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I’ve had this a number of times recently ... “we’d like to invite you to do a private talk for our staff ... other speakers generally do this for free because it’s good for exposure”.
I will happily speak at a public meetup for free if I’m already in the area. Asking me to undertake an unpaid 2-3 day roundtrip to do a free private hour long talk for your staff is pretty offensive though.
Sometimes companies will ask me to visit them for free when I’m “in the area”. The problem here is that often a competitor company is paying me to be in the area! So that’s not very fair on my clients, who are often smaller companies than those asking for free stuff.
Conference organisers get burnt by this a lot ... they pay for speakers to travel to their event, who then disappear and do a free private talk for a local company. That’s just rude.
This "give me free stuff" happens with Structurizr too ... a lot. Recently a *funded* startup (5+ years old) with 50+ employees asked me for free access to Structurizr for 1 year (US$150) so that they could "convince the company to use it". That's pretty insulting.
Other fun stories include ... I once agreed to run a workshop as a profit share, only to find that the organiser filled 80% of the seats with their own staff at a "discounted rate". 🤦♂️🤷♂️
Or the time I was invited to speak at a conference in Siberia, and they would only cover my flights from Moscow. 🤣
And the conference that offered to take me sightseeing at the weekend instead of paying for my travel (6 flights) or accommodation.
Often the invitation e-mails for conferences and private talks at organisations go like this: "famous person X has previously given/is giving a talk and we'd like to invite you" ... but most of these people are DevRels, and that's literally their job. I'm self-employed though.
