5 Easy Tips for Startups To Make The Best Out Of Your Web Summit
1. Going as a team is your best decision
When deciding to plan a journey to Lisbon, the (budgetary) decision about how many people will go and participate is among the first ones. Obviously, plane tickets and accommodation will be your main costs and you will legitimately try to minimize them. At Allvibes, we decided to send three people to the Web Summit: Carole, Kevin and Quentin. And we do not regret it at all!
First, this three-day event is intense. On the day(s) your start-up exhibits, you will be standing from 7:30am to 6pm, with visitors all day long and almost no time to have lunch. That’s exhausting! Should you want to have a least 2 people at your booth pitching your product and someone making contacts somewhere else during the event, go with a three-people team is a good idea. Last, try your best to exhibit on Day 1. In theory, that’s randomly assigned but who knows… There is no harm in trying!
2. Flashy clothes are the best tools for brand awareness
Officially, the Web Summit 2017 gathered 60.000 people around four pavilions and one Central Stage. No need to say that’s a lot of people! Your startup need to stand out from the crowd.
The classic move is to use corporate flashy clothing. Yet, once there, we realize few startups took this decision. We believe they did a mistake: with a visible clothing, visitors know (i) you work for a start-up, (ii) the name of your startup or your website (obviously, do not forget to print it on your clothes, it will then appear on all photos, which is such a classic hack :p…), (iii) you are happy to talk to them. You can use those 60.000 visitors to increase your brand awareness, so do not miss this opportunity!
3. Candies are tired visitors’ best friends
According to you, what is one of the oldest ice-breakers our ancestors have been using for centuries when welcoming a stranger coming from a tiring trip? Offering food. And do you know how a Web Summit visitor feel after spending half-a-day talking to hundreds of people? Tired and hungry. It is simple… Terribly simple… And terribly efficient!
For safety/hygiene purposes, be careful, we do not recommend you to bring either huge amount of home-made food or liquids. Don’t do that! But packed candies wonderfully do the job. We bought some in a small shop in Lisbon when we arrived for less than 10$. One of your smallest cost per lead ever!
4. Scanning visitors’ badges with the Summit mobile app is the best tool for an easy follow up
At arrival, you need to register to one of the main Web Summit desk and volunteers will give you your personal badge with a QR code printed on it.
Such QR code can be scanned through the Web Summit mobile app to be saved. So far, what’s the difference between scanning QR codes and exchanging printed business cards? Once scanned, you will find a way to export all these contacts by email and receive a CSV file with all the names, job titles and emails of the people you met. Much more efficient than losing business cards, isn’t it?
5. Visiting other booths is the best way to grasp unexpected opportunities
During the Web Summit, we met lots of great entrepreneurs pitching great projects. But we also met investors, journalists, Allvibes users, incubators and potential business partners. We received feedbacks from people from 10+ countries, with interesting insights about their own interior markets. We took part to open pitch competitions and increased our public exposure. We benefited from press coverage abroad. All this by grasping the opportunity to talk to part of these 60.000 web lovers! Take a deep breath, smile and go talk to people. That’s all.
Do you have other tips you would like to share? Or questions we did not deal with? Let’s talk in comments.
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About Allvibes:
Allvibes (https://allvibes.app.link/9wF3moMI7H) is a bit like if TripAdvisor and Snapchat had a baby, allowing users to benefit from the “visual word of mouth” (yes, that’s our motto). With Allvibes, clients choose where to go out more efficiently and avoid disappointments! Concretely, Allvibes is a platform gathering customer reviews(about experiences in restaurants, hotels or sightseeing spots) but everything in video format!
