
Ask HN: Should I exhibit my rough early-stage product? - conf_throwaway
I have a SaaS tool that is in a very early stage. I&#x27;m onboarding my first alpha user next week.<p>There&#x27;s a conference for my target tech niche in my town that&#x27;s coming up in mid-October. Should I exhibit? The cost is $1000 early-bird before Aug 1, or $1500 after. I can decide not to exhibit before Mid-Sept and lose a $500 deposit.  This cost is minor to my budget.<p>I&#x27;ll have a working product, and I&#x27;ll have feedback from a few teams at that point. But I&#x27;m worried that my product will still be _rough_ and might not make a good impression.<p>How should I weight the pros&#x2F;cons?<p>One side of my wants to stay quiet, and just work with a few - dozen companies I reach out to directly, and spend some more months on their feedback before pushing marketing.<p>Another side of my thinks it would be better to get more feedback from more people, even if it&#x27;s an early-stage and kind of rough.
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greenyouse
If you're still early stage and looking for feedback you should look for
feedback from actual users. Taking feedback from non-users may skew your
feedback away from what actual users would provide. The audience which pays
for a product and provides feedback will be different from the feedback you
would receive from people watching a conference demo.

There is some hype provided by a conference demo and you may get feedback from
designers + programmers. This type of feedback will be different from normal
users and at an early stage the benefit may be low if your saas product
provides a substantial benefit to users.

If you've already put down some money though, it may be worth seeing what
other technical people think. At least you should know that this will likely
be more nit-picky than the general utility type feedback non-technical people
would give. It will probably help with UX + programming but less with the
value prop of your product.

If it's a technical product - think about what would make the conference
audience recommend your product to other potential users.

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davismwfl
Go, get more feedback. Even some rough edges during the conference won't
matter as that won't be seen usually.

The mistake almost all founders make is not getting enough exposure early and
working on the specific feedback, there really is almost no such thing as too
much exposure.

If I was you and the conference fees work with your budget I'd be there, in
fact if it wasn't in the budget I'd be trying to find the money to make it
work so I could go.

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gavinbaker
I’m a marketer and we help our clients with a few trade shows a year.

If you are going to have a booth, table cloth, marketing materials (flyers,
brochure, etc) you cost will be more than then the $1,500 for the space.
Depending on the type of show many will also charge you for WiFi and power.
Even on the low spend side, I’d anticipate spending $3k plus your food,
lodging and travel costs.

Upside is many shows will provide you with the whole list of attendees which
while aren’t leads - can be useful for future outreach without hunting down
names/emails on your own.

Like others mentioned if it’s not a lot of money, then go and get feedback
about the pain your product is solving. In addition to that, you can meet
other vendors who can be good referral and industry connections if you don’t
have that yet.

My experience: I have built a failed product that no one needed before and it
was an expensive (couple million) and long exercise (2 yrs) in futility that
would have been helped by getting face to face with our target audience
earlier, not later.

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paulkon
Would you be comfortable sharing the product you worked on and a postmortem on
why it didn't succeed?

I'd find it helpful to learn from as I'm in the process of getting early
feedback from businesses to validate or tweak my own tiny saas idea.

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27182818284
Although exposure and feedback are great, I think that exposure via a
$1000/$1500 exhibit is a very expensive way to validate parts of your SaaS
product at your stage. It isn't that it won't generate leads, it is just a
pricey way of doing so.

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consultutah
Since you have 2 contradictory comments right now, I’ll add a 3rd that doesn’t
break the tie: is $1k a lot to you? If not, it would be a great way to get
feedback. If it is a lot of money to you, then there are cheaper ways to get
feedback at the cost of more of your time. Good luck!

