5 Lessons from Hosting My Own Event, Content Hacker Live, March 2024

I heard Alex Hormozi say everything is 20/20…but only in hindsight.

In March of 2024 (this year), I did something so far outside my comfort zone that I almost couldn’t believe it. It was hard to sleep, eat.

I was on stage hosting my own conference for a straight 8 hour day.

Hosting, facilitating, MC’ing all of it.

That thought, initially, almost paralyzed me. 😅

This quiet, book-loving, knowledge-seeking introverted writer knew she’d need a 10-week people-free vacation to recover afterwards.

Just kidding. (Maybe.)

….

The conference I hosted was Content Hacker Live.

Back in 2019, I trademarked Content Hacker and bought the domain.

To me, it embodied content built for growth and traction.

I’d spent the previous 8 years selling, building, and training writers how to create content that, well, grew a business.

Back then, Backlinko and Semrush did some studies on content usage that shocked me.

97% of content created goes unused. And another 97% of content that gets published gets NO traction. Not a single backlink or ranking or share.

As an experienced writer, content built for growth was my middle name.

Content Hacker FIT me like a glove.

All my social profiles said — “Julia, Content Hacker.”

That positioning caught the eye of Fortune 500s that needed a fresh take on their stale content.

I came in and was paid to train them. Spent hours conducting workshops.

And when we unrolled Content Hacker Live, my vision for Content Hacker truly turned into Content Hackers.

It wouldn’t be possible without the founder and team at Content at Scale.

I got to celebrate and host a room full of folks getting together around the future of content marketing and AI.

We had some incredible speakers: Matt Wolfe, Elena Cardone, Lisa Colegrove Copeland, Jeff J Hunter, Mark de Grasse, Stephanie Nivinskus, Chris Kirksey, Alicia Lyttle, Jeff Joyce, Owen Hemsath, Apryl Beverly, Alexander Rodriguez, Jordache Johnson.

We tackled the future of AI and content and we taught out attendees how to WIN.

How It Went — And Why Hindsight is 2020

Facts, friends:

You gotta DO the thing to LEARN the thing.

I’ve never ran my own conference before. This was the first.

There are times in life when you take on what feels like something FAR beyond you, you do it anyway… and you walk away learning more than you’ve ever learned.

That was Content Hacker Live ’24 for me, which I hosted March 15, 2024, right on the back of SXSW in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas.

We sold 200 tickets, had a few sponsors, and a bunch of SXSW walk-ins.

I did it through nearly 50 different emails spread throughout campaigns I wrote / scheduled and published in sequences to our list of roughly 60,000 recipients.

I started this in Q4 of 2023, so barely 7 months before the event (note: start earlier next time–we got a lot of folks that said “if only I knew sooner, I would have planned for travel”).

The majority of purchases came from a small list of less than 5,000 — people that had been on my personal newsletter list at Content Hacker. The trust factor was the highest there.

John Doherty was our main sponsor — an ideal one. He’s incredibly wise, could speak to so many things with knowledge, and is implementing the AIO approach at EditorNinja.

Top 6 lessons from hosting my own conference CHL, good and bad:

1. Gather the right folks around you. On our own, we can only go so far. But with the right people to give us the rocket pad launch we all need (support, encouragement, love, backing, skills/smarts we miss, advice) we go 10x further.
2. Get offline and IRL more. You make much, much more impact in person than you ever do online. Likewise, you receive much, much more inspiration in person than you do online. We saw this all throughout that bomb conference day.
3. Being in other communities is a HUGE win, 50–60% of the people there were from other communities I’ve helped in (not paid).
4. Email works. LOTS of email reminders were the main reason we sold tickets (but I know this from 10 years of content): outside of the communities, the other 50% ticket holders were from 50+ emails I sent.
5. Profitability is important. We were not profitable with this one. We would’ve been profitable AND had the same amount of folks if we didn’t hire the celebs (that alone ran us $53k+, and no ticket sales from their mentions). I didn’t plan for a profitable conference as much as I planned for “big names…” but those big names didn’t bring us a single ticket holder! Lesson learned.

My top takeaways from hosting CHL:

1. Find the micro-influencers/community hosts creating true impact, hire them.

You will make the ROI on those types of speakers. Example: my friend Jeff J Hunter is what I’d call a MEGA micro-influencer. (Micro = not in the six-figure YouTuber or 10–100M Insta followers.) Jeff brought us over a dozen HIGH-value folks AND was there with us on the ground floor the whole time.

2. Folks that have built and monetized real skills are stage winners.

Real skills. Real methodologies to speak to. And that’s why I was blown away by Mark de Grasse, Owen Hemsath, Chris Kirksey, Stephanie Nivinskus, Alexander Rodriguez, Alicia Lyttle, Jordache Johnson, Apryl Beverly.

It was an honor to have them on our stage and they crushed it–every one of them. They are the real deal.

Guess who stayed, networked, and even brought paying ticket holders? Not Elena Cardone. These folks.

3. Live events create incredible fans.

People were promoting Content at Scale to other people. Asking “why the hell are you not a customer already?”

I’ve never seen the comradry, respect, and attention for a brand like what I saw on the ground floor at our event.

Also, I work with the right team & an amazing founder.

We couldn’t get our CEO, Justin McGill, on stage. I had him slated for the end after a corny but AWESOME video prank, and he got out of it almost entirely.

But the fact that he stood back and let his team shine, when he’s the inventor of the AI that generates undetectable content… earned mad respect from all.

Plus my podcast co-host, Jeff Joyce, and I launched a new podcast on the LIVE FLOOR – Humanity Unchained. That was cool.

Big shoutout to our Content at Scale team for all the help.

And to the attendees — you mean more than you know. You there made it 10x better.

Will I Do it Again?

Not the way I did this one, no.

I would not singlehandedly run a conference ever again. 😂

It put us in a money hole, took all my vision and capabilities away for weeks (truly, I was dead), and was not worth the work involved.

Would I do it again if we were a $10M company and could hire a team?

Yes. Absolutely.

And in the meantime, I will be running smaller local (Arizona) get-togethers, meetups, and attending/speaking at others. I think that is a win, much more than hosting your own.

For more unconventional takes, see Julia’s latest and greatest on YouTube.