

Why Early Stage Startups Should Not Exhibit at Conferences - netvarun
http://blog.semantics3.com/our-experiences-at-demo-asia-and-why-early-stage-startups-shouldnt-exhibit-at-conferences/

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einhverfr
Conferences are tricky. Here's a counter-example.

We went to MYGOSSCON (Malaysian Government Open Source Software Convention)
and nailed it. Walked away with about 32 business cards, many were
interesting, two solid leads (one turned into a sale), and a great deal of
confidence that we were pushing for a great market. Gave away 50 business
cards. This was despite the fact that we had an extremely simple booth (two
banners, nothing on the walls, a desk and some marketing material).

But you don't just go to a convention or conference and expect to succeed.
There is little in the way of prizes for just showing up. You have to put in
legwork and you have to think through and plan your presence.

The first thing we recognized was that we had no real way to draw people to
our booth with our main product (LedgerSMB). Nobody was going to come by and
see what we could offer. So we decided to reinvent ourselves a bit and turn
the tables a bit-- our primary exhibit was PostgreSQL (since PostgreSQL as an
org wasn't going to be there and generally when PostgreSQL is going to be at a
conference, we have tended to volunteer at their booth, so the arrangement
wasn't unusual except that we paid for the booth) and our secondary one was
LedgerSMB. We knew it was government-centric so we planned our marketing
materials to be government-centric, including a case study of the use of
PostgreSQL at CNAF in the French Government. We gave away probably 100 of
those.

Once folks came in to talk with us about databases we'd also talk about
accounting and ERP software. While others (Hitachi) were offering a raffle for
a free iPad, we got folks to come by, simply offering them something that was
interesting to them, and being able to talk about it.

Also we blogged about our presence in advance, and gave a report after,
ensuring that people would know that we were there.

The moral of the story is this: with conferences what you get out depends a
lot on what you put in. Time and attention to detail goes a long way towards
success.

~~~
temphn

      since PostgreSQL as an org wasn't going to be there and 
      generally when PostgreSQL is going to be at a conference, 
      we have tended to volunteer at their booth
    

This is an interesting tactic. Normally I'd think the BDFL of each project
would want to preapprove someone speaking on his team's behalf, but open
source isn't necessarily like that. Feels like this could be quite the
marketing exploit if leveraged in the right way. Support the project and draft
on its fame behind it.

~~~
einhverfr
We got pre-approval for the record.

In fact they offered reimbursement for us printing Pg marketing materials but
the costs were minimal and we didn't adequately separate the two areas, so we
declined.

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HerraBRE
I've been to quite a few conferences, speaking about my startup's software
(<http://pagekite.net>). In my case, since we release our core product as Free
Software and are very aligned with the decentralization and "cloud backlash"
movements, it's been easy to get speaking slots to get up on stage and talk.

This has been an absolutely fantastic learning experience, even though it also
taken a huge amount of time. Being able to get up on stage and comfortably
explain to a room full of people is a very valuable skill, and one you can
really only learn by doing. Even if you are just standing in a booth, you can
cultivate this sort of thing by actively seeking out conversations with
passers-by.

Another thing, is we've also noticed there is often a 6-month lag or even more
before seeing any tangible returns - people listen, file away the ideas and
then come back when they are ready.

So although I agree that it is important to carefully evaluate the costs
involved in events like this, I think many of the metrics used in the article
may be a bit short-sighted. Basically, "wasting time" is part of the learning
experience. If you don't do it, you never learn.

~~~
netvarun
I fully agree on your comment regarding "wasting time". Just 3 months into
this new career path. So much for me to learn =)

And yes, in some sense I am a little too short-term focused. As a friend
commented on my facebook wall, the angel investor whom we are going to meet
might refer to someone big in the long term and that one meeting could have
made the difference.

Time shall tell.

~~~
HerraBRE
Good luck!

------
MicahWedemeyer
I agree that a lot of small companies have really unrealistic expectations
about these kinds of things, and I cringe whenever I hear about a 3-man shop
who drops $10k so they can get a booth and attend a trade show or something. I
just don't see that investment ever being repaid.

However, 7.5 "man days" really isn't that much in the whole scheme of things.
Most small teams lose that much in a weekend. Plus, if the Singapore
government is paying the entire bill then you're not spending your own money.
To me it sounds like a (somewhat crappy) paid vacation. There are worse things
to do with your time.

One final note: I think setting target goals for blog posts, customers, and
investors is an excellent idea. It helps to turn very vague "networking" into
a goal-oriented task. I have used the same technique in the past to help gauge
the value of spending my time and resources at various events.

~~~
netvarun
Fully agree on your comments regarding tiny startups attending conferences.
Thank god we didn't pay for anything.

7.5 days is the actual raw amount of man-days lost. In reality it was much
more than then. Each time I wasn't in the office, I couldn't make much
progress in some areas (like the content extraction platform, which I am in
charge of). That held progress on the API which my teammates @govind201 is
working on.

So in reality it was close to 2 weeks of productivity that was lost forever.

Anyway as one of the commenters mentioned above, 'wasting time' is a lesson
every one doing a startup has to learn in some point of their journey.

------
PaulHoule
It's hard to know how much value you'll get out of different kinds of
marketing.

The $10k or so cost of having a conference booth helps me put other kinds of
marketing in perspective, in particular, it helps justify spending $5k on
something else that that I think would pay off better.

Note that there's psychology at work even for more established companies. I
used to work for a company that, for years, rented a booth at a large
conference in Las Vegas -- the president of the company told me that he
thought going to the conference was not cost effective, but that if he stopped
going, people would have thought we'd gone out of business.

Funny, I talked with a guy who sells newspaper ads who finds that he brings
this one up every time a local business questions the value of newspaper
advertising.

------
yo-mf
It is hard to argue with a platform that offers global visibility wrapped in a
very polished and professional production. The benefits touted by DEMO’s
producers are top-tier media exposure, boost in sales, landing valuable
partnerships and securing funding. Having attended several DEMO conferences
and other similar conferences, there are plenty of startups that have managed
to come away with positive results.

While I would not take away from the obvious value of DEMO and similar launch
conferences, early stage start-ups need to think long and hard whether they
are even ready to launch. In lean start-up parlance, most early stage start-
ups are still in Customer Discovery and Validation. If you have not locked
down what your market type is, what problem you are solving and what customers
would buy from you, making a big splash could be a very costly mistake. I have
seen too many start-ups go to these events and come away poorer without any
results to show for it.

All that being said, like with many decisions, it is the execution that
counts. You were going for free, so you had a huge opportunity to make the
most of the time. To simply expect to show up however and get attention is
naive. The press want interesting stories and you are competing with 50 other
companies, all vying for attention. You could have built up interest in
numerous ways by being proactive and creative to build up interest. For
example, you could have pulled together a Social Media SWAT team of
friends/family/business partners to tweet, Like, and push your story out
there. Instead, you simply showed up, which is kind of like building a web app
and simply expecting people to visit.

As with anything, it was a learning experience, but I would not use this
experience to color your views on conferences. You just need to understand how
best to utilize these tools to your advantage.

------
bilbo0s
A bit off of their central point but....

Having never been to SG but the more I hear about its public-private
interactions, the more intrigued I become. American young people may be at a
disadvantage to Asian young people in the coming years.

I think it would be difficult in the US to have the government provide, what
is essentially angel funding, to startups. But this sort of, 'provide angel
funding' thinking, is beginning to take hold around asia. For instance, I knew
that the Indonesian government was trying to figure out the details of how
they might accomplish something similar in Indonesia.

I don't know...just will be interesting to see those structural differences
and how they play out over time. Maybe Asia will have more low quality
startups since that funding is less dear. I don't know...it'll be interesting
to watch.

~~~
Duff
Singapore is a city-state, so administering that sort of program is feasible.

The US is so much larger in terms of both size & scope that any program would
be overrun with fraud, or overrun with bureaucracy to prevent fraud
immediately. If you have ever had any experience buying stuff for or selling
stuff to any US government entity, you'd run away as soon as possible!

------
agentgt
Conferences don't suck if your startup helps conferences :)

Seriously if your company can some how help the conference by using your
product you will find conferences are much more valuable.

For example we provide inbound mobile marketing software
(<http://snaphop.com>). We often give the conference holder free access to our
software to help run the event.

Otherwise: yeah conferences feel pretty much like "circle jerks". Basically
all the vendors extolling how awesome they are and how cool the problem space
is. If its B2B the press is generally pretty bored. Rarely do I see prospects
(leads) at these events. Sometimes I even walk over to other booths in the
beginning of the event and pretend to be a prospect so I can hear their pitch
:)

~~~
netvarun
Actually you have got a pretty good point. In fact quite a few guys suggested
that we pull some structured data/do some basic analytics on all companies
that have ever pitched/launched at DEMO and all its subsidary conferences.
Unfortunately we never had the time nor the resources to pull it off.

Anyway, its something other startups exhibiting at conferences could think
about.

------
dave_sullivan
Sounds like you guys went in with some clear goals, which is good. Still you
might have had better luck focusing on sales/customer dev leads rather than
press mentions.

Another good strategy for press might have been tracking down bloggers/press
that were going to the conf (maybe they tweeted about it? Posted something?)
and tried to arrange meetings ahead of time--they are there with goals too, or
at least a full appointment book/some ideas on what to cover.

But yeah, the lost man days thing is certainly something to consider, but
don't let it discourage you entirely, try it again sometime and do it a little
different, maybe get different results. And if you follow up a couple times,
maybe something comes out of those biz cards, you never know until you do.

------
dshankar
It all depends on your expectations. Your mismatched expectations led you to
an overgeneralized blanket statement. Smaller conferences with a core, focused
audience would be better suited to small 3-man startups.

~~~
netvarun
Conferences (regardless of their size) take a lot of time and effort. Gotta do
your marketing collaterals, write your press releases, setup your booth. More
importantly taking part in them costs big money (in our case, the awesome
Singapore government paid for us)

IHMO, early stage startups that still are in heavy development are better off
being holed up in their offices working day and night than exhibiting at
conferences. The high costs (both in terms of money and time) are simply not
worth it.

You have a good point regarding the type of conference. As I mentioned in my
blog post, maybe a more focused conference (eg. The Strate Data Conf) could
have resulted in better outcomes for us. But once again I am not too sure I
want to take part in any of them any time soon (atleast until we have shipped
our product)

~~~
alain94040
_early stage startups that still are in heavy development are better off being
holed up in their offices working day and night_

That's the part I disagree with. Facing your potential customers, the press
and key players, is not something you'll do if you stay locked up in your
office.

You learned a valuable lesson: no one cared about the awesome startup you are
working on. It's disappointing, and there can be many reasons for that (wrong
audience, bad pitch, bad product). But at least the delusion you may have had
that as soon as you show your product, everyone will love it... well now
reality set it.

------
dwyer
>Remember we are based in Singapore. There are quite a few government funds
for entrepreneurs to tap into and most importantly they don’t take any equity
at all.

The more I learn about Singapore the more I like it.

Also, given the quality and humor of your article it's probably best that you
didn't outsource that press release. You write better than a lot of writers
out there.

~~~
netvarun
My mom is now proud twice over =) If you are planning on doing a startup, and
Singapore is a pretty awesome place to get started. But of course, once you
have gotten off the ground, you should then head to the mecca of tech -
Silicon Valley.

~~~
nubela
The Singapore government hates you for saying that. /Singaporean.

~~~
vinothgopi
I have a feeling netvarun dint mean it in a "take ALL the money and leave"
way.

Singapore is seen as an up and coming startup haven and the goverment is
trying really hard to build that entrepreneurial ecosystem (and i should say
they are doing a pretty good job!). But that hasn't yet negated 2 issues with
starting up a business in Singapore.

I'm sure you've heard the argument about how small a market Singapore is so I
shall not go down that path. The govt has been very supportive of early stage
startups with grants ranging from 10k to 100k. But have you noticed that very
FEW startups have actually made it big? I've spoken to several startup
founders and all of them seem to voice the same opinion: its easy to raise a
seed round in SG(<$100k) but anything more than that its gonna be very
difficult. Singaporean VCs are risk-averse and are only focused on whether the
startup has solid numbers to back its requested funding amount. Nothing else.
Cant blame them as well. We Asians are wired that way. At this point of time,
Singapore is a great launchpad. Not a place to grow. If we want to grow, we
got to move.

With the influx of Silicon Valley investors, angels and incubators, the
situation might improve though. And if you think your product is suited for
the US market anyway, why stay in Singapore?

------
xiaoma
Very neat. I've made a few buddies from NUS while at a startup in Beijing, and
been planning to head out to Sg for a weekend to check out the scene.
Actually, big data has become a bigger part of my work. What kind of analytics
are you working on? Are you using R?

~~~
netvarun
Thanks for the comment. Feel free to contact me at varun [at] semantics3 [dot]
com, if you are heading over to Singapore. We haven't yet started on our
analytics. Currently we are still scaling our backend infrastructure to pull
in vast amounts of semi-structured data from a multitude of sources and
organize them into structured entities and map out their relations.

------
vlasta2
On the other hand, you made it to page 1 on HN due to your going to the
conference and blogging about it. That should be better than the 3 blog posts
you aimed at :-).

~~~
netvarun
You figured out our fallback plan pretty well =)

------
wilfra
Early stage startups should not exhibit at conferences because this one
startup got nothing out of this one conference? I think more likely one or
more of the following:

-They chose the wrong conference -Their product sucks -Their pitch sucked

Conferences are great for networking, raising awareness, getting customers,
catching the eye of investors etc. All the reasons they went. Sorry it didn't
work out but that doesn't mean it wont work out for others if they choose the
correct conference, have a good pitch and have a good product.

