Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Shawn Collins, who is the founder of Affiliate Summit. Shawn, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and your background?

Shawn Collins: Thank you, Adrian. I’ve been and affiliate marketer since 1997. I got to that after working in magazine publishing mostly for technology titles back in the 90s. I joined a startup back in ’97 called MedSite, they were looking for an affiliate manager. I had no background at all in marketing, never took a business class in college as a communications major, but they gave me the job because I was willing to work for cheap. I ended up doing affiliate management for about 10 years for various companies and also on my own. Along the way I realized that there wasn’t a good trade show out there for our business. I had met my current partner, Missy Ward, at a conference. We were talking about the need for a trade show. None of us had the experience, but we had the zeal and the passion for it. We got Affiliate Summit going in 2003. Back then we got a free space at Baruch College in New York City to run it. We just had 200 people there, it was a very small event. We were in Caesar?s Palace in Las Vegas this past January, and we had over 5000 people, a couple hundred booths and tables from sponsors, so it’s come a long way.

Adrian Bye: And you do two a year, right?

Shawn Collins: Yes, we do two big ones a year. We do a East Coast and a West Coast one. Then we also recently started up sort of a smaller brand that we’re calling ‘Performance Marketing Summit’, where we just get together a couple hundred people.

Adrian Bye: How does one start a conference like this? You guys got free space at Baruch College, put 200 people in the room. I guess you and Missy were really dialed in so it was easy enough for you to do?

Shawn Collins: At that time we just leveraged a lot of relationships. We started the wrong way because we didn’t know any of the vendors or anything to use. But I got that space for free in exchange for giving a couple of passes to marketing students at Baruch College. I was running all the registrations through my own PayPal account and manually sending out confirmation emails to people as they registered. It was very dumb, handmade, do-it-yourself kind of setup. We stuffed all the bags ourselves, everything we did by hand. The time was about two years after I’d written a book about how to manage an affiliate program, so I managed to build up a pretty nice list from that. And Missy had her connections as well, so we were able to fill that room. And then just by word of mouth kept building it up from there.

Adrian Bye: That was the first one. When did you do the second one?

Shawn Collins: The first was November 2003, the second one was in June 2004. That was a different sort of thing. It was a mistake that we didn’t repeat, it was on a cruise ship. The networking was amazing, five days where we were just jammed together at every meal and everything. But the issue there was that we couldn’t get any big brands to come along because they just figured it was a boondoggle. We sold it out with 230 people and the space didn’t allow us any room for any kind of exhibit hall or sponsorships. And the cruise gave us a lot of headaches. We thought we would have a totally private area, but the entire time they refused to let us lock the doors and had guests from the cruise ship walking through our room. We were assured there wouldn’t be any event during the day, but they went back on their word and as soon as we set sail, they had children every day screaming, shouting and stomping, music blasting. It was very frustrating and embarrassing for us trying to build this company at this time, dealing with those kind of silly things.

Adrian Bye: What did you do after that time?

Shawn Collins: We polled our attendees and asked where we should have our conference next, and we have done that every time since then for a couple dozens of them. They wanted to go to Vegas so we waited a whole other year until we did the next one, which was in June 2005. We headed off to Las Vegas and learned another mistake along the way. We had a company approach us, they would take care of all the logistics locally and they would book the hotel for us. I had never been to Las Vegas at that time so I didn’t really know one hotel from the next. They sold us on the fact that they could get us great deals at the Riviera, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been there before, but that’s kind of a dump. We learned from that that we didn’t want to rely on any other third parties to take care of such an important part of the conference. That set the stage for us to always be very hands-on and taking care of all the details and not outsourcing any important things like that.

Adrian Bye: I had assumed that if you run a conference you would just place a phone call to some logistics people and they would set everything up for you and you show up for the conference.

Shawn Collins: I suppose there is a number of ways that you can go about it. With us we really like to handle all the details and there are some things that we happily outsource. We have a whole army that we hire in each city for security and for registrations and the folks that staff the booths, check people in and give them their attendee bags. We get everything shipped to a third party to stuff the bags that we hand out. But in terms of actually negotiating contracts and picking spaces that we’re going to have and the actual rooms that we’ll be in we like to do ourselves. Just to make sure it’s what we want.

We have a staffing agency ?that specializes in conference folks that are in Las Vegas or New York or anywhere that bring all those people in there. Then there is a company called ?Freemen, they’re one of a couple of different decorating companies that we usually use. They set up all these booths that you go checking out to get your badge, and they also do all the setup of tables and booths and actual exhibit hall. ?

I’d love to say it’s a well-oiled machine, but it’s still lots of putting out fires. Just the process of trying and building the audience. We’ve managed to grow it every year for ten years straight. It’s continually marketing and trying to innovate and change things and improve it. We kept a very small staff all along, so it’s myself and my partner Missy, and just two full-time people to run the whole thing.

Adrian Bye: It would seem like there is a lot to do eight weeks before the event and getting the event set up, but the rest of the year you kind of have a long holiday. Is that not the case?

Shawn Collins: Each of the conferences has about a year or so of horizon leading up to it. There are a lot of details leading up to it, like what speakers we’re going to have for our conference. It’s still at this point five months away and so getting them all to signing agreements, working out the schedule when they’re going to speak, all the topics and that sort of thing takes a lot more time than you might imagine. And dealing with all the catering and everything. We’ve been working with the fire department in Philadelphia for quite some time trying to get as many booths in the space as we can and get it all proofed. It is a lot of back and forth with a lot of the local people there in the convention center, the fire department, the decorating company, and the caterers and then also the sponsors. So a lot of moving parts need to be attended to.

Adrian Bye: You have gone from 200 people to 5000, that’s obviously a pretty good growth. Is this 5000 per one of these two seminars per year? ?

Shawn Collins: We have an east and a west one, and the west one is usually about 20% bigger than it is in the east. So it’s about 9000 in total last year.

Adrian Bye: Who are your competitors? I’d guess Adtech is your competitor?

Shawn Collins: That depends on how far you reach in because we cover a lot of topics. Adtech, LeadsCon, PubCon, SES, SMX, there are just a whole bunch out there that we compete in big or small ways. And of course also the networks themselves, CommissionJunction, LinkShare, have their own network event as well. So, at the end of the day, people can only attend x amounts of shows, so they’re all competing with us for the dollars for the marketers.

Adrian Bye: Jay Weintraub founded LeadsCon basically out of nowhere, built it up over a couple of years and sold it. It seems like he did well with that. Is that something that you guys have considered?

Shawn Collins: We really enjoy being our own bosses, so that’s not something that is particularly attractive to us.

Adrian Bye: In terms of growth, you went from Baruchs to the Riviera, then started to settle down to a more orderly growth. What were some of the other interesting lessons that you learned along the way?

Shawn Collins: One thing that we came across that was surprising in a way was that there were companies that wanted to have a bigger presence there but couldn’t really come up with the money to buy the booth. So we came up with the idea back in 2006 what we called the Meet Market, which is on the first day of our conference. It’s kind of a mix between an exhibit hall and a job fair. Instead of a booth we all have tables there, so it costs a good deal less than a booth. It’s something where you can just have a single person staffing it and it goes for six hours. It was really meant for the companies that couldn’t afford the expenditure of a whole booth but over time we’ve found that not only the small companies did want to do that. The companies that were in the exhibit hall wanted to have presence there too because it gets such a big crowd and it’s just such a lively part of the conference. That was something where we just listened to our audience and tried to give them something that they needed and it really panned out.

Adrian Bye: Did you expect that this would become the size it did when you started that thing in Baruch, or were you just saying somebody needs to do this, let’s do it.

Shawn Collins: I’d love to say that I could have predicted it would explode like this, but at that time we only wanted to have something for the industry to get together, and we’d never seen anybody else have events that were more than maybe several hundred people at the most. We didn’t really know what the capacity was. I was conference friends with Missy, but I didn’t even know her that well, so there was no way to really predict it would multiply in size so much that we would be great friends and doing well a decade later.

Adrian Bye: When seminars are getting bought at a sale for selling a business, what sort of price is a conference actually worth? ?I don’t even have a concept of how you’d value one. Do you know how much leads consult for or what businesses do like this in your space?

Shawn Collins: I never bothered to look at what they sold it for, I’m not even sure it was publicized. And I don’t really know anything about the whole merger acquisition thing or how you’d even establish the value of an event.

Adrian Bye: But I imagine you get people coming to you from time to time surely because you have a lot of visibility. ?

Shawn Collins: Yes, over the years people have approached us. The conversations just haven’t really gotten that far. We weren’t really comfortable sharing our data and we were concerned they just wanted to kick the tires so we figured it safer to keep the books closed.

Adrian Bye: A lot of affiliate marketing is lifestyle business, so you guys are running the conferences as a lifestyle business, too.

Shawn Collins: Something that I’ve always preached to people is that a great thing about being an affiliate marketer is that you can live anywhere, but it took me so long to be unhappy where I was living to finally take some action and move from New Jersey to Texas. I wish I would have done this ten years earlier. I was telling everybody else move out to a place that’s a paradise for you, but I wasn’t listening to myself for a long time. But it’s certainly a lifestyle business, and I loved it.

Adrian Bye: Any tip for someone thinking about starting a conference, what they should be thinking about when they do it?

Shawn Collins: I guess the biggest asset for ?us starting up was just to be involved in the community that’s focused on that conference. Since we were already immersed and already part of the community, we had those connections to know who would be a good speaker or to know who we should try to get as sponsors. I think it would be tough to start a conference without any connection to the people. And also I would say it’s a good idea to start small and just let it grow organically. It worked for us. I’ve seen some people that came and tried to compete with us over time and they tried to go from zero to like 2000 people for a show. They took a lot of risk on. To me the slow and steady to win the race is probably the best that you can subscribe to when you’re getting going.

Adrian Bye: Awesome. Shawn, thank you very much for doing the interview.

Shawn Collins: Thank you, it’s been a great time.