by "proximately profitable," i'm counting the obvious, clear, proximate revenues minus the obvious, clear, proximate costs. for example:
revenues: ticket sales, sponsorships, donations, lotteries, etc
costs: venue, food, travel, etc — NOTE: this market DOES NOT INCLUDE staff salaries
here's an equivalent market that includes staff salaries:
further clarifications:
since we might sell tickets for mana (or buy things in mana?), i'll include mana in this count, at an M100 = $1 USD.
this count would include manifest summer camp.
this count explicitly excludes things like, e.g., finding a new hire for manifold, or the manifold dev team getting really high quality user feedback
Related questions
Argument for NO: companies do events like this for all sorts of non-tangible benefits, such as raising awareness, soliciting feedback, and improving engagement with whales.
As such, subsidizing the event as much as the organizer can afford to is the preferred strategy. Directly profiting from the event isn't the goal, and so is unlikely to happen.
@DanHomerick Yeah but one of the manifold leadership team just commented below that they are adding incentive to make the event profitable so this suggests that a goal is profit. You can have multiple goals. Not subsidizing an event opens up the possibility of more regional events whereas subsidizing makes it just a loss leader and less efficient.
You can have multiple goals.
yeah, this is the case. my goals for the event, which roughly approximate the rest of the organizing team:
goal: weighting*
general good vibes/having a good event/bringing the community together/having fun: 0.5
profitability: 0.2
marketing manifold: 0.1
press: 0.05
specific, targetted goals, like building up partnerships among a leaders in the space: 0.05
misc: 0.1
*where 0=doesn't matter, and 1=the only thing that matters, and all weights should add to one.