Borrowing someone else's audience

The fastest way to fill a room you can't fill alone is to stand next to someone who can.

This is not sponsorship and it is not a speaker slot. It is finding one person or company whose audience is your audience, and running the thing together.

Who to ask

The test is overlap without competition. You want someone selling something different to the same people. A billing tool and a fractional CFO practice have the same room and nothing to argue about. Two billing tools have the same room and a problem.

Look for:

• Adjacent operators: consultancies, agencies, fractional people. They live on relationships, and an event is their natural habitat.
• Communities with no venue. Plenty of Slack groups and newsletters have an engaged audience and nowhere to put them, and you have the room.
• A venue with a list. Co-working spaces and members' clubs often have both a space and an audience, and will trade one for the evening.

Avoid anyone whose audience is large and untargeted. Two thousand irrelevant subscribers fill a room with people who won't come back.

What to ask for, specifically

"Let's co-host something" produces nothing. Ask for the thing you need:

• One dedicated email to their list, sent by them, in their voice. A mention inside a longer newsletter does almost nothing.
• Ten personal invites, the same private round you are doing, from someone else's relationships.
• Their name on the invitation. Sometimes their name on the invitation is all you need.

Be equally specific about what you're giving. Usually: you do all the work.

The split that keeps them

Whoever put the room together owns the follow-up with the room. That is the honest default, and pretending otherwise poisons the second event.

What works: both hosts get the attendee list, both agree what they'll do with it. Write that down in an email before the invitations go out, not afterwards. One line: "we'll each follow up with everyone, and neither of us adds them to a marketing list."

The thing that ruins co-hosted events is one side treating the other's audience as a lead magnet. It's obvious within a week, and it costs you the relationship and the audience.

Speakers are a different deal

A speaker who brings an audience is a co-host. A speaker who brings expertise is a guest with a job.

Be clear which one you're asking for, because the ask is different. "Come and talk about X" gets you expertise. "Come and talk about X, and bring the people you think should hear it" gets you a room, and deserves more of the credit.

Start smaller than feels right

A first co-hosted event with someone you don't know well should be small enough that failure is survivable for both of you. Twelve people, one evening, low stakes.

Do it well and the second one is easy to ask for. Fill a hundred-person room badly together and there isn't a second one.