Think about the last conference that was genuinely worth the money.
Something specific happened. A conversation with one person, which turned into something. Now check the date: that meeting was in your calendar before you flew.
That is the whole thing, and it reframes what you are buying. A conference is a scheduling device. Its value is the set of meetings you arranged in advance with people who were going to be in that city anyway, and almost none of the value is generated on the floor.
Which means the work happens three weeks earlier, at your desk, and the ticket is the least important decision in the exercise.
So the first question is about the list, not the lineup
Events get judged on the speaker lineup, the atmosphere and the attendance number. None of those predict anything.
The question that predicts everything: can you find out who is coming, before you buy the ticket?
Some events publish an attendee list, or a partner directory, or run a meeting-booking app you can see into once registered. Some have a public list of which funds and which companies are sending people. And some sell you a number of attendees and nothing else, which means you are buying a lottery ticket and calling it a channel.
If you cannot assemble a list of twenty people you want to meet, with names, from publicly visible information about that event, do not go. That is not strictness for its own sake. It is the only check that separates an event from a holiday with a lanyard.
The exhibiting question is a different calculation and I worked through it for B2B trade shows, including where the money goes and the claimed returns. This is the attendee’s version, which is cheaper and almost always better value.
In a market this size, the local event is for meeting foreigners
Here is the inversion that matters in Estonia and that nobody states.
You already know the domestic room. In an ecosystem this size, the people who matter to you locally are reachable by a message on any Tuesday, and you have met most of them. So a domestic conference cannot be a lead source for domestic business, because there is no information in it you could not get for the price of a coffee.
What a Tallinn or Tartu event genuinely gives you is the foreigners who flew in. Latitude59 in May is valuable because investors, partners and the Nordic and German firms you would otherwise have to travel to are all in your city, jetlagged and with nothing in their calendar after six.
So the strategy inverts. You attend the local conference to meet people from elsewhere, and you attend the international one to meet your buyers. Slush in Helsinki, which is this month, is a ninety-minute flight and sits in the other category entirely: you go because your actual customers are there, and the cost is travel and days rather than the pass.
Check the current dates yourself rather than trusting a blog, mine included, because event calendars move and the listings disagree with each other more than you would expect.
The three weeks before, which is the whole job
This is the part people skip, and skipping it is why conferences feel like a waste.
Three weeks out, write the twenty names. Not companies, people, with their actual role.
Then send twenty individual messages, and the content of each is the whole game. “Are you going to Slush? Would be good to connect” produces nothing, because it asks the recipient to do the work of inventing a reason. What works is specific and small: name the one thing you want to ask them about, say how long it will take, and propose a time and a place.
Twenty messages written like that will produce somewhere between four and eight meetings, in my experience, which is a better conversion rate than anything else you will do that quarter.
Then, the week before, book the rest of the day around them. A conference day with four scheduled conversations and gaps between them is productive. A conference day with nothing in it becomes a day of talks, and talks are available on video for free in February.
The twenty minutes, and what it is for
You will get twenty minutes with somebody, standing up, probably holding a drink, in a room with a noise problem.
Nobody has ever made a purchasing decision in that setting, and trying to force one is how a good contact becomes an avoided one. So be clear about the deliverable: the output of a conference meeting is a scheduled call, not a sale.
Which means spend the twenty minutes on two things. Establish, in a sentence, what you do and who for, so they can place you. Then ask about their situation and listen, because the thing you learn is what makes your follow-up email worth opening.
And then say the quiet part out loud. “This is not the place to get into it properly. Can I send you a time for next week?” Then send it that evening, from your phone, before the day blurs.
The person who does that is in a different category from the ninety percent who say “let us stay in touch”, and it costs nothing but having decided in advance.
Speak rather than sponsor
For a small company, sponsoring a local event buys you domestic visibility you mostly already have, at a price that would fund a quarter of something better.
A speaking slot is a different product and it is frequently free. It solves the single hardest problem of attending, which is that approaching strangers is miserable and most founders are bad at it. Speak for fifteen minutes and strangers approach you for the rest of the day, pre-qualified by having chosen to.
The bar for getting one is lower than people assume, because programme organisers are perpetually short of speakers with something specific to say. Which means the ask is not “can I speak at your event”, it is a one-paragraph description of a talk nobody else can give, offered four months early.
If you have no such talk, that is useful information about your positioning rather than about the event.
The one thing conferences do better than anything else
I should be fair, because there is a genuine case and it is not about sales.
Conferences compress serendipity, and the two places that actually pays are hiring and investors. Both of those are relationship markets where you cannot buy an introduction and where being physically present for three days does something a message cannot.
In a thin talent market that matters more than it would elsewhere. The senior person you want is employed, not looking, and will never answer a cold message, and the only realistic path to them is standing next to them at something. I went through what a small company can honestly offer that person separately, and a conference is where the offer gets made.
So if your real reason for going is hiring or fundraising, say so in the budget line and judge it on that. The thing that wastes money is attending for sales reasons and getting hiring value, then being unable to explain either.
Where I come out
Go to fewer events and prepare for them properly. Two a year with twenty names each beats six a year with a lanyard and good intentions.
Pick them on whether you can see who is coming. Do the three weeks of work before, or do not go. Treat the twenty minutes as a way to earn a calendar entry rather than a pitch. Try for the speaking slot, skip the sponsorship.
And if you cannot write down the twenty names for an event, the honest answer is that it is not your event. There will be one that is.
If you’d like to think through which two events are yours and what the pre-work should look like, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on lead generation cover the channels you control the rest of the year. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.