Geekway to the West ticket sales went on sale yesterday for general attendees, and even with our historic growth, I never expected them to go this fast.

This is our biggest Geekway ever. We’re going to cap out at just under 2500 attendees total, with 200 of those being Patrons, 2000 being Attendees, and then the other 300 being the Staff and Owners, our families, a few guests, our lifetime member, our Vendors, and people who won entries from the charities and fundraisers we support.

2500 is a lot of people. I started attending Geekway when it was still in the Maryland Heights Center. I think the first year I came there were about 125 people there. It was just a couple years later in 2011 that I joined as a volunteer for Geekway, doing website work for the convention when it was at Westport. There were about 250-275 people there including on-site registrations, which was fairly steady growth.

2012 was a modest jump, with about 400 total attendees and 277 pre-registrations.

2013 was a scary year for us. We agreed to a 25% increase in hotel room pickups and put down deposits for a much larger area. We needed at least 400 pre-registrations to cover costs. We ended up with 559 pre-registrations, and over 600 attendees with walkups.

2014 saw even more growth, taking us to 756 pre-registrations and over 800 attendees.

Then, 2015 hit. We capped our paid attendance at 1300, with another 150 badges for vendors, staff, etc. We had a a first day ticket sales of over 80 attendees, and then a huge spike of over 500 sales in our pre-registrations at the end of our Early Bird pricing, and sold out in March.

At this point we were no longer really surprised at how big we were growing, but more or less just worried that we’d get too big, too fast, and the con wouldn’t be fun anymore. But we kept growing anyway, and for 2016 we booked the entire Westport Chalet, room for 1750 people. We determined we’d sell 1600 badges and keep the rest for staff and vendors.

We opened ticket sales in September, and had 370 tickets sold on our first day. We sold over 1000 tickets in the first month. And then something unimaginable happened, we sold completely out in December. We were excited. Ecstatic. And then we realized we had all this money, and it wasn’t January yet. We paid as much of our deposits as we could, bought games and shelves, but in the end we couldn’t ditch the money fast enough and had a huge tax penalty. I’ve never made money from Geekway, and never plan to, but eating a huge tax bill was not something I’d planned on, and the owners ended up paying half of the taxes and letting Geekway pay the other half.

After that snafu, Geekway 2016 went amazingly well. It was our best yet despite the huge growth. The owners and board of directors made the decision to move the venue, so we could grow again. This time to 2200 paid attendees and up to 300 others.

But! We knew better than to open ticket sales too soon. We couldn’t eat another tax hit like that, but we did need cash flow to pay some deposits, legal fees, and the like. We decided to sell 200 Patron badges for a premium price, with some additional swag and first crack at the hotel. We’ve never sold out a hotel before, but we knew as we got bigger it might be an issue.

Patron badges went on sale, and were gone in 4 hours. The hotel started filling up, and we couldn’t believe it. We thought it would take over a month to sell them, and then we hit our hotel commitments… we realized we needed more hotel rooms soon, but then the holidays hit and we weren’t thinking about it.

January 2nd was coming and we would start selling our 2000 attendee badges. I expected them to last 6 weeks. Maybe four? Then we realized the hotel was already full. We started scrambling to increase the block, but it was a holiday. I looked up other nearby hotels and updated our Venue page and the confirmation email. Jay sent out an ‘oops’ email to our mailing list. We started getting emails asking when registration would open.

January 2nd, 10:00 am. We sold 600 badges in the first HOUR. We ended the day having sold 1,170 badges. Today, we’ve sold 215 more. We have 575 tickets remaining as I type this, and I don’t expect them to last the week. We grabbed as many hotel rooms as we could at the Embassy and released them. Todd set up blocks at three other nearby hotels!

We’ve gotten complaints, some people won’t be coming since they can’t stay in the main hotel. I understand that, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

What a whirlwind. Also, while all this is going on, we’re wrangling vendors, and free games, and swag, and patron rewards, and volunteer prizes, and T-shirts, and the Trade Table, and events, and Play and Win… Not to mention the less fun parts of buying event insurance, dealing with printers, hiring moving companies, dealing with taxes and the accountant, and more. The next few months will be so hectic I will question while I do all this while having another full time job that actually pays the bills!

See you in May!