Notes:

• We sent out a final you haven’t paid for lunch reminder on Wed, asked for a reply if they were planning to bring their own. 20 or so are, so far. We don’t mind that they do of course, but it’s really valuable information because it’s another block of attendees we can confirm (or as close to confirm as possible). Paid attendees are one group (very likely to attend), comps (speakers, sponsors, a few volunteers, all very likely to attend), and then the rest. The way the site works we don’t make it obvious that you can NOT pay or how to change your plan. Not huge, but something we could tweak at the system level.
• We also asked for people to cancel if their plans changed, and we’ve done – guessing here – as many as 20. Every little bit helps us to understand where we stand.
• Why the obsession over counts? Back at #1 it was food, scared silly that we wouldn’t have enough. With paid lunches (and we order a little extra, still) we don’t sweat the food, but we still want to have about the right amount of water, soda, coffee, donuts, etc. Sucks to order 100 people worth extra, that’s money that could get used elsewhere. The other part is seating. Based on what we think we added a 10th room to make sure we could handle the attendance.
• We’re at 604 right now, and the count has bounced up and down over/under for a couple days as we add one/lose one.
• Maybe if we did another push to the not-reg list we might push it some more, but we feel like it’s a busy email week and we’ve done enough
• All of this a reminder that registrations are all good fun to count, but what matters is attendance. Kendal has one projection that puts at 500 on site. Im curious to see!
• We had the waitlist count sent to 600, but we moved it to 700. We don’t expect it to go that high, but with the count bouncing we’d rather just add people to the list rather than worry they don’t register because they’d be on the waitlist

Here’s some more art from Kendal looking at day by day number for the last week going back to 2009. The guess is +25 registrations from today. The question is how much that will get offset by cancellations.