Apropos of nothing, this little marketing page is pretty great -- https://www.conferencebadge.com/why-use-conference-badge

Wow, that's fantastic. Clicked on "Try the Slow Way".

so, it took anna 10 hours, and lets assume anna gets paid 25 dollars an hour, so a cost of 250 dollars. Shelley, used the conference badge, and at 1.79 for the fully shipped version of the badge, it will cost 582 dollars. So, essentially, Shelley paid 332 dollars for QR codes and convenience.

Is it worth it? probably. but maybe not.

I think this depends on one-off vs long term. If this group is going to be doing 2~3 conferences a year, learning how to print labels yourself or is valuable skill. You might even have a designer on your team that could work with a local print shop (allowing a personal relationship and even last minute badges so you're not handwriting last minute speakers).

There's a one time cost of learning all that stuff, and then each year you just reuse those same templates and skills with a new logo/graphics from your design guy.

If this is something your team/volunteer group/etc. rarely does, then it's probably worth just paying conference badges. It's a trade-off.

If it's a non-profit thing, consider open souring the process and CC licensing the designs to help others doing the same thing.

I organise conferences as a hobby, and I've been manually doing mail merge on badges for the past few years.

It takes me anywhere between 5–15 minutes to set things up, and my biggest annoyance throughout the process is dealing with CSV character encodings.

I think the main value the service provides is that it provides "guaranteed" next-day delivery. My print shop gives me a fair amount of crap for not sending my badges to print a few days in advance.

On the other hand, it's so much less work for organisers to print blank white boxes, and let attendees fill in their own preferred names at check-in.

Hmmm, I hear you but I’m really skeptical of valuing any full time employee’s time at $25/hour.

The true cost of a full time office worker employee once all taxes and benefits are factored in are usually going to be a lot higher than that. This would make the service a lot more worth it.

OTOH if that employee is underutilized, their time is effectively free, so the only thing you would be paying for is (hopefully) quality and consistency.

Badge printing kits/holders are not free :) https://www.amazon.com/Avery-Badges-Lanyards-Holders-Inserts...

Blank lanyards and card holders are really cheap if bought separately, and one really only needs to make sure that their printer prints 4x6" or A6, instead of buying such an expensive kit.

It's not just her pay for 10 hours, there is the lost opportunity cost of other work she could have done that day(s) and the supply cost for 325 badges/holders/lanyards/etc...

$300 bucks is nothing compared to the costs of running a convention. And also there's other stuff Anna needed to be working on that didn't happen.

Empty badges are around ~$0.50. At 325 badges, that reduces the difference by $165.

you dont understand business stakeholders. Shelley is busy and overworked. She is relatively price insensitive, but is very time sensitive.

Our (enterprise) business customers dont care about price much, they care about things going smoothly for an event which has a ton of moving parts.

We serve a similar demographic.

This really is pretty great.

Formatting is totally butchered though on my S9. The two columns are sometimes one and sometimes are reversed.

I have a suggestion: add support for dual-clip lanyards[1]. I've always found the single-clip lanyards annoying: they flop around and get twisted. I went to a conference this spring that had lanyards that clipped to both top corners of the badge, and it was significantly less annoying.

[1] For example: https://www.marcopromos.com/product/3-4-cotton-no-flip-lanya...

More detailed suggestion: Implement all the Badge Reviews tips found at https://badge.reviews/

In the last few conferences with single-clip lanyards, I started noticing the badges' orientation. I would expect them to be roughly 50% front, 50% back, but significantly more badges were oriented so that the back was showing, which surprised me.

I guess it's the same kind of magic that makes the USB port always be the wrong orientation, then you flip it and it's wrong again, and it's only right after you flip it twice.

I usually keep my badge facing in (so you can't glance at my info) on purpose if the badge has a lead-gen attendee type - e.g. founder, investor, media - printed on it. I find that having it the right way 'round makes it harder to have interesting or productive discussions because by the end of the first day everyone is pre-judging the people they meet based on their badge.

If I'm there on a founder badge, for example, it's difficult to chat up investors because they're wary of hearing the 400th pitch from a random startup guy when I really just want to talk and make a connection.

This may be more annoying for me than most because I'm often at conferences as someone's guest, so the badge type rarely matches with my goals for attending.

Then double loop will help keep the badge exactly how you want it!

I actually prefer the double clip style because I find it more comfortable, too! Just offering an anecdote that might help explain your observations - I can't be the only person who does this.

Some people don't like showing off all their information, but most venues require the badge to be shown at all times.

Those both look like amazing companies and I love the website design. but I could kinda see how YC might reject you... they're always looking for the unicorn and neither one of those looks like it's gonna 100x, they look like great businesses that will make tons of money, but possibly not at a scale or within a timeline that would make investors excited.

Y'all hold on to that designer you've got. Those landing pages have a great feel to them.

FYI visiting https://conferencebadge.com doesn't work, only the insecure or www does.

Little Terraform and ACME/LetsEncrypt provider with a build pipeline or basic cron job and this is an easy permanent fix.

> Little Terraform and ACME/LetsEncrypt provider with a build pipeline [...] and this is an easy permanent fix

That's the easy version. The overkill version uses Kafka, BigQuery and AWS SNS. (/s)

A+ modern problems require modern solutions

They must have excellent responsiveness; https://www.conferencebadge.com/ works fine for me.

It doesn't work without the leading slash. They probably all have cached redirects from working locally so they never noticed. 30 second fix on basically any webserver.

Try it without the www.

ConferenceBadge landing page is one of the best I've seen. Nice work!

With funding, you might be in the situation of having not a single cent more in revenue (possibly less, trying to buy growth) and failing hard because of having 30 employees more than you have now, and not the tiniest idea of how you could get by with less.

The intersection between the set of business opportunities that can work bootstrapped and set of business opportunities that work when strongly funded might be much smaller than one would naively assume.

I'm not your target audience for either one, but I gotta say the websites are spot on. Really well done.

OK, I'm stealing this idea. Just returned from an exhibition where this whole badge idea was implemented pretty poorly-clearly still a lot of space for improvements.

Sir, you just got yourself a ConferenceBadge customer for https://2019.cascadiajs.com

I gotta say your Medium post about Missive being a hybrid app and beating native UIs in many aspects was pretty inspiring.

This is the only reason we can as a tiny team of 3 keep pushing features/improvements[1] on all platforms. Not to say it's perfect.

[1] https://missiveapp.com/changelog

I tried out your app on my iPhone X. There are buttons on the bottom that you can't tap (like 'privacy' in the signup screen or 'I prefer to stay alone' in the hamburger menu.) because they are in the swipe up zone. Might want to add a general safety margin to the bottom of of your app for bezeless devices.

please share a link

Fantastic! I love hearing stories like these. Congrats on building a healthy, hopefully profitable, business.

The "Why use Conference Badge" section on conferencebadge.com is fantastic.

I'm just here to let you know your website designs are aMaZiNg!!!!

conferencebadge.com is very interesting to me, as are all niche businesses that can generate 7 digits.

Would you care to share how you identified the opportunity and estimated potential revenue?

Went into the why and how in this podcast https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/033-philippe-lehoux-of-...

Thank you, that was really inspiring!

Thanks very much!

Inspirational, thanks for sharing your story. Gotta keep pushing!