NEARCon 2024 had about 200 registrations.
The target was roughly 1,800 and we had around six to eight weeks left.
Not ideal lol.
The obvious answer was to push the event harder across the ecosystem. More posts, more reminders, more people asking the same audience to register.
That audience already knew NEARCon existed.
Asking them again wasn’t magically going to find another 1,600 people.
We went looking outside the ecosystem
I led ecosystem relations and had a small team. Working with the events and marketing teams, we started looking at people near the event who could get something real from it even if they weren’t already deep in NEAR.
Computer-science students. Developers. Universities. Crypto-curious builders. Non-crypto developer communities.
They didn’t need an ecosystem update. They needed a reason to give us a day of their time.
So we talked about the founders they could meet, companies they could learn from, builders working on things they were curious about and possible career opportunities in an industry they didn’t know well yet.
Then we took that message directly to the places those people already were.
My team coordinated outreach into universities, department heads and developer communities. We used promo-code access and direct organic outreach while the wider events and marketing push continued around us.
Registrations moved from roughly 200 to more than 2,500 in approximately six weeks. The event passed the 1,800 target and became oversubscribed.
No paid acquisition.
It was a cross-functional result. My part was spotting that the audience was exhausted, finding relevant groups outside the existing ecosystem, changing the reason they should care and coordinating that outreach.
The bit that stayed with me is pretty simple.
Teams spend a lot of time asking how to promote something harder.
Sometimes the people you need have never heard the first message. They’re somewhere else, already looking for the outcome your product or event can give them.