The biggest bet I've ever took

I've never organized an event in my life.

Unless you count beer pong tournaments in college (I ran a clean bracket).

So obviously, in 47 days, I'm throwing a four-day event for product marketers in Michigan. We've raised $100K in sponsorships, put our solo consultancies on hold, and we've been promoting this thing for ten months.

My podcast co-host Eric came with a vision and a dream. We said yes.

Here's everything we got wrong and right building it 👇

All good stories have a villain that makes you root for the hero early on. We didn’t set out to find someone to bash, but it all started with a very specific award on LinkedIn.

In November, the Product Marketing Alliance launched their top 100 product marketing influencers 2025. On the same day, we’ve launched the NOT top 100 PMM influencers:

And the day right after, we started calling out the dry sandwiches delivered at their events.

And we said that people deserve to eat good sandwiches, but since we can’t ship them, we’ve partnered with the World Food Programme to raise money.

We’ve raised $2,908 in 36 hours. All that to say that we’ve never bashed PMA, but we found a way to make this memorable, while making LinkedIn feel like reality TV.

The common enemy here was bad food served at events, and awards that don’t reflect the hard work that product marketers are doing.

Now that we’ve had an enemy, we needed to research what great events look like.

We started promoting our event (the idea of it at least) 10 months ago, and took time to workshop precisely what our dream event would look like.

So we went to Drive 2025 and did the whole planning there. Eric went to Highline twice, I followed him at Above The Fold, and we’ve been each of us to a bunch of PMA summits.

We had a few ideas of what we wanted:

→ Go outside and explore
→ Learn lessons through short stories
→ Eat at least 3 slappin' meals per day
→ Ship something cool before you leave
→ Hear a roast of your offer or value prop

But the details mattered less than the main idea:

Can three non-marketers create a better event than a company that has done 100+ of them?

But because we didn’t want to re-mortgage our houses, we’ve needed the money to make this event a reality BEFORE we started selling tickets.

So came the idea of Ship Days.

The pitch we took to sponsors: don't buy a logo on a banner. Run a room.

Five sponsors, four rooms, and every attendee picks two of them.

Navattic and Guideflow for interactive demos. GetWhys for voice of the customer. CompeteIQ for competitive intel. Appcues for in-app adoption.

Day 1 you start both. Day 2 you keep building, with the people who actually made the tool sitting next to you. Day 3 you present what you built to the room.

Nobody presents slides about what they might build next quarter.

That's the whole model. Sponsors fund the event and get two days watching product marketers use their product for real. PMMs leave with two things shipped and a business case. Nobody has to pretend a booth is a conversation.

We gave ourselves one rule: raise $100K before selling a single ticket. March 15 was the deadline. If the money wasn't there by then, we'd have killed the whole thing (and I was genuinely not sure we'd make it).

We ran a lot of calls with software vendors. Most of them hated the idea of slapping a logo somewhere and paying extra for the privilege.

So we stopped selling them one.

Navattic said yes at $25K. GetWhys at $25K. CompeteIQ and Guideflow at $15K each. Appcues came in after.

No rate card, no gold-silver-bronze tiers, every single one negotiated on its own terms.

Plenty said no though…

And the sandwich thing? It turned into our outbound angle. Zach went after the vendors who had already sponsored PMA events with one line: we know what you spent your money on. Let's talk.

We hit $100K in March. Then we opened ticket sales.

But if you’re a PMM, you know why the classic event playbook sucks.

You've sat in the ballroom. You've taken the notes. You flew home with a tote bag and a Notion page of things to try, and by Thursday you were back in the launch doc and none of it happened.

An event that ends in notes produces notes. That's the format doing exactly what it was built to do.

So we built one that ends in output instead.

Sorting houses like in Harry Potter. A field day during Michigan fall. Keynote talks about everything EXCEPT marketing. Sticky moustaches for everyone.

We built the event PMMs deserve. The Boring 2 Boring industry has been serving the same thing for years, and we were done eating it.

Instead of telling you, I'll let this speak for itself:

Two reasons, and neither of them is that I want your money 👇

If you run events: we did this with three people, no agency, and a spreadsheet. The villain, the sponsors-run-rooms model, the budget raised before a single ticket got sold. All of it is copyable. Steal it.

If you're a PMM: this is the one you leave with the thing built. (And if October
doesn't work for you, the model still does. Go ask your team for two days and a tool.)

I've been running my consultancy for 39 months. But I'll be honest, this is the most fun I've had in years.

Selling tickets is REALLY more challenging than I budgeted for, but we're feeling the wave at 120%.

I've even started running ads targeting PMMs, for a podcast called We're Not Marketers. We're really doing the opposite here.

But I can promise you, with all of the efforts, there's nothing confirming that we will run this back next year. So this might be the truly, only edition of Death to Marketing…

34 of the 70 seats are gone. If you're on the fence, hit reply and I'll send you the discount code I've still got 👀

Everything else about Death to Marketing lives here:
https://death-to-marketing.com/

Hope to see you in real life soon 👋

- Gab