[Inpycon] Sponsorship for PyCon India 2018

[Noufal Ibrahim KV]

On Fri, Dec 01 2017, vijay kumar wrote:

>>  This involves two things.
>>
>> 1. Low cost (definitely less than 50k. Preferable less than 25k). This
>> makes the barrier of entry low and there will be people who say "I don't
>> know if it's worth it but what the heck, let's try
>>    it anyway. It doesn't cost much."
>>
>> 2. A tangible gain from coming. We cannot piss off the high paying
>> sponsors who will have booth and other things at the event. However, just
>> paying 10k or something and having a link on the website
>>    doesn't do much. A startup row which will be active from (say) 14:00 to
>> 17:00 on the first day where the startups can all be in one room with a row
>> of tables. They can pitch their wares, organise
>>    little contests or whatever during that time. It won't be exclusive but
>> will be along with other talks.
>>
>
> There seems to be a little confusion here. We are planning to have 3 slabs
> for startups as below.
>
> Associate sponsors : 1L
> Associate sponsors : 50% discount for startups for which we are working on
> the criteria

The minimum sponsorship slab is 50k then? That's still quite high for a
small startup.

> Start up row : Free for shortlisted startups to showcase their
> products.

What are the criteria for shortlisting? Who's going to do it? This is a
gateway to accusations of favouritism and other nonsense which are not
worth it. 


> IMO, reducing the cost to 25K might help get more startups to sponsor
> PyCon. But providing a space for all the startups to organize like a
> job fair might hurt other high paying sponsors.

This is tricky to balance but my suggestion is genuinely make an effort
to increase the number of small sponsors. 

I'm not sure what you mean by a job fair but my suggestion was
different. It's a fixed non-exclusive time slot to show off startups who
use Python.

> We should also keep in mind the space availability at the venue. If we
> promise a space for stratups as mentioned and the number of startups
> who sponsor us go high we might end up having space crunch; looking
> for a bigger halls will cost us more which we cannot afford unless we
> get more than 40 sponsors.

We can cap the number of startups at the event and do first come first
serve. 

Quite frankly, I'm not against (and in fact supportive of) increasing
the entrance fee to rely less on sponsors and to reduce the number of
participants. 



[...]


-- 
Cordially,
Noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in