Startup Picture Day
Leading a service based business, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to launch something of your own. To keep up with market trends and increase empathy with our clients, we’ve taken a dose of our own medicine.
We launched Startup Picture Day in the summer of 2016 to provide startups and entreprenuers with quality, un-watermarked headshots, absolutely free. It addresses a need in the market and a local, event-based concept provides the perfect cadence to test our iterative process.
We’ve learned a lot since our first event at Switchyards and the education keeps on coming. Here are a few of our wins and failures thus far.
Our Wins.
- A clear message. We started with a simple message that attendees and sponsors resonate with… “Awesome, un-watermarked, high-res pictures for you and your team to use on websites, social profiles, and email, absolutely FREE!
- A quality product. Free stuff usually sucks. Our goal was to set the bar high and provide attendees with a remarkable experience and final product. We built a system to keep the process smooth and hired a professional photographer to ensure beautiful pictures.
Our Failures.
- Closing the sale. A free event lives and dies based on sponsorships. We offset many of the costs thanks to generous companies donating ‘time’. Unfortunately, it takes cash to pay photographers and staff, so not focusing on enough on sponsorships required us to take a financial hit.
- Followups. After the summer, we met hundreds of startups and entreprenuers. Then, we entered into our busy season with Polar Notion and have only managed to engage a few of them. We collected feedback from the event, which was incredibly positive, but without additional followup, the story ended there.
In preparation for our next wave of events, we’ve doubled down on what worked best and have learned from our failures. Our next event is May 18th at Strongbox West in Atlanta, GA.
We’d love to see you there.
Also, if you’re interested in being a sponsor, contact us.
