Yes. Once more it is silence here and this time it would be easy to state that this is because of so many things I do – as I do, really. But really it is because I am away with my family in a small village in Liguria in Italy called Candeasco, where we have been 11 years ago, when our youngest daughter Mali, was in Tanja’s inside before she was born in that year in December. We had a wonderful time back then and when we decided to go back this year it felt strange as our other two kids – back then 6 and 8 years old – could not make it. University and celebrating end of school with friends in Spain was in the way. Now we are here again. Eleven years after we have been here last time and it is wonderful how memories of places and experiences come back as soon as you trigger them. Before this Tanja and I often said somethings like “Was the walk to the little river like xyz or abc?” and as soon as you are back at this place you remember. Your brain is a great tool, isn’t it?

Well, often it is. Sometimes it is not and does not help either. I have been lazy over the last couple of months. With many things. And therefore, being a single person doing what they do, I am getting the bill now. Many things for beyond tellerrand Berlin are still not done, border:none needs more attention and last, but not least, Karl is waiting for Marc’s energy for Better by Design in Washington in March 2024. But somehow my brain (and with this my body) is locked. Since the pandemic all the tasks to run an event feel so hard. They payout, when the event takes place, is still wonderful, but everything upfront is so hard. Harder than all the years before.

I am sure I can still pull it off. And I want to.

See you in Berlin, Nuremberg and/or Washington!

Would be nice to have company on those rides, to be honest. But on the other hand, I do get my head clean during these rides, which never happened with running for me. Maybe just because you need to keep track of the ride to not fall of the bike.

Wonderful weather. Fantastic start into the new week. I hope yours is great as well.

2023 edition of Smashing Conference in San Francisco is over. Here is a set of photos capturing the atmosphere and people at the event.

I was invited by the lovely people of the German, weekly Working Draft podcast once more. It is always a pleasure and good fun and surely we were also talking about organising events and beyond tellerrand, but also had a deeper look behind the scenes of an event organiser’s life in edition #564.

I was hugely enjoying this conversation, as much as I always enjoy being a guest in Working Draft and/or chatting about all things events ;) Full episode here!

Also right before beyond tellerrand 2023 in Düsseldorf, I was invited to be part of the German Digital Pacemaker Podcast by Ulrich Irnich, CIO of Vodafone Germany and Markus Kuckertz, who is responsible for IT strategy und innovation at Vodafone Germany. This podcast had a totally different focus than others I had been invited to and we were chatting about the question, why I thin kit is important to be open minded when working in design and development and why schools and universities already should have a broader focus, teaching people a general interest and curiosity for other things than what they learn only.

You can listen to the whole episode here.

Short before I ran beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf I was invited to be a guest in Ohne den Hype, a German podcast by Sven Saro about design related topics.

Good fun, lovely conversation with Sven and you can listen to it here.

Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, […] The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act.

Yes! I agree, Tim.

⇾ Visit: Investing in RSS – Tim Kadlec

I am usually not a person complaining. Especially not about things in the past. But when being asked, I told how hard the pandemic has hit me personally and us as a family. Not only financially, but more importantly emotionally. Because I really love, what I am doing with beyond tellerrand.

Not everybody really knows, that it is a single person organising the events completely. Up to the point, when we set up the events with the lovely team around Guido, Tanja, Patrick, Lulu and many other supporting those gigs, it is only me planning, coordinating and organising everything. Speakers, topics, travel for speakers, partners, venue, side events, workshops, schedule and so on … and I bloody love it! The way those events build up month by months until everything ends in the final piece: the event itself.

Now the pandemic has shown me, that setting all your money on one horse is not ideal. I haven’t created any other revenue stream like a YouTube channel or even a podcast. I did not write books about “my success” or how to run event or alike. I simply have been happy running those events. That lead to the fact, that from one day to the other, all my income I generate through those events for 4 other people in my family and me, was gone. In my positivity, call it naivety, when the lockdown was announced, I thought, that I would run my events soon again. Little did I know and 2,5 years later the small amount of savings in my business bank account, that slowly grew over 8 years of running the event and which would save me, when one event might fail financially and help me planning and ordering swag early, was gone.

When I started running beyond tellerrand again last year, I quickly had to realise that it wasn’t a “let’s continue”, but more a “let’s restart”. And yes it was. A restart from zero. Financially. Getting the word out. Everything. The only real benefit I still ad was a good reputation. It was tough getting the word spread, that beyond tellerrand happens again. Social media these days is more or less dead. Algorithms have broken the natural stream of all platforms and the content people see is not the content of people they follow, but of people who pay to be seen.

Furthermore 3 years are a long time. People’s interests and their jobs chance. Kids were born, people focused on their families (as they should) and many of those who always came to my events simply had a different life and would not come anymore. That led to two events in Düsseldorf and Berlin in 2022 that weren’t sold out. Luckily I did not loose any money, but I also did not make any. I, like in the beginning, needed to plan each event with the money that came from the same event’s ticket sales.

In the past that was not a big problem since people really bought their tickets early and beyond tellerrand sold out sometimes two months or earlier in advance. That gave me the base of ordering swag early and knowing the numbers to plan with. Especially being a single person running this, it is more difficult the later I have those final numbers. The manner how people right now buy their tickets changed. They are not early, but really late and I do understand why. Not only because we don’t know surely if another wave of Covid related shit is hitting us, but also big companies letting go multiple thousand people does not create a save perspective in our industry. And I don’t blame anyone for being late, honestly.

Up until 6 weeks ago I did not even sell 50% of the tickets I have for beyond tellerrand. I was not sure, if that would work out. Not only financially, but a half full room is not the best for the overall atmosphere, for the speakers on stage and also for my partners expecting a certain amount of people to be there. It never has been easy to advertise my event. It is an event without a focus on a specific things. Neither just design or typography, nor just tech or web design/development. It is a broad mix.

I, though, love how one of the teachers, who always brought around 30 to 40 students from Belgium to beyond tellerrand puts it, when asked what the benefit for him and his students is to be at the event:

[…] the joy to create such great inspiring moments in the lives of the students. You know, all the students I had who came to btconf turned out to be better professionals and to have more interesting careers than those who did not. That’s the impact of such an experience. They turned out to become more opinionated, more passionate, more demanding to themselves, more international too. This sort of trip gives lifelong memories for them. I was glad to be an enabler of that, and you made it very easy for me.

That is so lovely! ☺️

Thanks to so many people spreading the word, re-posting my posts on social media, telling others about the event I feel such aa massive relief now as I am proud to say that only about 30 tickets are left for beyond tellerrand 2023 by the time writing these lines. It is late and gives me some hard tasks to get things sorted, but the great excitement that I have will make it possible somehow.

I am so relieved and happy and am extremely looking forward to kick off another beyond tellerrand show in Düsseldorf in about 4 weeks from now.

Thanks so much for those who support me and beyond tellerrand with anything. Financially, with reposting bist I post, with telling other people about the event … with everything!

See you in Düsseldorf.

Like Gruber says:

Long story short: If you’re a subscriber to either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, you can help them out with three simple steps:

1. Reinstall the app if you’ve already deleted it; otherwise, make sure you’re running the latest version.
2. Tap the “I Don’t Need a Refund” button.
3. Feel good and go buy yourself a treat, knowing you helped the good folks at a small company whose work you’ve appreciated (and will continue to).

👍

It’s January 31st. I stop my car in front of a Japanese shop in the area of Düsseldorf’s central station. It is a grey day and the person I am picking up is my friend Vitaly Friedman. He took the train from Berlin to Düsseldorf to meet me there. From Düsseldorf we drove over to Belgium to explore and check a few venues for a possible new adventure. When entering my car Vitaly says:

Ahh. Marc, that feels like in the old days, when we were checking venues for our very first event in Freiburg. Do you remember?

Indeed it had a similar feeling. The event business is on some kind of re-start. Especially when I hear from web related events, a lot of them struggle to sell tickets these days and not because their line-up is bad or their marketing. Many reasons exist – too many to go into details here – why this is the case and those who don’t stop running their events wonder what they could do to get the word out and sell tickets. And selling tickets, plus getting financial support by companies who team up with events like mine, is crucial for those events to survive, as they are mostly community based or community driven events. Maybe even only by a very small team or single person.

But back to where we were … so Vitaly and I ended up in my car for 3 hours chatting about all things events and Smashing Magazine. About the difficulties mentioned above, but also about the curiosity and excitement of running those events. We both share this passion to bring people together on those days and create something that is valuable and wonderful. Time was flying and we arrived in Antwerp, where we wanted to check two possible venues.

The first venue we arrived at was the Bourla Schouwburg. Two very nice people welcomed us and showed us the venue. What a lovely, old theatre. Vitaly and I directly loved it and were giggling about ideas we had for different areas in the venue, imagining where what could happen during the days of the event and felt that this one had the right atmosphere and spirit.

Our next stop was the Zuiderpershuis. Again a very lovely person welcomed us and showed us around. This one is not a real theatre, but more like an event venue. Very nice and authentic also and we could directly see the kind of events that would take place here. Festivals that would be containing of more hands-on experiences than talks. Smaller workshops, shorter presentations and hands-on in depth sessions. But for what we were thinking of there would be too much we would need to get done and many details missing and to be added, so that we decided not to go with this one.

For our next stop we had to drive roughly another hour to arrive in the wonderful city of Gent, after we had some tasty fries iN Antwerp. I have never been in Gent before, but the city centre is just amazing. So were the two people waiting for us, when we arrived at the NTGent. An what a lovely venue was waiting for us again. Similar to the Bourla in Antwerp it has wonderful balconies and both of us, Vitaly and I, were directly in love with the theatre, the opportunities the rooms next to the theatre offered us and the wonderful view from the balcony of one of the rooms at the theatre.

We left this theatre impressed, but with a sour taste in our mouths. A sour taste not because all those venues were nice, but because we did not know which one would be best of our two favourites.

On our 3-hours ride back to Düsseldorf we spoke a lot about pro and con of Bourla vs NTGent, we left voice messages for Charis, Amanda and the rest of the Smashing Team to describe those benefits and possible negative bits.

In the end we did not decide against the NTGent as a venue, but for Antwerp as the city. It is better known, better reachable from most places and offers more of what we need, in the summary, compared to Gent and the NTGent.

Well and now? Now we are on to a new adventure in Belgium. Today we announced Smashing Conference Antwerp, a conference focusing on Design and UX topics. Early birds tickets are online (48 left by the time writing these lines!) and we are all extremely looking forward to exploring the options we have in Antwerp. New lessons learned at a new city in a new venue and you can be part of this and help us to make this a memorable experience for everybody coming!

See you at October 9–11 in Antwerp for a new Smashing Conference and thanks for reading this little memorable story about how Vitaly and I visited the venues in Belgium!