No Brand Con, Attendance Counts, and Being Honest

With No Brand Con 2026 in the rearview, I think it's time to talk about the business of running a small, nonprofit convention. This year was genuinely really good for us, and kind of a miracle. Events like ours usually don't come back from the dead, and I want to talk about how that death happened, and how we used the lessons from that collapse to bring it back. When we failed in 2023, it wasn't out of nowhere. Events like ours don't just just spontaneously combust. There are a number of reasons cons can fail, and ours wasn't special. Now there were some cirumstances that accelerated that death, like the COVID-19 pandemic suspending any income for a few years for an organization that has to get most of its revenue from memberships, but that train had left the station long before that. Something we don't talk about a lot is how No Brand Con's attendance had been steadily declining for years. The last time No Brand Con publicly reported its numbers was 2015 (1504 for the record). 2015…