Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve exhibited at Maker Faire a couple of times and visited many times, and exhibited at Open Sauce twice.

Early Maker Faire (in the Bay Area) was a mix of art booths/vehicles coming out of Burning Man storage and independent makers showing their projects and inventions. Then it rapidly commercialized with company booths taking most of the show space, and then it finally imploded financially. The recent resurrected version is less commercial, much smaller, and aimed more at younger children and their parents, but is overall not that far off from the Make origins.

Open Sauce is very much Creators (content and otherwise) and independent makers, growing in scale every year. It works well, in part because the company/sponsor booths are no larger or flashier than the hacker/maker booths.

I've spoken with a few conference organizers about this—how do you please sponsors enough to make them want to come back the next year, but also make it so their booths / areas on the floor don't turn into boring "whatever-conference" spaces.

It's a balance and so far Open Sauce seems to have done okay there; but a couple sponsored booths felt a bit more corporate/salesy and out of place this year.

You could tell people would kind of give them a wide berth compared to walking around other areas, where people were more densely packed around all the booths.

The balance during the first two years felt amazing. I was so energized by the first days that I spent the second days revisiting to a ton of makers I’d met the first day to talk more. And I still didn’t see everything.

This year my friends and I felt it swayed a bit far to sponsored booths. There were fewer cool experiences (like the mini-golf) and I’d seen everything in one day. We wondered if the cool booths got denied in favor of ones that could pay more.

We still had great conversations and met incredible people, but felt we had to work harder to find it.

That said.. I think William’s team has been in a deficit each year and he said in his OpenSauce+ video how he is trying to be more sustainable.. I still remember buying the $69.69 early early bird ticket on the way out of 2023 for 2024 just to help them cover existing costs.

I really hope they figure it out. It’s such a great environment and has a great team behind it

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