
Announcing The TechCrunch50 Conference: September 8-10, San Francisco - raghus
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/02/announcing-the-techcrunch50-conference-september-8-10-san-francisco/
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Conferences to show off new startups are a good thing, but it seems like a bad
plan to make the startups launch _at_ the conference. Unless the date happens
to be exactly when the startup would have launched anyway, this constraint is
going to force them to launch either too early, or too late.

Launching late is very dangerous. Someone else is probably doing what you're
doing, and if you launch even a couple weeks later your company could for the
rest of its life be described as an X-like site, where X is your competitor's
name.

Launching too early is even more dangerous. The right time to launch is as
soon as you have something (a) useful and (b) not totally broken. Which means
that launching early = launching something useless or broken.

~~~
parker
Also, I read somewhere that launching at a conference means that you're one of
dozens of launches over a short period of time, and you have to compete even
harder for coverage from press/bloggers. Whereas, if you launch on a non-
descript day, you may be the only interesting thing happening all day, and get
a copious amount of coveage.

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holdenk
Has anyone been to last years? If so, what was it like?

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konsl
I was in the Demo Pit -- was good since I'm from Canada, and got to tour the
bay area. I wouldn't recommend the Demo Pit -- people spend most of the day in
the conference and either head home or make a quick pass through the pit. You
will mostly be speaking with service providers. For the price, I wouldn't
recommend the conference either (for entrepreneurs, there are much better ways
to use the $). If you do end up in the Demo Pit, I would strongly recommend
getting a slot on the first day.

Last year, we were the only Demo Pit company to use the student rate ;) This
year, the student rate is $149 to attend the conference.

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Mistone
yikes $2000 to attend - better be a vc or at least have some vc cash to burn,
but they are offering $195 tickets to student, time to go sign up for a few
community college classes.

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redorb
charging a lot less i.e. $500 per a ticket would still keep those you don't
want out. Also if your charging $2k/ticket any idea why you can only give $50k
to the winner?

~~~
colinplamondon
Profit maximization.

~~~
dcurtis
There's a very thin line between profit maximization and greed.

