Visit almost any event website and you’ll find the same reasons to attend: a list of speakers, learning opportunities, a packed agenda and the promise of meaningful connections.
All of that might be true. But it’s rarely written for one person.
Two people can hold the same job title at similar companies and still want completely different things from three days at a conference. One might want to meet startups. The other might want to learn how their peers are using AI internally. Their profiles look nearly identical on paper. Their reasons for showing up don’t.
HumanX built its attendee experience around that gap. Before someone even registers, the HumanX Pack opens with one question: what brings you here? That answer shapes a personal shortlist, sessions worth attending, people worth meeting, sponsors worth a conversation, each one with a reason attached.
Alex Anikeev has spent more than 14 years writing software, mostly in back-end cloud infrastructure and third-party integrations. Before HumanX, he led a team of engineers on Web Summit’s acquisition platform and websites. Now, as Head of Technology at HumanX, he owns the technology behind the event, including its registration, payments, and personalized attendee experience.
In our latest Sevinar, Alex joins Rachel Stephan, CEO and Founder of Snöball, to walk through how HumanX builds that case, one person at a time. Here’s what he shared.
Registration Starts With What HumanX Already Knows
Alex describes HumanX’s approach: “We call it reduce the friction for registration.”
The process starts with a small ask. Attendees enter their email address and agree to the terms before moving to the next step. HumanX then checks its internal database and uses what it already knows to pre-fill the rest of the form.
“Then we try to get the data from our internal database about you to pre-fill everything on the second step.”
For someone new to HumanX, the system uses Apollo to enrich the attendee’s information based on their email address. Either way, the aim is the same: reduce the amount of information the attendee has to enter manually.
As Alex puts it, “what’s left is just glancing over and maybe editing a few things that are outdated or incorrect.”
Rachel Stephan experienced the process herself as a HumanX attendee. “I want to thank you on behalf of all attendees going to HumanX because it is always a pain to refill, especially a returning attendee.”
That difference matters beyond registration. Information such as a person’s title, company, seniority, function and country helps HumanX classify them into one of 10 attendee personas. That becomes one of the inputs behind the recommendations that follow.
Takeaway: Make attendees do only the work you actually need them to do. If you already have the information, use it to make registration easier.
One Question Reveals What the Attendee Actually Wants
“The most important field is a free text box saying what brings you to HumanX. Because you might have the same title, you might work for the same company, but you might have a different goal. Someone might want to meet startups, or another person might just want to learn about internal processes.”
Title and company only go so far. HumanX needs the attendee’s own words to get the rest of the way.
“Based on that information, we do some categorization to figure out what persona you are. We currently have 10 personas. And based on that persona plus what you entered as your goal for the event, we try to figure out which content that we have will suit you best.”
Title and company sort someone into one of those ten personas first. The free-text answer layers on top, sharpening a broad category into something closer to an actual person, and the Pack builds its shortlist from both together.
This happens before anyone buys a ticket. Most events only start paying attention to what someone wants after they’ve registered. HumanX starts earlier, right when someone’s still deciding whether to come at all, which is exactly when a good answer matters most.
Takeaway: if your personalization only kicks in after someone registers, you’re missing the moment it does the most convincing.
A Recommendation Becomes Useful When It Explains Why
“I saw it in different places where they give you just a list of names, list of sessions, and you have no idea why this is relevant to you, why you should come. So that becomes a homework. And no one likes the homework, you know. So we simplify that for you and we help you understand why.”
That’s the failure mode HumanX designed against: a recommendation with no argument attached, left for the attendee to justify on their own. The fix isn’t more recommendations. It’s fewer, each one carrying its own reason, so the attendee spends zero effort deciding whether to trust it.
“We want to make that connection. We want to match you with the people who will want to match with you, not just give you some flashy names and hope that works for you.”
That line points at something easy to miss: the matching runs in both directions. HumanX isn’t just asking who this attendee should meet, it’s asking who would also want to meet them. A one-way recommendation is a guess. A two-way one is closer to an actual introduction, which is why it holds up under scrutiny in a way a generic list never does.
Takeaway: a recommendation earns attention when it explains itself. A name alone is easy to scroll past.
The Personalized Case Comes Before the Ticket
“We give you the shareable link for the HumanX Pack, so you can send that link to anyone, your boss, for example, and get a good case why you should be there.”
Rachel said what that replaces: “The convince your boss thing was very old school. This is taking it and actually putting the work and the thinking behind how can I make it more useful, personalized, and without the friction, for the user to justify why they should be going, without extra legwork.”
Most events would keep something this useful behind a signup wall. HumanX doesn’t. Anyone can generate a Pack for free, whether they’ve bought a ticket or not, and share it with whoever needs convincing, a manager, a colleague, anyone holding the budget.
Takeaway: give away more of the personal case for attending, not less. The more convincing it is, the more it’s worth sharing freely.
The Same Personalization Becomes the Attendee’s Event Plan
“Once you register, we’ll also give you what we call the agenda picks. This is more your event guide, not the marketing tool. That’s a list of sessions and also activities like visiting sponsor booths that you can just come to the event and follow step by step. It will give you non-conflicting schedule.”
The Pack makes the case for attending. Agenda Picks is what happens after someone says yes, the same understanding of who they are, now pointed at getting them through three days without wasted time.
That understanding doesn’t stop once the event starts, either. “All the data that we get, it gets synced back to our HumanX database, so within that database we can query all the data we would like, including the pre-event journey and the at-event journey.” HumanX can eventually check its own homework, whether the sessions it recommended are the ones people actually walked into.
Takeaway: personalization shouldn’t stop the moment someone converts. Carry it through to the actual event experience.
What HumanX Is Measuring After the Recommendation
“Out of two hundred eleven people who generated the pack, who didn’t have the ticket, thirty of them are registered now. So that’s about fourteen percent. But that doesn’t mean the HumanX pack was the trigger. It was one of the steps in their journey.”
Alex offered that caveat himself. People who go to the trouble of building a Pack were already more interested than average, so the real credit belongs partly to the Pack and partly to their own curiosity, and HumanX hasn’t yet worked out exactly how to split the two.
The same personalization pays off for sponsors. “We have multiple things we do for our sponsors. One is pre-event, where we help you understand who will be in the room. But also that’s a part of our post-event sponsor ROI dashboard, those are people who you recommended to, those who connected with you, all the meetings you had, all the leads you got by the scans.”
Sponsors get a preview before the event and a receipt after it, both built from the same data attendees generated by describing what they wanted.
Takeaway: measure personalization by what people actually do, not just by what they click, and be upfront about what a number can and can’t prove.
A Personal Reason to Attend Could Become a Reason for Someone Else to Go
Rachel: “Right now we basically have a link with a copy button. What if we let people not only share it with their boss, but share it publicly, here’s my Pack, are you going, let’s see if we match? There’s something fun to do with it.”
Alex agreed, floating the idea of sharing it on social media too. The two of them kept going from there, talking through letting people who’d already registered share their Pack as well, posting their sessions and their reasons for going, even after the ticket was bought.
This part is still just an idea, something Rachel and Alex worked through live, not a feature that exists yet. A Pack starts out built to convince one person.
Shared publicly, it could do the same job for someone else, a colleague on the fence, a stranger scrolling their feed who takes a real person’s reason more seriously than a generic ad.
Takeaway: a personal reason to attend is worth sharing, not just keeping to yourself.
Bottom Line
Everything HumanX has built comes down to one habit: ask people what they actually want, then use that answer to do the convincing for them. A short question replaces a generic pitch. A clear reason replaces a bare name. A shareable Pack replaces a boilerplate boss letter, given away before anyone’s bought a ticket. The personal touch doesn’t stop once someone walks through the door, and HumanX stays honest about what its own numbers can and can’t prove.
A few practical questions this raises for any event marketer, whether or not you’re building anything like what HumanX built:
- What do you already know about a returning attendee that you’re still asking them to retype?
- Could a prospective attendee tell you what they want in their own words, rather than you guessing from their title?
- Does every recommendation you make come with a reason, or just a name?
- Would you give your best content away before someone registers, or only after?
- Does anything you learn before someone registers keep shaping their experience afterward?
- Is there something personal in your funnel that someone would actually want to share?
- If you measured a conversion number today, could you say honestly what it does and doesn’t prove?
For a closer look at how personalized, peer-driven content moves people from interest to registration, read Snöball’s 67 Ways to Personalize Your Referral Campaigns, or see how this same peer-to-peer approach played out at HumanX’s own 2025 event. And for more on why the generic convince-your-boss letter is being replaced across the industry, see 14 Events That Have Replaced the Convince Your Boss Letter.
To explore how event teams use peer-to-peer engagement to build stronger sponsor and attendee relationships, browse the Snöball Sevinars series or read our case studies from events across industries.
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About Alex Anikeev
Discover how Snöball helps event teams activate their speakers, exhibitors, and advocates to drive registrations from the audiences that matter most.
