#microconf

Tone

MicroConf

Tagline is "The conference for self-funded startups." A big emphasis is the "self-funded" part. This conference is all about how to grow or launch your company by funding it yourself through company generated revenue or working part time until you can quit and focus it on full time.

Launch Conference

Tagline is "The best place to launch your startup, raise money, and learn about starting a company." From my experience there definitely seems to be more focus on the "raising money" part as most of the startups there seem to have raised money or were actively looking to raise funding (either seed or venture capital).

Size

MicroConf

Total attendees around 250. All of us fit into one larger sized conference room at the Tropicana Hotel (Cohiba room to be more precise). The conference organizers, Rob and Mike, purposely limit the number of tickets to keep it more intimate.

Launch Conference

Total attendees around 10,000 or so (give or take a few hundred). They rented out the entire San Francisco Design Center Concourse. The first half of the building was dedicated to the Demo Pit where companies could setup a booth. The second half was dedicated for the main stage pitches and talks. The conference organizer, Jason Calacanis, wanted the conference to be open and accessible to as many as people so size is much larger.

Speaker Topics

Microconf

Because the focus of the conference is on self-funded startups (many of which were software as a service type businesses) the talks were more strategic and tactical in nature. For example one of my favorite talks, Rob Walling's talk, was entitled "How to Validate Your Idea and Launch to $7k in Recurring Revenue" where he step-by-step went through how he validated his most current company, Drip (if you're interested in the talk you can check out slides).

Launch Conference

Because of the size of the conference Launch is multi-track with different "stages" having a wide range of different talks. Topics include startups "launching" a new feature or product (the conference is called "launch" after all), panels about raising money, and various higher profile speakers. The tone is definitely a lot less tactical and meant to be more aspirational (as in "maybe one day I'll raise millions of money too!").

Audience

Microconf

I'd say 80% of the audience were developers and software engineers. Many have or are doing software consulting while bootstrapping their startups as a side business. Contrary to what you think of "startups" (ie college kids building it out of their dorm) many of the attendees were older (over 30), married, and with kids. Because of their situations and background their seemed to be a focus on creating a business that can generate revenue in order for them to quite their day job.

Launch Conference

Considering there were thousands there it was harder to connect and talk with everyone, but it was definitely a more varied crowd. Some people were just checking it out to get inspiration, others were designers, others programmers, and then some were students.  The types of businesses that had demo booths was also varied. Things from a tread mill you can play games with on your Occulus Rift to an app for sharing your fashion. A majority of the companies that were there seemed consumer focuses which is the antithesis of the attendees of MicroConf

Conclusion

It's definitely not a choice between "whether I should attend one conference or another." It's more a matter of what you are looking for in your company / startup. The downside of MicroConf is that it is much more expensive than Launch. MicroConf cost us about $800 per ticket vs Launch which was $49 per ticket. While the ticket price is higher for anyone seriously looking at growing or starting a self funded startup I can't think of a better conference to be surrounded by like-minded people.