Hacking Events on a $0 Budget
If you are bootstrapping, chances are you have absolutely no money to attend live events or trade shows. This barrier is further complicated when you have hardware that can’t fit into a car or be carried on a plane. We feel your pain. Below is how we’ve managed a presence at 20 events a year on less than a $25k annual marketing budget.
Avoid Registration Fees
While posting this blog might damage our precedence of attending experiences for free, we feel it’s worth sharing our no-cost policy for event support. We’ve also noted that after 4 years and over 100 external demos, associated conversions for Gigabot are extremely low (like zero conversion low, one if we are lucky). For this reason, if we can’t speak, pitch, or bring Gigabot, we have to pass (thus why we’ve had to sit out CES).
It’s not just that we are being cheap- rather, we recognize that making flyers, shipping Gigabot, & traveling often put us over what we can afford per event. We understand that organizers need to pay their bills as well, so we work hard when invited to demo to find way to barter a mutually beneficial opportunity for us to support an event without paying an exhibit fee.
Over the last few years, this rule-of-thumb has taken several forms. Sometimes we 3D print the event logo, sponsor gifts, or pitch competition trophies…. essentially a contract print “credit” in exchange for attendance. On other occasions we will offer to bring Gigabot to another company’s booth and print something relevant to their vertical as compensation for pirating their corner. We’ve also proposed store credits/discounts if an event sponsor or exhibitor is considering buying a Gigabot. The need for free space is why we are so quick to pitch or speak. Not only does the stage offer us addition opportunity to share our passion, but it often comes with an invitation to show off Gigabot live.
In short, we’ve gone to pretty great lengths to engineer ways to attend an experience and substantially reduce costs. However, it’s worth noting that if you barter, it’s essential you deliver on any promises you make.
Shipping
Shipping fees continue to been a huge burden for our company, particularly if it is outside of the United States. We’ve learned the hard way that overseas exhibition not only includes freight, but insurance as well as a bond that the item will be shipped home (if not, duty is assessed). Additionally there is the cost of handling once your goods are received by the union assigned to move stuff to the booth at the venue, the packaging materials (in our case a wooden crate on casters), and the considerable time we invest in making triplicates of all the paperwork and calling all of the touch points to troubleshoot. Our biggest mistakes to date include not double-checking that quoted costs are round-trip, verifying that there aren’t additional handling fees at a conference center, having a toolkit onsite to manage any transit damage, and leaving ample time for the worst case scenario to be resolved (we’ve exhibited without a Gigabot lost in transit three times).
In order to mitigate these costs, we rarely exhibit or send Gigabot outside of the US. When we do, we try our best to leverage state incentives to encourage overseas exhibition, and/or rely on bartering with sponsors to help offset expenditures. Even with support, attending even one event in a foreign country a year is ambitious for us.
To compensate, we routinely preference events where it’s feasible to hitch a trailer to my SUV and drive cross-country. If it weren’t for UHAUL, we’d likely never leave the factory!
Flights + Hotels
After registration fees & shipping, travel costs for teammate travel is the next biggest consideration re: whether you can actually afford an event.
In addition to often road tripping it to get somewhere, we’re not above couch-surfing, leveraging local friends, and taking advantage of friends & family discounts to hotel chains. The most significant savings has come from staying with a friend and sharing a room with 2+ regardless of gender wherever we go. The downside is we often have a considerable commute to get onsite, lose sleep when the traveling crew includes a snorer, and most of our team has heard the other fart in a confined space.
Regarding flights, we’ve heard other start-ups boast of being sponsored by an airline, but we have never had this good fortune. Instead we’ve spent long hours in layovers with multi-stop flights, or routed through Istanbul for 19 hours only to fly back to Europe (an awesome hack to score a flight out of Houston for <$700). Recently we also switched banks and are putting as much of our purchases as we can on credit cards with high hopes of scoring 4+ flights a year gratis via rewards. When we must book non-reward travel, we use a travel agent at Someday is Now Travel, who helps us score bundled savings.
A Cautionary Tail re: Budgeting for Car Insurance
Last year I inadvertently caused a car accident in Los Angeles heading back from dinner with a friend after a couple of days visiting customers. Thankfully everyone was OK, but I learned it is critical that when you rent a car for business purposes on a business debit or credit card that you elect for additional insurance. Your personal car insurance might not cover you in this instance, so be sure to spend the extra $12/day when prompted at pickup to buy the piece of mind!
Bootstrapping a Booth
In our experience, the average event opportunity comes in 3 flavors:
1. A corner or cocktail table: This opportunity usually consists of sharing space in a hotel ballroom, bar, office, or lounge. Recently we’ve found that the best way to look sharp in confined quarters is to buy a $20 spandex (we use displays2go) and bring a cocktail table or banner to display next to Gigabot. To avoid clutter, we typically purchase a flyer and business card holder (which almost always get destroyed in shipping), from FedEx. Per chance we have a window behind us, we have a window cling on hand that our friends at Own Local gifted us from a past event). Other than giveaways & Gigabot, we do not bring additional product for small displays.
2. Normalized pre-fabricated stands with a small locker below for hiding supplies: In order to catch a glance from participants at Websummit, Rise & Collision, we invested considerable thought into how to be seen from across the room. When we had the standard plywood exhibition stand, we dressed it up with a black tablecloth, 3D prints, and professional handouts about our product & company. While we may get in trouble for revealing this, we also hacked our stand by bringing Gigabot to the display as well… as we’ve learned it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission (and typically be switched to a corner booth to avoid a fire hazard).
3. A 10x10 booth: We’ve struggled with this configuration the most, as it’s easy to look unprofessional with a bunch of multicolored plastic parts strewn across a table. Our peers struggle with this as well and have introduced risers or light boxes in effort to make the display more professional. While they look great, but exceed our budget. Our most recent solution is to bring only a couple of prints with articulating parts to be featured in cocktail tables surrounded by 3D printed furniture & a Gigabot. The table is the moved to the back of the booth or discarded as our goal is to offer a community feel where attendees feel comfortable hanging out & asking questions. In our experience having only a couple of large professional prints, complemented by Gigabot is better than an assortment of small things competing for attention.
Standing Out
As part of our grassroots marketing, some of our team dresses up in black flight suits, which I think helped us stick out. We also try to have a giant 3D print that we take with us while we travel and at all side events. This gives us an excuse to take selfies with other attendees, local representatives, and startup influencers (including Tony Hsieh). Our biggest traction has been by creating furniture. Not only is this handy in a crowded bar (and with a heavy backpack), we find that people of all ages can relate to a stool, and welcome the chance to rest their feet after a long day.
In order to trend on social media, we’ve discovered that creating an object live that has meaning for the event or location is a great way to recruit selfies and hash tags. For example, in Ireland for Websummit in 2015, we printed a sheep in response to a challenge a shepherdess gave us via Twitter and our reach was unprecedented!
Be Prepared to Give a Live Demo Anywhere You Go
Don’t leave your product at the hotel or your booth. When you are mingling at the conference or at an after party, find a creative prop or product that represents what you do. Attendees want to engage with your startup and any opportunity to share what you are working on beyond a business card, will inspire better conversations. Some of our favorite moments included meeting Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny and taking a selfie on our 3D printed stool at Web Summit 2014 after being a BETA Pitch runner up, and then taking the Web Summit 2014 trophy and another stool to a photo-op during an IDA Ireland breakfast at a SXSW event this spring pre-Collision. We also printed a surfboard once to take to a surfing summit!
Go Beyond Your Stand
In our experience, it is essential to take advantage of side events. Also, we’ve learned it’s important to invite the friends you make to your booth, and go to theirs. As a hardware company, it can be difficult to find opportunity and space share your product. By taking the time to share your goods and experience another startup’s efforts, you can have more targeted conversations and brainstorming. Budget bandwidth to go out to the breakfasts, lunches, dinner, and drinks with the other attendees. As a scrappy company you have moved mountains to make it to the experience, and by maximizing your touch points with the community you are more likely to develop enduring relationships.
Things We Wished We Hadn’t Done
Hustling too much
Once, recognizing we couldn’t afford the luggage fees or shipping, we determined the best course of action would be to steal the event trash cans & boxes from the press room and cover them with trash bags (which we also stole) as make-shift “risers” for our prints. At the time we were pretty proud of ourselves, however after viewing the social media posts online, I feel like we could have come up with a more aesthetic alternative (and avoided the stress of being caught).
Burning Out the Team
During SXSW 2015 I committed everyone on our team (including people who were not traditionally customer facing) with at least 4 days of exhibiting a Gigabot alone in an event with high foot traffic. With an average age of 30+, this left little room for the life events and managing day-to-day ops. Consequently I’ve tried to limit shifts to 4 hours/teammate, and only to overcommit sales, interns, or marketing types who value or are recharged by the interaction. We also try to send at least 2 teammates to events over 2 days. As a result our follow-up and morale has significantly increased.
Skipping Talks
The number of talks that re:3D has supported in 4 years can probably be counted on one hand. By limiting teammate participation, we’ve missed the chance to learn from our peers & network as we constantly feed a long line of questions near Gigabot. If you can send 3 people, we suggest doing so and taking turns at the booth & joining talks or roundtables with groups you can learn from (or possibly partner with).
Final Thoughts….Don’t forget Your Customers!
This most rewarding part of our travels has been reaching out to local customers, offering free service visits and shaking their hands for betting on our product & team. Their feedback is critical to our success & next steps, and knowing the face behind the email or support ticket is incredibly humbling. For this reason, we suggest taking an extra day or two on either side of your travels to give your community a high five.
