Warning: that conference I went to in Austin was a content bait trap

I flew down to Austin last week for a marketing conference and sat in on three sessions that were basically 45 minute ads for the speaker's paid course. They kept saying 'strategy' but never showed a single real example or data point. One guy literally told us to 'trust the process' and then dropped a link to his $500 workshop. I left feeling like I wasted $350 on the ticket plus a hotel night. Have any of you walked out of a conference and asked for a refund, or do you just eat the loss?

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spencer_dixon391mo ago

Looking at this I gotta ask, is it really a scam though? Half of every conference is just people pitching their next thing, that's kind of the whole game. You paid for the ticket knowing the speakers make money off the back end, that's how these events work. Asking for a refund because the sessions felt like ads is like asking for your money back at a movie theater because of all the trailers. Sounds like you got a couple of bad talks but that doesn't mean the whole thing was a trap, just means you picked the wrong rooms to sit in.

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