The $200K Mistake We Didn't See Coming | Jacque Aboubakr (Ahrefs)

**Tim Soulo** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Ahrefs Podcast. Today, I have Jacque Aboubakr with me. She's our head of global events at Ahrefs. And what we're going to do, we're going to share all of our secrets of running events at Ahrefs, and especially our key main event called Evolve. We just wrapped up Evolve Singapore literally yesterday. And today in the morning, we're already recording about Evolve San Diego and just generally about our events. So the first thing I want to discuss because, yeah, I want to spill all the beans, as they say, and kind of share everything we have. Maybe it would be helpful for anyone listening.
It's the budgets because what I realized running events, they are expensive, it turns out, especially so in the US. So maybe let's briefly start from our event here in Singapore.
What was the budget for the Singaporean event? It's like a one-day event, right?

**Jacque Aboubakr** (0:56)
Yes, one-day event. So it's different than the San Diego event. And as I'm discovering, things in Singapore are cost, they have a different cost than they do in the States.
So the total expenses for Singapore and for this one-day event were around 170,000 Singaporean dollars.

**Tim Soulo** (1:14)
Yeah, nice. And we managed to even make 5K profit on it?

**Jacque Aboubakr** (1:20)
That might be gone now.
Might be just at break even because there's always last-minute things. Actually, no, we always put contingency in, so I think we'll be okay. I think we're right there.

**Tim Soulo** (1:31)
So we're more or less break even. Again, it depends on how you calculate your expenses. Well, profits are coming for us from tickets and sponsors. These are essentially the only profits, tickets and sponsors. And expenses, this is what we spend to organize the actual event. But then we don't really account for the team expenses, for the team to travel here, for them to stay, because also we have separate budget for team travel expenses whenever they go to conferences. So yeah, it kind of depends on how you count.
But generally, I think this event was basically breaking even regardless.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (2:12)
On paper, yes.

**Tim Soulo** (2:13)
Yeah. What I like about our events, or rather our goal with events is that, yeah, we try to break even where event would pay for itself, which means all the kind of branding value, all the customer value whenever we manage to expand accounts or get new accounts, it all goes in the plus for us. But let's speak about Evolve San Diego because this is a much more expensive event. This event in Singapore is one day event, quite cheap.
The venue is relatively small. We had about 200 people there, right?

**Jacque Aboubakr** (2:52)
Yes.

**Tim Soulo** (2:53)
But Evolve San Diego is going to be, we're hoping for up to 600 people.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (2:58)
Yeah. I mean, I think we're maxed out at about 600, but we could have anywhere from 600 to 700 So with Singapore even, we had more than 200 just because there were a lot of extra people there in terms of sponsors, in terms of our staff, in terms of event staff.
So we want to make sure that everyone fits comfortably in the room. But it's always like give or take. And so San Diego, we'll have anywhere from 600 to 700

**Tim Soulo** (3:25)
We can fit 700 in that room.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (3:27)
Ish.
We might have people around. That's the goal.

**Tim Soulo** (3:31)
Okay. By the way, one thing I forgot to mention. So here in Singapore, we had over 200 people, but how many tickets did we sell?

**Jacque Aboubakr** (3:41)
Oh, man.

**Tim Soulo** (3:42)
It was around 150 ish?

**Jacque Aboubakr** (3:47)
I think it was like, yeah, 150 to 170 I didn't look it up before I came here.

**Tim Soulo** (3:51)
So we need to give a shout out to Daria, who over delivered on our sponsorship value, because we wanted to get, what, $20,000 from all the sponsors for this event, and she managed to get 60 Something like that.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (4:05)
Yeah.

**Tim Soulo** (4:06)
So in part, that's thanks, because of her efforts, we managed to break even, which is very cool.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (4:12)
Well, also, like, we were constantly monitoring the budget and figuring out how much we can spend. And so her bringing in more meant that we could do a little bit more.

**Tim Soulo** (4:20)
Nice.

**Jacque Aboubakr** (4:21)
So that's kind of what we do with the events, is that we'll see how much money we have and we'll kind of hold back on some of the surprise and delights that we want to do to wait and see where we're at. So it's always this kind of give and take game of this game of using the budget as the tool for planning the event.