PgSaturday Dallas: Break the mold
About a year ago Dallas Postgres joined the PostgresWorld network of Meetups. This was after a long time of relationship building between PostgresWorld and the local community. While we built the foundations and infrastructure to support meetups a detail became increasingly clear. Meetups thrive on local leadership. If you don’t have local leadership meetups will wither on the vine.
We saw PgSaturday Dallas as investment in local leadership and local community. The investment did not disappoint. We announced and successfully organized the first PgSaturday Dallas on April 5th, 2025. What made this conference different for the community than others?
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A creative venue
For decades Postgres Community conferences have run in Academic Spaces or Conference spaces such as Hotels or Convention Centers. We wanted to break the mold. The community is shifting. We have a lot more professionals and especially young professionals. So we thought, what is a way that we can bring an elevated experience to what is essentially a Professional Development opportunity? That is why we chose Alamo Drafthouse with great food, comfortable seats and top of the line AV capabilities. We expect when we run the next Dallas event, it will likely be held at the same location.
Saturday
The idea behind Saturday was simply, “Will people show up on a weekend?” The idea was derived from the successful SQL Saturday and this event shows that people will, provided the correct incentive.
What can we do better?
A criticism we received was the price of the ticket (149.00). We felt that was fair for a full day of content, morning coffee and lunch. What do you think, what is a fair price for a 1 day event?
Here’s how it works in the SQL Saturday: First the admission is free, with a small fee ($15-$20) for lunch, like that, it’ll be guaranteed that more people will show up. Second, you need an academic venue, something like a community college or high school, a place where it provides infrastructure such as AV, Amphitheater, etc, and the cost of the location is very low, if not free (Sometimes). Lastly, you need vendors to help sponsor the event. Any vendor that loves and has products catered for Postgres is what you need. Like that, they offer their tools and services to the audience and help pickup any bills left over.
A ticket price of $30-$40 should work well. For the next event, we could use the Improving office location where we hold our monthly meetups. Adding sponsor booths would also help reduce the overall costs.