Graphs speak louder than words

Some aggregate results from an attendee survey I sent out that 40 people responded to: http://imgur.com/gallery/fxKbm

Things that went well

I'm happy with our speaker selection, we had a good mix of locals and folks from out of town, Rust team members and people just starting to get active in the Rust community, experienced speakers and new speakers.
People had fun, learned things, and met each other!
Sponsors were amazing, especially Chef. One of my favorite moments was watching hoverbear send a PR to Habitat after hanging out in the hallway with them :)
I am so glad I invited the students from Pittsburgh's code bootcamp, Academy.
My fellow organizers were a huge help!
Sending people out for lunch continued to be a choice that I feel good about making.

Things that did not go so well

The biggest mistake I made was assuming I could get 250 attendees (we had about 150 people total, including speakers, sponsors, organizers, students, scholarships). I've gotten that many (and more) for a regional Ruby conference before, and even though it's much earlier in Rust's history, I figured being the only Rust conference east of the Rockies would help.
As a result of the low attendance, some of the workshops had very few attendees, and I feel horrible about what that speaking experience was like.
We would have at least come closer to breaking even if we had gotten 100 more ticket sales.
Related, I could have done more work trying to get more sponsorship.
I could have done more work recruiting more diverse speakers and attendees. I planned the Rust Bridge too late to really get that to be a feeder into the conference, but I hope to hold more of those more often to support and encourage people from underrepresented people in tech learning Rust.
I got a question during the conference about the availability of gender neutral restrooms, which the hotel indeed had, but I had not investigated this beforehand. This is definitely going on my venue checklist for next year.

I need to get better at advertising/outreach, and/or recruit more volunteers who are better than I am at that :)
I do want to move this around to different Rust Belt cities, in hopes of getting different attendees and perhaps less work for me personally on logistics if I can find local folks to help out. I'm going to start reaching out to people on that front soon for 2017.
It's hard to tell since I can't survey people who couldn't make it easily, but I'm going to try to have the conference on at least one weekend day (Fri+Sat) next year, to hopefully make it easier for folks to come.