Part 2 of 3:
2016 wasn't a good year for Ponycon. It lost so much money that we pretty much shot it dead on stage during the closing ceremony. It was an extremely sad way to go out and it remains one of the saddest days of my life. The following couple of months were extremely difficult for the team.
We ended up finding a way though, we found a way to make it so that even if we lost 50% of our attendance, which is absolutely insane, we would still make a profit and would be able to continue making cons. We found a cheaper venue, we focused on the fans rather than focusing on VA's. Everything shifted and the team felt really good about the direction it was going.

But for some reason that I still can't quite understand, our sales numbers just weren't going all that strong. We had already signed contracts, had already gotten the ball rolling, but our sales were coming in at 2/5ths of what they were the previous year. The biggest drop in attendance that any pony convention has ever had, I have absolutely no idea what happened to cause this but we did everything we could to turn it around. We reached out to parent magazines, doubled down on our advertising on the various pony sites. We did everything we could to show how incredibly attendee focus we were being with this convention. We did things that no other con had done before, the biggest example of this is the computer lab where we had about thirty laptops set up and some of the best most prominent animators in the fandom were coming to show you, hands on, how they make the animations. It was so exciting to us but the reaction we got from the fandom was "meh, you don't have Tarra Strong so I'm not going".
It was a huge blow to us. It was shocking to see that so many people were more interested in waiting in a four hour line to talk to someone for thirty seconds rather than getting a one of a kind experience with hands on demonstrations and up close and personal interactions with the various creators that we've come to know and love. We had workshops with Cathy Weseluck where she talks about all the things she does outside of pony. We had just… So many things.

You can probably hear the frustration that I have over this through my text. I couldn't understand why a thirty second conversation was worth more than all of this. But that's what the fans want I guess. We read the room wrong.


Despite all of this, we did have a really wonderful time with everyone throughout the con. Just about everyone I talked to that DID show up said that it was the best con they've attended and it really meant a lot to me to hear that from them. Our small team poured our hearts and souls into it and people definitely seemed to notice.

So yeah, that's how the con ended up failing and strapping me with about $60,000 in debt. I truly believed that we had something special here and was hoping to continue it for years to come but it just wasn't meant to be.