I've been to over 100 conferences. A lot of tech and automotive ones, plus four years in K-12 edtech, where events drove most of our pipeline.
So I know the drill. A convention center. A sponsor hall with a bunch of booths. The booths have shirts, stickers, and water bottles.
And every time I go to one of these, I think, I have to go to this. Not, wow, I can't wait to go to this.
Because it's always the same.
And surely it's not just me. If I'm thinking it, your attendees probably are too.
There are so many places to get creative at an event. You won't always get to change everything, but if you can, do it!
The venue sets the tone
I lean toward music and concert halls. The seats are more comfortable and the vibes are livelier than a convention center or a hotel conference room. And the rigging makes it fun. In 2025, we hung LED tubes from the ceiling that looked like pieces of our logo. It made the space feel VERY Laravel, in a good way.
We also did a big event out of a power station.
When I first did the site visit, it was a blank canvas. So a handful of us started throwing ideas around. A big stage. A big screen. A crowd full of people.
We had to think through where the stage would go, not just for the shock and awe when people walked in, but also so speakers could actually get backstage. We knew they'd be demoing products, so we put in one really nice big screen and two side screens.
Then I showed up to Laracon, and the team we hired had actually pulled it off.
I'd be surprised if someone walked into a power station and thought, "yep, another typical conference."
Figure out the flow
The worst conference I ever went to, I was a sponsor. I sat in a dark hallway for two days with the AC on full blast and spoke to maybe 2 people. The flow was off. I'll likely never sponsor that event again.
We rely on sponsors to put our event together. And from that experience, we know we have to manufacture some kind of flow through the sponsor hall.
So at the power station, we tried a giant tent. Attendees had to flow through it to get to the talk hall, because it was the only way in and out of the building.
Sponsors loved that, haha. All eyes were on them at some point. It worked well, but I'm not saying we'll always do it that way.
Because it also kinda ruined the outside of the power station, which is what drew us to it in the first place. Instead of a sweet industrial building, we had half an industrial building with a giant tent blocking the other half.
There are always trade-offs.
Know who's coming before you decide what's fun
I've put together a golf tournament for developers. (with Abby Gilson, ofc)
This was risky. Very few of them had ever shown any interest in golf. So we had 200 people we had to make sure had a great time, doing something they'd be pretty uncomfortable doing.
Instead of typical golf, we made every hole different. A rocket launcher. Races. Cornhole. Exploding golf balls.
Honestly, it was very hard to coordinate. We needed someone at every hole just to explain the weird rules. And the acreage of a golf course? I got my weekly step count done in one day.
People still talk about it to this day. Not everybody liked it! Some people loved it. Some people loathed it.
But it was worth the risk, because people are still talking about it. About how you never know what you're gonna get with that Laravel crew. A basketball game? Golf tournament? Dodgeball? A prom?!
And that creates intrigue.
Even the booth
The typical booth: a handful of the team, maybe sales, maybe eng, maybe marketing. Some stickers, maybe shirts. A QR code situation to get people's emails, or a badge scanner and a "to get the shirt, I need your badge scan."
It's fine. It works.
We just did a conference for an audience we'd never been in front of. It was Resend's conference, and Resend is an email tool. So instead of the typical, we thought: let's build something that connects this audience to our product.
We built the drawbot. (Well, Josh Cirre on our team did.)
You emailed us a picture, and a robot drew it with an actual pen in one stroke.
It took a couple minutes per drawing, honestly. So we had a queue, and a monitor at the booth showing whose drawing was up next. People hung around to watch the robot work on everyone else's while they waited for theirs.
People were standing at a booth on purpose.
Which made the next part very easy: "want to know how we built this?"
Resend, a tool they already use. Laravel Cloud, a tool they'd probably never heard of. And a robot.
BAM.
And they walked away with a drawing a robot made just for them. Then we emailed them the SVG, so they could print it on whatever they wanted later.
Think about the typical badge scan. You get a shirt, and they get to send you emails you didn't ask for.
Here, people were happy to get our email, because their art was in it.
Different isn't automatically better
I'm not telling you to host your next event on a boat. (Although I do know someone who was going to hire one to take a group to see the eclipse over the Mediterranean. Unless it's that.)
The golf was worth the risk because we knew the people in the room weren't golfers, and we built the whole thing around that. The drawbot worked because it connected the people in the room to what we do.
Be willing to experiment. Just make sure it's for them.
Give them something unexpected
Think of everything, so the event runs. Make people feel like they belong, so they want to come back.
Then give them something they didn't see coming, so they have a story to tell for years.
Typical is fine. It works.
It's also boring.