Rise above the noise
or “How to stand out at a startup event”
Attending a startup event is a great opportunity to boost a product’s awareness level. Beside the chance to convince people of your product and turn them into eventual customers you can get a lot of high quality feedback. And business aside, of course it’s fun as hell. But the major problem of these events is just as well known as the many benefits. And there is one question everyone asks himself when he prepares for an event:
“How do you catch the attention of your prospect when everyone else is just as busy searching for it? How do you rise above the noise?”
So when we booked a startup booth at this years Pirate Summit (the most awesome startup event in Europe) and started preparing ourselves we were quickly stumped by that very question. From past events we had learned that flyers won’t do the trick since they were generally repurposed for building spacers for joints. And even stickers are not cool if everyone has them. So what could we do differently? Giving away free beer wouldn’t show our product and frequently returning customers wouldn’t even remember us the next day — needless to say that the Summit actually had free beer. We thought hard about the ingredients of a successful campaign and came up with the following list of must-haves:
- above all: the campaign must showcase our product
- it has to do that in a playful and entertaining way
- it must have a physical component so that customers would remember us after the event
- it should generate some leads that we could later on convert into sales
Before we get to our idea, I might need to explain the product we were trying to pitch. We recently launched our PhotoEditor SDK, a sophisticated online photo editing solution (as you might have guessed) which can swiftly be integrated into any application with ease. We figured that the ragtag crowd of founders, developers at the Pirate Summit was the perfect audience for the showcasing of our product but it had to be done right. So with our must-haves in mind we thought long and hard on how we wanted to present our SDK and came up with the following idea:
1. We set up a camera (in an iMac) at the booth where participants could take a picture of themselves and apply a pirate beard (or other stickers) using our editor’s sticker feature
2. We printed the resulting image using printing stylesheets
3. Then we created a button from the printed image
This is the one of the results:
In under four hours we wrote a little Web-application to take a picture (with WebRTC). With that little application (which is now open source) we were able to showcase our editor in a fun and playful way. The people who came to our booth wore the pirate button with pride. Some were extremely excited about our SDK, like two guys in a full pirate costume who yelled „Shut up and take my money!“ after we told them that our SDK is in HTML5. Another benefit of our presentation is that we were able to actually observe people engaging with our product which spawned lots of cool, new ideas about the different ways in which it could be used (BTW the Webcam feature has landed in the core of the SDK whilst writing this). And last but not least we generated a lot of leads by collecting the email of all participants who got a button.
So, here are the key takeaways if you’re planning to exhibit at a startup event:
- It is not enough to just show up, come prepared, set goals for the event and devise a strategy to achieve them
- Leave your flyers at home, instead offer something that people can engage with (just kidding - give them a flyer additionally)
- Don’t bore people and in case you don’t have a great idea you better save the money for a better opportunity
And if you’re looking for a powerful but slick online photo editor check out the actual product: http://photoeditorsdk.com
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Published in #SWLH (Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking)
