Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter where we validate one of our previous ideas quicker than the Bugatti TV can unfold itself (why did they build this?) 📺
In today's edition:
💡 An idea for everyone who's ever wanted to skip a conference
🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product
🤑 What do the unit economics look like?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea
Let's goooo 🚀
🤝 Conference Attendance-as-a-Service
Seat happens
Name.com Domain: Altendee.co
👤 Source: Edition #311, written the week we couldn't get ourselves to a conference in Vegas.
❌ Problem:
Conferences are still the best way to make B2B sales. 81% of attendees have buying authority and cost per lead runs $112-186, which beats almost every digital channel for high-value sales cycles.
But the price of being in that room is brutal when you're twelve people and pre-Series A. SaaStr Annual tickets run $799-2,199 before you've booked anything, and attending one conference lands somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000 per person all in.
So early-stage companies do the only sensible thing. They pick one show a year, go to it, and skip the other four they should have been at. It's time to unlock those other events for them. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A managed service that puts a vetted, sector-literate local professional on the floor, on your behalf, at the shows you can't get to.
You brief them, they work the show, you get qualified leads, booked meetings and a written report once it's over.
Pricing is primarily on an outcome-based model, meaning the risk to the company is extremely low.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
🩺 Your Health is Your Wealth
As a founder, you obsess over your company's metrics. Revenue, run rate, churn. But what about your most valuable asset? Your health.
That's where Function Health comes in.
Function Health is a tech unicorn that offers a groundbreaking health membership that gives you access to 160+ lab tests and advanced, FDA-cleared MRI scans, all for a few hundred dollars a year and all designed to detect disease before symptoms appear. Oh, and scans take just 22 minutes.
Because no amount of wealth matters without your health.
🔬 Our Validation Process
📊 We Priced It Up
The ticket is the cheap bit. SaaStr Annual runs $799-2,199, TechCrunch Disrupt's founder pass is $579, TechCrunch Founder Summit's is $229 on early bird. Annoying, but survivable.
The room is what kills you, because conferences break the hotel market in the city they land in. Median nightly rates near Moscone jump 87% during Dreamforce week, from $305 to $569, against a government lodging allowance of $272 - a $297 gap per night. During CES week a survey of 158 Las Vegas hotels found a Strip average of $262, with some properties asking over $1,000 a night. Ramp found the same pattern across Dreamforce, SXSW and CES.
Now do the maths nobody does. Call a trip $5,000 all in. A founder who's never walked that floor before, jet-lagged, without a plan, has maybe fifteen conversations worth having across three days. That's $333 a conversation, against an industry cost-per-lead benchmark of $112-186. You're paying two to three times the going rate, and that's before you count a week of founder time.
🚀 Acquiring Customers
👥 Early Customers
Go to groups of companies first, not isolated ones. One conversation with an accelerator or a VC platform lead gets you thirty companies with an identical problem and a partner who's actively looking for ways to be useful to them.
Next, hit up founder communities. "Is [show] actually worth it?" gets asked weekly in every Slack group and subreddit in B2B. Answer it honestly for a year and you'll never need to advertise.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Show-by-show SEO, and the search terms are gorgeously specific. "Is SaaStr worth it", "CES on a budget", "Shoptalk without going". High intent, near-zero competition, one page per show.
Supply is your growth loop. Recruit operators from inside the industries themselves - consultants, fractional marketers and between-roles sales people who attend these shows anyway. They arrive with their own client relationships.
🤑 The Economics of This Business
🏷️ Pricing
Coverage fee ($750 per show): Covers the badge, the brief, three days of floor time and the written report. It exists because your operator gets paid whether the show turns out to be any good or not, which is why nobody in this business can run on pure success fee no matter how hard a prospect pushes.
Commission ($100 - $325 per booked meeting): On top of the coverage fee, operators earn on the outcomes they generate - intros made, meetings booked. This incentivizes the operator to perform and reduces the risk to the buyer too.
🧮 Unit Economics
Pay the operator the same way you charge. $300 a day plus $100 a meeting, so a quiet show costs you less instead of eating your margin.
Show one barely pays. Three days of floor time and six meetings is $1,500 to the operator, plus roughly $600 for the badge. Against $2,700 of revenue, you clear about $600. At three meetings you've worked for free.
Show two is where the money is. Same client, same operator, brief already written. Your own selling and setup time drops to near zero, the price doesn't move, and margin roughly doubles.
⚔️ The Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Trade show staffing agencies ($20,000-50,000 average exhibitor spend per show): mature and national, operating across 200-plus US locations. But they staff a booth you've already paid for. They serve companies who are definitely going. You serve the ones who aren't.
Virtual passes, AI note-takers and free session recordings ($0): these have permanently killed the "tell me what was said in the keynote" half of this idea.
Skipping the show entirely ($0): the actual competitor, and currently the market leader by a distance. Everything about your pitch has to be aimed at the decision not to go.
🎯 The Gap
The entire events industry sells to companies who are already in the building - booth builders, staffing agencies, lead capture tools, badge scanners. Nobody sells anything at all to the far larger group who looked at the numbers and stayed home.
✅ Go
This one's a go.
Don't pitch it as a cheaper way to attend a conference, because the thing you're actually replacing costs nothing. Pitch it as the four shows a year you were never going to make. The founder still gets on the plane for the one that matters. Everything else gets covered by somebody who already knows that floor, at a price that fits a seed budget.
The mechanism that makes it work is pricing on outcomes rather than time. That drops the entry point to a few hundred dollars plus whatever the show actually delivers, which is the difference between a nice idea and a purchase order.
We wrote this idea because we couldn't get to a conference in Vegas. Turns out most companies can't get to most conferences, and nobody has ever tried selling them anything.
This one's worth a shot.
👋 That's All Folks
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