KonfHub team at DevNation
KonfHub started not as a company but as a community initiative! The co-founders Hari Kiran and Ganesh believed in the mantra “learn, network, grow”: they focused on building meetup communities where there is ample scope to learn from each other & experts, network with other like-minded professionals, and grow personally and professionally.
After a successful Java meetup in Bengaluru in 2017
Community is at the Heart of KonfHub
Hari and Ganesh (who were college classmates in PSG tech) decided to quit their well-paying jobs in the IT industry and start “something” on their own. After quitting their jobs and not knowing what to do, they wrote a book on Java certification that became a bestseller. Then, they started their first meetup group on “Core Java” to share the knowledge gained while writing the book. They loved how the meetups brought together expert speakers who were enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge, companies who were keen to offer their office spaces for hosting meetups, and participants who were interested in learning and networking. So, slowly, they started doing more meetups on tech topics (now they have 12+ meetup groups with more than 60,000 members!).
After a successful meetup on Cloud & DevOps in Bengaluru
They started doing tech conferences as a logical next step to organising meetups. Their first conference was “Bangalore Container Conference” in 2017. Many more successful conferences followed that.
During the conferences, KonfHub’s founders ran into numerous challenges for which existing ticketing platforms were not providing any solutions:
- How do I get more registrations / sell tickets?
The existing ticketing platforms did not provide any support for promoting the event for selling their tickets and charged for the same. In one of the conferences, they paid Rs. 20,000 to feature the event on the ticketing platform’s landing page to attract more paid participants, and they got only 3 (!) tickets sold. Frustrated, they decided to give another Rs. 20,000 to whichever participant brought in the highest number of participants through a referral contest. To their surprise, it worked well, and they got 100+ paid registrations, and the conference was sold out! It took a couple of more years to tune the referral contest, and now KonfHub offers an automated referral contest that can be launched in less than a minute. To our credit, all major conferences hosted in KonfHub are SOLD OUT to date!
KonfHub founders Hari & Ganesh in a conference
- How do we engage the audience?
During conferences, holding the participants’ attention and keeping them engaged is difficult. So, after exploring other tools available in the market and not finding them suitable, their team developed a live quizzing platform QuizHub.
QuizHub is now used by developer & student communities in India and even in other countries. Questions in the events are typically related to the content shared in the event. Since participants play the questions simultaneously with a live leaderboard, there is a lot of engagement and excitement during the event.
QuizHub being used in a community conference in 2022
- How to get feedback and also reward participants?
“For events to be successful (be it training/workshops, conferences, or meetups), there needs to be a feedback loop. However, we found it difficult to motivate participants to give feedback. Also, it is important to reward participants, so they are happy and come back to participate in the events again and again,” says Ganesh Samarthyam.
“To solve these twin problems, we have developed an innovative solution: when participants submit their feedback, they can automatically get a participation certificate! With this approach, it is easy to encourage participants to give feedback, and the participants are also happy to get a participation certificate. Moreover, we found that student communities/events really like this feature,” adds Hari Kiran.
Continued Engagement With Developer Communities
KonfHub continues to host developer meetups and events in Bangalore and other cities. KonfHub also works closely with numerous developer communities across the country and slowly in other parts of the world.
We invite you to be part of this journey.
