We took part in TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield. Was it worth it?
On September 12th, 2016, we publicly launched productboard on the stage of the most famous and coveted startup competition in the world, TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield — San Francisco.
With 5,000 attendees and hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning in online, Disrupt was the perfect opportunity for a launch and we scored an amazing post on TechCrunch, but it took a lot of time and team effort to get there. In fact, the most common question I’ve been getting from fellow entrepreneurs and investors has been was it worth it? Let me share my perspective.
What’s involved?
It all starts with the application. If you’ve already fundraised, submitting the application is a matter of minutes, since you’ve got all the answers already. These are the very same questions that investors tend to ask. If you haven’t fundraised, this may take some time to complete, but it’s a good investment of time. It’s never too early to consider your business from 10,000 feet and distill it in a concise summary. This is something you will be reusing 100% — no effort wasted here.
From the moment you submit your application, you have about four weeks until you hear from Sam O’Keefe, the competition’s organizer, whether you’ve been selected. It is pretty competitive, only 23 companies get selected from over a thousand applications, so when you find out you made it, it is pretty exciting. You just need to keep it quiet, because you want to save the thunder for the day of your appearance on-stage.
From the moment you find out you got selected, you have six weeks to get ready. Making it into the Battlefield means that you get to present on stage to a panel of judges (and an audience of thousands) in addition to securing a complementary booth at the Disrupt conference for the full three days. Here is what our team’s to-do list looked like:
Marketing to-dos:
- Update messaging and positioning doc: problem statement, positioning statement, category blueprint, and 15-, 30-, 60-, 100- word company/offering summaries
- Update website: make sure latest product updates are reflected on product page, ensure messaging is consistent with the way solution benefits are being described at Disrupt
- Set up follow-up social media campaign: amplify the core message of the on-stage presentation, spread the word about being selected for Startup Battlefield
Presentation/Expo to-dos:
- Script, design, and rehearse stage pitch: tell a narrative story that helps illustrate the offering’s capabilities and the needs it addresses; prepare slides to introduce the company, market opportunity, business model, etc.
- Create demo project for the live, on-stage demo: set up just the right demo data to support the presentation narrative
- Get permission from customers to reference them: add these logos to the public-facing customer list and presentation slide
- Design and order discount coupons, flyers: aim to maximize the number of booth visitors who will sign up for the free trial
- Design banner and record product demo video for booth: use to attract attention of passerbys: primary goal of starting conversations and secondary goal of compelling shy attendees to check out offering later
- Write and print executive summary for members of the press: to be distributed to any members of the press who stop by the booth; highlights details that would be fitting for a write-up on the product/company
- Design and order T-shirts for team members attending Disrupt
Product to-dos:
- Update product on-boarding experience: any support questions that can be prevented via better on-boarding will help the team cope with the sign-up spike
- Deliver high-priority features and close key gaps: rally the team to push the product forward in a short amount of time
- Prep the team for influx of questions/support tickets from leads: save canned responses, schedule 24-hour support coverage for week of Disrupt
- Scale up platform resources for spike in visitors: estimate load to be incurred by trial sign-ups — better to scale too much and to pay a couple of $100 more than fail right when the world is watching
The great news about these tasks is that most of them would be required for any public launch, TechCrunch Disrupt or not, and most of them you’re going to need for your marketing campaigns and events on an ongoing basis.
The actual pitch on the stage has a very specific format, it is catered to a broader audience, not just to your actual target customer segment, or to VCs that you’d select because of their understanding of your space. This is where Sam O’Keefe was great. She helped us a lot with our narrative and over a series of sessions kept pushing us to get it better and better, because no matter how good you think you are at explaining the benefits of your own product, you’ll be amazed by the questions asked by a thoughtful outsider with no insider perspective. It forces you to break down the jargon you’ve come to rely on and even come to a deeper understanding of what benefits your product provides for users.
The pitch is precisely six minutes which is very little for a product like ours, an enterprise SaaS solution for product managers. While our users have come to appreciate productboard’s unique value proposition — to help product leaders understand user needs, prioritize what to build, and deliver interactive roadmaps, it is a little more challenging to explain what product management is about to a general audience. To put it shortly, drones and VR are sexier. 😃
While a six-minute pitch in this format is not likely something you’ll directly reuse, it was a great excuse to create a press-friendly narrative for a broader audience, and let me tell you, we’ve used the lines from our pitch so many times since — at our booth during the three-day event as well as on customer demo calls and at other business events.
Sam and the whole TechCrunch team do incredible job to make sure the event runs smoothly. You go through several rehearsal sessions, including one on the stage couple days before. You get coaching on how to speak, move on the stage, and run your demo. Especially if you haven’t gone through media training before, you learn a lot.
So, was it worth it?
If you are a founder or senior product leader, you know that simply defining the strategic direction for your team is not enough. You also need to create a sense of urgency to get it done. If you want to move really fast, everyone on your team needs to understand that time is running out, that resources are limited, that if you slow down, competition will eat you for lunch.
One of the best ways to create a sense of urgency is to create a series of forcing functions: deadlines, milestones, and goals with clearly defined objectives. The more firm the deadlines, and the more external pressure associated with them, the better. It means you can’t just postpone deadlines or relax requirements when things get tough.
TechCrunch Disrupt was just the forcing function we needed. It forced us to tackle many of the things we’d been postponing. We fleshed out messaging and positioning, created a company narrative and defined our market category, updated our website, sought out a list of customer references, designed marketing collateral, created a demo project, improved onboarding, closed many product gaps, and, not to forget, actually told the world that we exist!
Running the numbers
If nothing else, the benefits of using Disrupt as a forcing function are clear, but what about the ROI? (Where investment is mainly time-spent on Battlefield-specific preparations.) We’ve been in public beta for the past several months and have been acquiring customers organically. Our pitch on the stage and the article on TechCrunch was our first public PR. Of course, everyone’s numbers will differ depending on industry, but we’ve seen ~5,000% increase in trial sign-ups for the week of Disrupt and we’ve acquired thousands of dollars in new MRR in just a couple weeks. Interest came from startups to Fortune 500 companies. If you are ready acquisition-wise, the ROI is there. Our baseline website traffic is up as well, but it is too early to judge how this has affected the long-term trajectory of site visits.
On the fundraising front, we’ve had several big VCs contacting us. And while I still believe that the best way to approach a VC is a warm intro to a general partner from your happy customer, it feels nice to be hunted for a change. I’ll keep you posted on the development here. 😃
One final benefit: as a Battlefield alumni we get free access to all future Disrupt and VIP TechCrunch events. More broadly, taking part in the competition has already noticeably boosted the credibility of our brand: blogs are reaching out to publish our content, conferences are reaching out with speaker calls. We also made some great new friends from the other Battlefield companies and alumni. Our network has grown stronger.
It was worth it.
Make the most of it
Disrupt was a success, but not everything went as planned. Despite all the dry runs for my presentation, I still mixed up some of my lines 😊 🙊, and it was hard to hear the judges on the stage and so I didn’t fully address some of their questions. We missed the opportunity to rent a badge scanner for our booth, so may have lost some leads or potential partners. The very last-minute changes that made our website Disrupt-ready also bungled a tracking code that cost us some visitor data, but it didn’t impact our signups and we caught the problem right away. For every issue that arose there were ten triumphs, which takes me to my final point:
Your team is everything
I said Startup Battlefield was worth it, but I want to add that it’s only worth it if your team has the attitude and resilience to succeed despite short timelines and unforeseen obstacles. I am so grateful to the whole team Alexandr Marinko, Daniel Hejl, Tomas Ruzicka, Michal Těhník, Michal Krejčí, Petr Meissner, Majo Moravcik, Vit Krchov, Winston Christie-Blick for all the incredible hard work you guys put in behind the scene. It is a great testament to our ability to align and get stuff done. I am excited to continue the journey with all of you. Thank you for making it happen!
Hubert
P.S.: Would you apply to Startup Battlefield? What have I missed? Happy to answer any questions!
