

Ask HN: Best trade show swag for developers? - spo81rty

What are your favorite freebie items you have received at IT trade shows?<p>My company is trying to come up with the best developer &quot;swag&quot; for some upcoming trade shows. We are looking for some great ideas!
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pedalpete
I don't know what the best swag is, but I assume you're trying to think
'outside the box'.

I think swag has two purposes.

1) Try to build a relationship with the developer, let them think about how
you care about them, get them keen on your product, stay front of mine. For
these sorts of things, we've seen stuff like coffee mugs, usb keys,keychains,
etc. Stuff the developer uses, but the focus is not on being seen by other
people.

2) the other type is stuff that broadcasts your company name and tries to make
an affinity between the developer and the community. This is the stuff like
t-shirts, hats, jackets, laptop cases, etc. etc. Sure the developer uses these
things, but they are promoting your brand by using them, and are (sometimes)
proudly showing their affinity to your company.

So first off, which type of swag are you looking for? What is your product,
who are the developers? Is the brand on a public item going to help you get
more clients, or are you so niche that you just want the developers who use
your product to talk about you?

Today I got my first qi charging pad, and it is ripe to have some branding on
it. If that fits your market, that could be a cool thing that developers use
every day, but it would be rare than anybody sees it other than the dev.

~~~
spo81rty
Our customers are developers. My company is Stackify. We provide a service for
operations that is a mashup of monitoring, metrics, errors, remote access and
more.

T-shirts seem to be popular and we give those away. Just trying to think of
some other clever ideas.

~~~
sparkslabs
No-one takes t-shirts seriously - you're wasting your money with those.
They're just a winter vest at best. Practical things devs use, that's
different. +1 on mugs. To this day, because some real effort went in some
multimap mugs are great. Good size quality mug. Possibly even a keyring with a
decent amount of weight - making it hard to lose. Or similar.

How about a pen that also doubles up as a touchscreen stylus?

