Why don’t more people apply to speak at conferences?
Doubling your user base overnight is possible — if you speak at conferences.
I’d long had my Too Phishy app in the Google Workspace Store, languishing at around 300 users. This August, I gave my first ever conference talk at the Carolina Codes Conference. The next day, Too Phishy had 200 new users, and I met ten IT practitioners who agreed to let me interview them for product research. 66% user growth in one day? And exponential growth in the number of customer interviews I’d been able to secure??
I felt like I’d hit a gold mine.
So why aren’t more developers applying to speak at conferences?
My guess: They don’t know how. So I want to demystify the process and help more people get accepted to conferences.
Why Diversity in Tech Conferences Matters
This blog post is for my own benefit. I want to see spicier content at tech conferences. More hot takes. More outside perspectives. More – gasp, since DEI initiatives have been in freefall on my Linkedin feed recently (to say nothing of the past week) – diversity.
Tech conferences are still full of white men giving repetitive talks. I’ve been to 14 meetups that featured a guy who made a subway app using public transit APIs. As someone who’s built my fair share of unoriginal apps, I shouldn’t judge, but I do notice that the apps getting presented at tech conferences become a LOT more interesting when the speakers come from more diverse backgrounds.
In short, I want more people to apply to conferences.
The Problem: People Are Too Intimidated to Apply
Applying to speak at conferences is intimidating. The term used to describe the conference application itself – a conference “paper” – is inherently intimidating, reminiscent of the academic-style papers from college that required careful citations and an appendix the length of one’s arm.
The surprising truth is that applying to conferences is far easier than most things you have to do in your regular job, and far easier than any of the papers you had to write in college…
Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Accepted to Conferences
Write a 250-Word Conference Proposal
You only need to write 250 words to submit a “conference paper.” In fact, most tech conference applications have a 250-word limit so you couldn’t write more even if you wanted to. Here’s an example of a paper I recently submitted to a couple of conferences; as you can see, it’s nothing crazy.
And, in the spirit of transparency, that 250-word “paper” was written by ChatGPT.
And if you’re wondering whether you need to train ChatGPT on examples of real conference papers, it’s not necessary to do so: conferences use accepted papers for the talk descriptions on conference schedules (which are publicly available on the web), so OpenAI has already scraped them all for you.
Include Links to Past Speaking Experience
My acceptance rate to conferences dramatically increased once I included links to past speaking experience, something I did upon the advice of my friend Akira, a conference veteran. Akira told me, “Conference committees like to see videos of past speaking just to make sure you can speak in public and won’t get stage fright.”
Taking their advice, I added more links to my application, even though none of this speaking experience was “technical.” Specifically, I’d spoken at a large tech conference about building a Green Team at MongoDB in 2021. I’d also given an assembly presentation to students at my former high school about learning to code in my mid-twenties. (Yes, this talk was literally targeted at 15-year-olds, and I included it anyway.)
Use the STAR Framework in Your Session Outline
Secondly, on the suggestion of my friend Josh, I wrote a supplemental description for my talk using the STAR (situation, task, action, and results) framework.
Josh’s exact words when I first sent him my initial GPT-written conference paper draft were “This was clearly written by AI.” Hah! He was right.
Heeding Josh’s advice, I begrudgingly rewrote the talk description myself (yes, without the use of generative AI) using STAR. You can see the new version here. I liked this new version a lot better, but it felt weird to reference myself so much (I used the word “I” eight times) in the talk description. Most conference papers use the term “we” instead of “I”, because the speaker usually works for an actual company (whereas at the time of writing these proposals, I was a solopreneur).
Faced with a time crunch, I eventually decided to stick with my GPT-written conference paper. Most conference paper application portals have an “optional” section, so I wrote “Here is my talk outline:” and pasted the STAR description. Again, not perfect, but it worked in a pinch.
Prepare for Rejection, but Keep Applying
Here’s the truth. Carolina Codes Conference was the first conference to accept me after nine months of applying to conferences. Prior to this summer, I’d gotten at least 75 conference talk rejections.
Persistence pays off. Keep tweaking things and keep applying.
The Two Key Changes That Led to My Acceptance
When I finally started getting accepted to conferences, I reached out to my marketing mentor, Omari – “You know that app I built last December, Too Phishy? Well, I applied to a bunch of conferences earlier this year, and now all of a sudden, it’s getting accepted!”
“Well,” Omari asked, “What changed?”
Funnily enough, it was only two of the simple changes above – adding links to past speaking experience and adding the STAR framework description in the optional section – that brought my acceptance rate from 0% to 30%. Since then, I’ve spoken at four conferences – Carolina Codes Conference (300+ attendees), BSides Nova (700+ attendees), BSides NYC (1,000+ attendees), and Triangle InfoSeCon (1,650+ attendees), and had a heck of a time doing it. I’ve met 100+ IT practitioners and learned more from them in-person than I ever could from online sources.
That’s what made me want to write this blog post.
Start Applying Today
Don't let rejection stop you. The hardest part of applying to conferences is finding conferences. Here's the conference application site I use: https://sessionize.com/app/speaker/discover. Once you're logged in, it’s surprisingly useful, because it sorts conferences by their application deadline and/or conference date.
Good luck!