Go-to-Market & Sponsor Push — Sep 2026¶

Written Sep 23, 2026, five days before DrupalCon Rotterdam and 18 days before the CFP closes. Owner: Dan (Marketing) with Guzman (Sponsorship). Prices and dates in here are proposals for the core team to approve, not commitments.

Related: Prospectus · Rotterdam playbook · Sponsor one-pager · Sponsor pipeline · Rotterdam social posts · Action items

TL;DR¶

We have a strong product: a 10^th anniversary, Dries, a sharp AI lineup, and Davos in ski season. Almost nobody knows yet, and nobody can buy yet. The strategy docs are good. The bottleneck is execution of the basic funnel:

1. Nobody can buy a ticket. /tickets says Super Early Bird started in August, but there are no prices and no shop link.
2. Nobody can buy a sponsorship. There are no prices, no PDF and no form. The only contact is a mailto to info@. No paying 2027 sponsors are listed five months out.
3. We've been silent since May 10. There's been no news post about the CFP, Dries, the theme or the anniversary. There's no newsletter signup on the site and Mautic isn't sending yet.

Goal for the next 3 weeks: open both funnels before Rotterdam, use DrupalCon for warm in-person sponsor conversations, and convert them into signed sponsors by Oct 31 with an early-commit incentive.

Sponsor target: CHF 40k (range 30-50k), with CHF 20k committed by Oct 31.

SWOT¶

Strengths¶

• 10^th anniversary / 6^th edition. It's a story in its own right and a reason to come back.
• Dries is confirmed for a fireside chat. No other camp this season has that draw for C-level and agency owners.
• The AI lineup is already stronger than most DrupalCons: Lena Fuhrimann (private LLMs), Robert Douglass (agentic engineering), Pay Chen (AI and org design) and John O'Nolan (Ghost founder, non-Drupal). The theme "Humans with AI in the loop" is concrete, not buzzword.
• Unique format: Davos, ski weekend, fondue, the pub quiz. Feedback says atmosphere and connection are the #1 reason people come, every edition.
• Loyal core sponsor base: Happy Coding (2019, 2022, 2024, 2025), MD Systems, soul.media, Liip, Hostpoint, Platform.sh/Upsun. Media partners The DropTimes and The Weekly Drop, and hosting partner amazee.io.
• Open, AI-assisted organising (MountainClaw). That's a story in itself and gives amazee.io something to showcase.

Weaknesses¶

• The funnel is closed: no ticket shop, no sponsor prices, no sponsor form, no newsletter signup, no Mautic tracking.
• Visibility since July is near zero: no posts on Mastodon, Bluesky or X, and no drupal.org listing. callforpaper.org shows "deadline not specified".
• The sponsor offer is a commodity ("logo on website"). Tiers are unpriced and the benefits don't map to what sponsors actually buy: leads, hiring, credibility and association with Dries/AI/sovereignty.
• Sponsor fatigue: we ran 2024 and 2025 back to back, and we ask the same ~15 Swiss agencies each time. Every year some drop out and we don't replace them with new categories.
• Small volunteer team with fuzzy ownership. Working groups still say "Leads: TBD". Several May action items (SMTP, sponsor form, Canva templates) are still open.
• Access barrier: Davos means travel and hotel costs, and that's the main reason people skip it, more than the ticket price.

Opportunities¶

• DrupalCon Rotterdam (Sep 28 - Oct 1): most of our warm sponsors, Dries and the DA board will be in one building. Three of us will be there.
• Sovereignty is a hot topic in 2026: EU and Swiss governments are leaving US clouds, the EU AI Act is live, Apertus is the Swiss national open LLM, and Schleswig-Holstein is migrating. That brings a new sponsor category beyond Drupal agencies: sovereign cloud, AI infrastructure and Swiss open source companies (Infomaniak, Exoscale, cloudscale.ch, Nine, VSHN, Puzzle ITC, Adfinis, Proton).
• Non-Drupal pull: Symfony AI, the Ghost founder, PHP and AI meetups in Zurich. "FOSDEM in the mountains" was a 2024 feedback wish.
• 2025 brought new sponsor types (Agiledrop, Varnish, SwissDevJobs), which proves infrastructure and recruiting sponsors will pay.
• Multi-edition deals turn churn into a two-edition commitment.
• Budget timing: many companies are planning their 2027 budgets right now. Splitting an invoice across Dec 2026 and Jan 2027 makes a yes easier.

Threats¶

• DrupalCon Chicago (Mar 23-26, 2027) is 3 weeks after us and competes for the same agency sponsor budgets.
• Agency budgets are tight (AI disruption, a softer Drupal agency market). Sponsorship is the first line cut.
• Short runway: 5 months to the event, the CFP closes in 18 days, and sponsor announcements are planned for mid-November.
• Switzerland is expensive: the venue cost is fixed, so if sponsors fall short the gap lands on ticket prices or the organisers.
• Volunteer bandwidth and burnout. Keep the plan small and owned.

Strategy: five moves¶

1. Open the funnel before Rotterdam (by Fri Sep 25)¶

2. Sell outcomes, not logos¶

The new prospectus does three things:

• Classic tiers (Platinum CHF 9k to Bronze CHF 800) with benefits sponsors actually buy: lightning talk, table, tickets, recordings pre-roll, and a dedicated post.
• Exclusive themed packages that sell a story rather than a slot: Fireside chat with Dries presented by… (Platinum), Sovereign AI Day partner, Fondue Night, Pub Quiz, Ski Day, Recordings, Newcomer scholarships.
• Anti-churn mechanics:
• Early-commit bonus if signed by Oct 31.
• 15% off for a two-edition commitment.
• Returning 2024/2025 sponsors get first refusal on their old slot until Oct 16.
• The invoice can be split across Dec and Jan.
• 30% off for small agencies (<10 people) and non-profits.

3. Widen the sponsor pool beyond the usual 15 Swiss agencies¶

The pipeline has four lanes:

Rule: a named person owns every company in the pipeline, and every contact gets a follow-up within 48 hours.

4. Make Dries the headline, with sign-off¶

• Josef sends the announcement copy and the question list to Dries by Fri Sep 25 for a quick OK. Drafts are in the Rotterdam posts.
• At Rotterdam: Dan asks Dries in person for a 15-second phone video ("See you in Davos for Mountain Camp's 10^th"). It's our best-performing asset for the rest of the campaign.
• Crowdsource the questions: "What should we ask Dries?" drives engagement and gives us newsletter content.
• Platinum sponsors get to present the fireside chat (a 2-minute intro on stage, with the logo on its recording). That's the headline benefit in the sponsor pitch.
• After sign-off: pitch TheDropTimes for an interview ("Dries returns to the mountains for Mountain Camp's 10^th").

5. Pull in non-Drupal people: AI, sovereignty, Symfony¶

• Announce the AI lineup now (Lena, Robert, Pay, John O'Nolan) as "Humans with AI in the loop". Speakers get a share card and an "I'm speaking" post template, so their networks are ours.
• Sovereignty day: push Hannes Gassert, Matthias Stürmer (BFH) and CH Open for a panel with the Dries angle, and add the bs.ch/ge.ch case studies. That's the C-level and public-sector hook, and it's what we sell to sovereign cloud sponsors.
• Symfony:
• Add Symfony explicitly to the CFP page, which today mentions PHP/Rust/Go but not Symfony.
• Miro and Josef contact Christopher Hertel (Symfony AI).
• Post the CFP and tickets in the Symfony Slack and at the PHP User Group Zurich.
• Give Symfony/PHP/AI meetups community voucher codes (e.g. SYMFONY, PHPZH, AIZH), both for a discount and to track where people come from.
• Keep the Drupal core audience: Drupal in a Day → camp pipeline and contribution day.

Channels & cadence (Sep 28 → Oct 31)¶

Posting rule (from AGENTS.md): humans approve before anything is published. MountainClaw drafts.

KPIs: check every Monday in the MountainClaw digest¶

2025 reality check (retro): ~80% of tickets sold in the last 6 weeks and only ~1 in 3 approached sponsors signed. The ticket targets above are ~4× the 2025 pace, so they only work if the Rotterdam push and the Nov 15 early-bird deadline really land. Don't read a slow November as failure; do read a slow sponsor month as one.

Open questions for the team¶

1. Real audience numbers for the pitch. 2025: ~80 on site (goal was 150), ~28 speakers, 11 sponsors. Still open: 2024 numbers, and what was the split (devs, leads/C-level, public sector)? Sponsors will ask.
2. Venue and catering cost. Rough estimate from 2025 actuals is ~CHF 41-45k total, break-even at ~CHF 20k sponsorship (see budget.md). Replace with real 2027 quotes.
3. Guzman's Slack account. There are two; which one should MountainClaw mention?
4. Do we run the CXO dinner (Extrablatt) as part of the Platinum package, or drop it?
5. Splash Awards: yes or no? If yes, it's another sponsor package. 2025 retro: financially positive (~+2.4k), but it split the volunteer team and brought few new DMC attendees; it needed ~25 submissions and got 15. If yes, give it its own small team.