what's the best way to learn? And like, I just didn't expect that that was going to be. I mean, 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. And so I think I had quite a few people who just decided to just join the course instead of incurring the, the costs.
- [12:18]
Jay Clouse
That's really interesting because 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 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 going to teach you our methodology. We're going to be very hands on. We're going to walk you through the entire process. And that is, in retrospect, I hadn't.
- [12:46]
Justin Moore
Thought about this either.
- [12:46]
Jay Clouse
That is a very similar promise to your products, your content. So I could totally see from the audience standpoint, well, A or B.
- [12:55]
Justin Moore
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 want to learn this stuff. 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, kind of doing this in person. And 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 going to 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. But I knew that going into it also. We basically didn't sell any tickets for the last, like, 60 days.
- [14:03]
Jay Clouse
Really?
- [14:03]
Justin Moore
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 see a flurry of sales, but that wasn't the case. And so ultimately we had about 40 ticket sales total. So down from 120, 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.
- [15:00]
Jay Clouse
You honored refunds that weren't requested.
- [15:03]
Justin Moore
I just felt what Jay is referring to is I sent him a refund because I felt bad you weren't there. So I'm not going to take your money. Like, I just. I don't know, dude. I don't know.
- [15:18]
Jay Clouse
After a quick break for our sponsors, we'll hear more about Justin's experience organizing sponsor games. So stick around.
- [15:23]
Justin Moore
We'll be right back.
- [15:30]
Jay Clouse
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 book purchasers? Like, what type of crossover did you see here?
- [15:44]
Justin Moore
I would say about 30% of people who attended were in my current Wizards Guild sponsorship coaching program. About 30%. 30% 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 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 what we had is day one was a welcome party. 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. 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. 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 B2B SaaS or whatever. We wanted to kind of 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. They don't know each other, but I know them both individually and I think they'll get along. And so we kind of did like this last minute, kind of 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, all right, team red, you're on team Red. Here we go. I'm gonna come over and introduce you to one of your teammates. Let's go. 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 was so great. Cause 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, all right, I got a mic. And I was like, all right, 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. Basically said, all right, 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.
- [19:25]
Jay Clouse
That's wild.
- [19:26]
Justin Moore
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. 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 by round of appraise, 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. Nice. So sure was one 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 kind of 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. 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. So that was 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. It was amazing.
- [21:20]
Jay Clouse
I want to 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?
- [21:37]
Justin Moore
So the venue was all in. It was about 15 grand. I 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.
- [21:48]
Jay Clouse
You don't have this rough proportions.
- [21:51]
Justin Moore
Yeah, yeah. So videography, photography, and event production was about 25 grand to that. You know, a big cost that I just didn't really think about. This is stupid, but I didn't think about going into it, but, like, travel and accommodations for my team to have everyone there staying in San antonio for basically four or five nights flying. All that was like almost 10 grand. And then decorated 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 got a step and repeat 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 going to be having this event every year. And so I did invest in a lot of these. And so all of that was about 10 grand. 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 three grand. And then catering, coffee, all that was about eight grand or so.
- [23:09]
Jay Clouse
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 this 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.
- [23:38]
Justin Moore
Oh my God. Dude. So we. 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 want to have an event, I want to 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. 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 going to 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. She. This is a good anecdote in Addition to just all the logistical stuff, she was out there wheeling and dealing, bro. She was the one who got 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 going to be an element of her event planning services was like being this like hugely vocal advocate for this event. 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. She designed the entire like this huge notion database for us to track everything. She designed the budget, she liaised with all the vendors. Okay, so 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. 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 timeframe, 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 kind of thinking about those types of areas for climate. And so all of the 42 venues were basically in those cities.
- [26:52]
Jay Clouse
Crazy. 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.
- [27:13]
Justin Moore
Totally.
- [27:16]
Jay Clouse
After one last break, Justin shares his final takeaways from hosting the first annual sponsor games. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Justin. Okay, 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 you would like to do first.
- [27:44]
Justin Moore
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 roleplay. We only did that on a few of the games. But, like, people were asking at the breaks, like, hey, can we do more roleplay? Like, instead of Q and A, can we do more roleplay? 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, thinking it was going to be a lot larger, 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 57,500, 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. And so, again, I just think so many things are going to be easier for years too, and beyond because we have the Hype video. We have proven track record. We've got testimonials of attendees. We've got testimonials with sponsors now. And so I really want to 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, at 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. 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 going to get your money's worth unless you join that thing. And so I was like, really? 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. So I was like, here's what you're competing for. You're not just competing for five grand in cash and all these other amazing sponsor prizes, but you're also going to 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 the 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 or whatever. 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 talked 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 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.
- [31:07]
Jay Clouse
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 wish you had. So would you change your ticket pricing or marketing strategy the next time around?
- [31:18]
Justin Moore
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 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. And so I think I was just like nervous because it was my first event that no one would come. Now seeing the outcomes of 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 again, it was just like. I think it's the same thing that people go through when they first sell something directly to their audience, like a course or coaching. 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 would be more comfortable with less people, but a larger investment.
- [32:47]
Jay Clouse
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?
- [32:52]
Justin Moore
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 is 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, you can't replace that, 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.
- [34:16]
Jay Clouse
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 239, 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 short period of time. I think it will inspire you. And if you want to learn more about Justin, visit his website@creatorwizard.com or pick up his book sponsor magnet@ sponsormagnet.com there's a link to both in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next.