“What made us choosing cities for the US road trip — The Preparatory Plan”

When we decided to take a road trip to interview people, the first question was where to go?

To choose what cities to cover, we started with a simple exercise -
We picked up all the silicon centers from a map like the one below and sent over a trench of 60 emails in each city mentioned. The selected targeted audience were from the diversified background — tech, non-tech, serial entrepreneurs, social-economic entrepreneurs. Additionally, while choosing these centers we even kept hunting for the startup hustling events, conferences, meetups, OpenCoffee Clubs, StartupGrind networks.

Since there was no way to find which city will have more people willing to participate in the survey, we thought to do trial email marketing to get some stats.

Here is the copy of the email we sent out

And here is the order of responses received:

The below stats were able to help us in coming up with the concrete itinerary. The final plan of two phases was from the below results that came from our email marketing campaign.

Trip 1:

Trip 2:

As you could see Charleston and Charlotte were some of the clear winners followed with Atlanta and Dallas. In fact, surprisingly New York and SF do not really score that high — The reason I could think of was because they get too many emails which create a lot of noise for the founders.

Anyways we had our list ready with the 14 cities that provided us a better response rate. Apart from the stats we checked out event dates in each shortlisted city and also tried to map a direction for the journey. The journey had to be in one direction. North to south or south to north/ east to west or west to east. Another filter was using my StartupGrind directors network. SG has a chapter in most US cities and I reached out to the chapter directors for the inside scoops of each city.

14 cities meant around 52 days on the road at a stretch but then cuteness stuck :) Well I have a 2 and a half-year-old so leaving her for more than a month was not possible…

So we decided to do the road trip in 2 phases:

The first in May covering- NYC (Well can't ignore the Big Apple and we found Techday happening as well), Baltimore, Washington DC(Arlington/Alexandria), Denver, Boulder and the second stage covering Montreal (where we attended the startupfest), Atlanta, Charleston, Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas.

In the last 3 months, I got to interview 500+ CXOs for the #MakeRemoteWork survey

How all of it was possible is accounted HERE

#MakeRemoteWork survey report is one of the most comprehensive reports on the current state and realities of the Remote Work Industry. We’ve gathered insights from over 500+ CXOs to compile this report. We’ve covered topics varying from cost, management & trust to difficulties, solutions and work environment.

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