Inside Create & Cultivate's $3M Festival With CEO Marina Middleton

the bossbabe podcast

Marina Middleton, CEO of Create & Cultivate, breaks down how her seven-person team sold 3,800 tickets to a $3 million women's entrepreneurship festival using zero ad spend. She details an organic growth engine built on

Key takeaways

• Create & Cultivate sold 3,800 festival tickets without spending a dollar on paid ads by leveraging UGC campaigns, targeted archetype giveaways, and an ambassador commission program.
• Middleton's speaker outreach framework rejects traditional fees; instead, she offers high-value stage space and brand activation access to attract talent like Cardi B and Martha Stewart.

Main topics

• Organic festival growth & zero ad spend strategy
• Speaker outreach & brand activation framework

Notable quotes

"The festival is our tentpole event. It is what we focus on. Everything else that we do throughout the year is to drive back to festival."

Conclusion

This episode delivers a tactical blueprint for scaling community-driven events organically while

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The festival is our tentpole event. It is what we focus on. Everything else that we do throughout the year is to drive back to festival. It Speaker 2 (0:06) is very different to be creating content as a founder who's running a brand than it is to be creating content as a content creator. Speaker 1 (0:13) 100%. I love educational posts. I love like, here's the stage. Here's what you're going to learn. I'm always, I'm constantly looking at assets and being like, why should I leave my family, pay for this ticket, potentially pay for a flight, hotel, like... What am I getting out of it? For Speaker 2 (0:27) you getting into this, how do you even begin to start to wrap your head around, here's how I contact talent. Here's where I look for Speaker 1 (0:34) security. Cardi B, with her performing this year, that's a little different. When she was at her opening in New York, I guess they had to like shut down the streets because her Bardi gang, they like swarmed the streets and shut down the streets. People assume Speaker 2 (0:50) you're a 100 % team. And actually, you're a seven-person team and you guys are really scrappy. How do you Speaker 1 (0:54) communicate that with brands? Nobody ever really feels like we're a small team besides the team. Speaker 2 (1:00) The team's like, we feel it. We know. Speaking of the kind of people you have there, you were just saying you don't pay speakers. Yeah. So it's funny because... Speaker 2 (1:12) Okay, let's just dive in at the top thing because I have so many questions. We just started talking. I have so many questions. Crane Cultivate, the largest festival for women in business is coming up this weekend. I cannot wait to speak at it. You just said you've sold 3,800 tickets. Speaker 1 (1:25) Yep. Speaker 2 (1:25) Okay, how are we selling tickets? What is your sales strategy here? Because that is insane. Speaker 1 (1:31) Yeah, what I was going to say is 3,800 is insane. We have two more days. We have two more keynotes that we're announcing, which will spike up the ticket sales. And that's definitely one of the strategies, but we do have to turn off tickets because we, I say only, but we only have exactly 4,000 gift bags. So like logistically, you know, we only need to sell 4,000. And so although we had the plan of selling 4,000, it's still insane. It's insane. To see it come to life. And so we'll talk through, okay, how do we sell tickets? For us specifically, we want to make sure that the festival is something that people know that is year over year. Every September, we'll be in LA. It is the most important thing. It's the same exact thing as how South By does it in Austin, how CanLion does it, how it's a tentpole event that every woman, whether she's Gen Z, millennial, Generation X, she's building, she's not building, she needs to be in that room. Because we're going to talk about all of the things, right? So we spend about like... I would say, so we'll start selling 2027 tickets the day of the event. And so we launch immediately and we give everybody that is there first access to buy tickets at the cheapest price. Speaker 2 (2:42) Okay. So Speaker 1 (2:43) there's the pricing tier. I don't love sales because I don't want people programming to think that like they're going to wait for a sale, but we'll do like spikes of sales like every once in a while. We did a lot of giveaways this year, meaning we did, we created archetypes this year. So I really wanted to have different archetypes of different people that are there. The creator, the founder, the person that's raising money, the investor, the student. We have 10. Each archetype, we did a giveaway. So we gave 20 tickets away for each of those archetypes. So that guarantees that we're going to have those people in the room. More people see it. They apply. If they don't make it, they still get a discount. They can attend. So that really helped. We launched a creator program this year. So we have over 1,500 creators coming. All sizes, like millions and millions of followers are just starting out. So that has really helped just to get them in the room. We did a UGC program, which was encouraging the attendees from last year to post their content of their experience last year. So it's not just Creating Cultivate that's posting, you know, the videos and pictures and our experiences, but it's like real stories about them finding an investor, them finding a job, their business partner. And so... It didn't feel as testimonially, if that's a word, but it was more of like the user-generated content that they posted. And then the fifth thing that we launched, which is crazy to actually say that we launched all of these five things as I'm saying, is an ambassador program. So people are always promoting Create and Cultivate events. And I'm like, why don't we give them like some Speaker 2 (4:19) commission for it? You Speaker 1 (4:21) know what I mean? And so ambassador program, you had to apply, you then get 10 % kickback. So we did a lot of different things that encouraged audiences or like people to post and then us tap into their audience, right? So we were very strategic, like women in tech, women in finance. We just wanted to tap into audiences that may have not known about Create and Cultivate. So I think those programs and initiatives really helped get us to that number really fast. I'd also be lying if I said like, announcing Alex Earl and Emma Greed and Cardi B as our concert like didn't help. Like, of course it helped, you know, so it's definitely talent too. Speaker 2 (4:56) And are you all organic? Do you do any ads? We don't do any ads. Speaker 1 (5:00) What? Speaker 2 (5:00) So you've sold all Speaker 1 (5:01) these tickets with no ad spend? Never Speaker 2 (5:03) done Speaker 1 (5:03) ads in the history of the company. I really want to get into ads, which is funny because I come from the publishing world from working at Yahoo. But like, there's just I would rather spend my money somewhere else. I get it. Yeah. Like, I don't know. I've never like been able to nail. the ads because you're spending so much and you're trying to get like a widespread in front of as many people. But I'm like, I just would rather focus on like concentrated communities, tap into them and have them convert faster. We've never done an ad. Speaker 2 (5:31) Yeah, I get it. I mean, in the whole decade that Boss Babe's been running, we've only spent $3 million on ads in that whole decade. Yeah. So we've tested it and then never really ran with it until... this last kind of three months and now we're scaling ads, which is really fun. It's just a different channel for us. Speaker 1 (5:47) Yeah. But Speaker 2 (5:47) I do think you kind of go all in on one or the other. I think it's very hard to do both things really, really well. Totally. But the fact that you've done it all organically is phenomenal. And having it be the same time every year. So true. I mean, I spoke at a Create and Cultivate event. I Speaker 1 (6:04) think Speaker 2 (6:04) it was in 2019. Speaker 1 (6:05) Like it's Speaker 2 (6:06) been, we know it has been going on. every single year and got better every single year. The branding's so iconic. It's very recognizable. Obviously, all of that. So that's amazing. How does security work at an event of this size? That scares the living daylights out of me to think about the kind of people that you have attending, headlining, artists, security. I mean, at one point you had a Kardashian there. It's insane. Does that keep you up at night? Speaker 1 (6:33) No. Everything else does. But security is that. Security is the one thing that I feel really good. We have, I think it's like 90, 93 security guards on site. It's packed. Every corner has security. There's security down the street. It's overnight. Talent has their own security. We have like five people, security guards walking like Sierra last year. She was supposed to get off stage and go straight to like golf cart back. And she was like, no, I actually want to walk into the crowd and do pictures. And I'm like, Oh, my God. So it's like you completely shift and, you know, and get security plan. Cardi B with her performing this year, that's a little different. Like we haven't been able to share the date or the venue publicly. When she was at her opening in New York, I guess they had to like shut down the streets because her Bardi gang, they like swarmed the streets and shut down the streets. So this is like, that's like a real thing of. making sure that people, we have a very strict registration process of coming into the doors and all that stuff. So making sure people like really registered and have their tickets and all that stuff. So it's a lot, but the security, yeah, we have almost 100 people on site. Speaker 2 (7:42) And speaking of the kind of people you have there, you were just saying you don't pay speakers. Speaker 1 (7:47) Yeah. So it's funny because obviously when you say like, oh, we don't pay speakers, it feels very like. Speaker 1 (7:54) like crazy to say just because we've had so many of these big speakers, right? So Martha Stewart, the Kardashian, Alex Earl, Emma Green, we don't pay anybody. The reason is we'll give them space on site to activate. A lot of the brands that are coming in and for people that are building businesses or wanting to work with talent, a lot of the times it's like you want to learn about who has something going on, right? Do they have a book launching? Do they have a product launching? How can we support by giving them access to this massive group of buying women? Women are coming and posting and engaging. Like this is the best marketing, you know what I mean? Experience that they're going to have. So sometimes people don't really understand that. It doesn't work for everybody. There's definitely times we've gone out to people and they're like, hey, like either here's my speaker fee or like the timing doesn't work. I will say. usually it's not the A-list celebrities. They're not usually asking for a speaker fee because it's like, like the Kardashian isn't going to care for 10K, 20K. But she will care if we have this like massive Skims build, you know, and people are posting pictures and stuff. So just trying to learn about what someone's, what do they want? And just make sure that's equal value. Speaker 2 (9:05) For you getting into this. How do you even begin to start to wrap your head around? Here's how I contact talent. Here's where I look for security. Here's how we pull all of this stuff together. Because it is such, it is the kind of space where if this was all you did, I get it. But this is only one part of your business. Yeah. So how are you getting your head around that? Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:27) So the festival specifically is definitely the biggest part of the business. It's the most important product that we have. It's what we bought the business around. It's what we raised money for. It's like the festival is our tentpole event. It is what we focus on. Everything else that we do throughout the year is to drive back to festival. Our social, our future summit event that we do in Austin, all of our dinners is to ensure that we're like still engaging the community and being able to provide value and show our programming, but at such a smaller scale than festival. And then festival is a big firework moment. I Speaker 2 (9:56) didn't know that. I didn't realize that all of those micro... I mean, not micro, smaller events are pushing toward the bigger and that's your main product. Speaker 1 (10:06) Yeah, but that's a new thing, right? So once we acquired the business, historically, Create & Cultivate's done like 89 events a year. It's crazy. Like events everywhere, small, big conferences, LA, New York, like it was just insane. And so when we bought it, that was something that I felt strongly about changing the business model to create this one tentpole event that will grow year over year that really becomes the one. industry event that like everybody goes to. And so it's just a different shift of like priority. We still do a lot of events. Like again, I said, like the summit, we do lots of dinners, we do bespoke events, lots of like podcast recording and all of that stuff. But again, the core is driving to festival. And Speaker 2 (10:49) the main ways you monetize the event is ticket sales and brand activation. Yeah. Sponsorship is, yeah. Speaker 1 (10:54) Sponsorship I would say is like 90%. And then 10 % is attendee tickets. And the goal is that we like, obviously get as many sponsors as possible to offset the cost. Because people don't realize, I mean, maybe they know how much it is. It's like over $3 million to produce this one single event. Yeah. So, and that's like, we're really scrappy. Like we are really scrappy. We do a lot of marketing trades. We love to support like the, it's so amazing. Like thinking through like florists. or artists that will come and say, hey, we'll do this mural. And then they'll do the mural. And then this like massive brand that was sponsoring will then bring them to their own event and pay. You know, it's like, it's so cool to see the ripple effect of it, which I get really excited about. But yeah, 3 million. And that is like, we are. very scrappy when it comes to it. And very like creative on how we can bring that to life because we want everything to be so grand. This year specifically was the largest builds we've ever had. We had over 83 activations versus last year we had 21. So it was just like a massive jump. So I would say 90 % sponsors and then 10 % attendees. That Speaker 2 (12:01) is wild. Yeah. that jump from 20 to 80. And you have a small team, you have a team of seven, right? Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:07) So Speaker 2 (12:07) talk to me about that scrappy side then, because I'm assuming you have a separate events team agency? No. Your team of seven is arranging this event? Yeah. How are you doing this? Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:18) So we bring vendors on like on site. Obviously, there's like the AV team, there's like the on site production team that'll help like coordinate. the fabrication companies and rentals and stuff like that. But yeah, it's all my team, which is