dtangl

What follows is actually a post I wrote for my day job (Touchring), but I thought the content was important enough that I would repost it here as well.

Today marks the first working day back in Korea after the whirlwind trip that was Techcrunch50 (TC50). How was it you ask? Simply put it was an incredible learning experience both for the company and for myself personally.

First, background. We didn’t have a chance to present on stage. But we did own the TC50 DemoPit. And we were close… real close to getting chosen to present on stage. Close enough in fact that the big daddy Arrington himself came to speak with us, but in the end we were beat out by SocialWok, an interesting Google mashup application (see we are gracious losers).

That is all water under the bridge though. The important thing here is what we learned at TC50 as a company.

1. Prepare for Murphy’s Law – You have heard of Murphy’s Law. It is the saying that goes, “If something can go wrong it will.” And at a high profile, high energy (read high stress) event like Techcrunch50, you can bet that Murphy’s Law will come into play. Maybe it will be the WiFi, or maybe it will be something else. So be prepared for it. Don’t let it destroy your demeanor and ruin your experience. A flawless demo / pitch is great, but if something goes wrong you have to roll with it. Laugh it off and everything will be fine. Whoever you are talking to will leave with a good taste in their mouth. But make a big deal out of it and believe me… beyond just having a bad demo you will have just turned that person off completely to your product.
2. Have a 30 second teaser and a 5 minute version of your pitch, but more importantly LISTEN – The teaser often goes by another name, the elevator pitch… but regardless of what you call it, you need to have one. When you first approach people, many of them will tell you they are in a hurry, so you need the teaser to get those people interested enough to stick around for the longer demo.
   
   
   The five minute pitch on the other hand is your baby. That is your chance to knock’em dead. And if you didn’t have a solid pitch before the conference, you can bet that by the time you leave you will know your sh*t inside and out. To be honest this may very well be the most valuable thing that you get out of this conference. Here you have the opportunity to pitch your idea to people who aren’t your friends and who aren’t your family. You will receive unfiltered feedback from people who know what they are talking about. LISTEN to this feedback. It is golden. If they aren’t impressed with what you are doing, find out why. If they are impressed, don’t let it get to your head… rather find out what they don’t like and what they would like to see implemented in your product.
3. Bring Swag – This point ties in very closely with the one above. Believe it or not, most of the people there are not there to talk with you, so be ready to woo them in with some sweet swag. And by swag, I mean something cool. Something that people will continue to want to have and use after the conference. Fliers, pamphlets, and things of that nature are a waste of trees and resources. They just end up in the trash.
   
   What we ended up doing was making some really kick-ass T-shirts (pictured above) designed by punodostres and using those to lure people to our booth. Worked like a charm.
4. Work the crowd – In general people will not come to you unprompted, you need to go get them. Everyone there is browsing for something interesting. But despite that fact, people are surprisingly reluctant to initiate the conversation. That is your job. Something as simple as “Hi, do you have 30 seconds?” will do. Once you and your team have grabbed the attention of a few people, the process is self-perpetuating. More people will linger around your booth if it looks like something interesting is happening there, making your job a hell of a lot easier.We kept our booth manned with two or three people at all times, which is something I would definitely recommend. One person may be able to generate sustained interest throughout the day, but it’ll be a whole lot easier with two or three.
5. Everyone at your booth should be doing something – This one is common sense. Don’t have someone just standing around twiddling their thumbs. You don’t have enough space around the booth to be wasting it like that. If you aren’t engaged in a conversation or demonstrating your product, you need to be walking around introducing yourself, and sending people back to the booth.
6. Be prepared to be exhausted – Hours of sustained talking by itself is hard work. But if your experience is going to be anything like ours was, you will be making last minute tweaks to your product that will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. So my advice is this. Get pumped. Like National-Championship-Gameday pumped. This is your time to shine. And sustain that initial adrenaline rush for as long as possible. Only after that initial rush has started to fade. would I recommend caffeinating yourself.Another thing to keep in mind is that the tokens you need to earn for the last presentation spot on stage are collected at 2pm-ish. For us, it was full steam ahead, afterburners lit up, until then. We were so busy trying to talk to people that every one of us skipped lunch. But once the tokens were collected, things relaxed significantly.
7. Have a unique business card – To be honest, I fought this one tooth-and-nail. But I lost. And I am glad I did. Our CEO decided that something unique was the way to go, and so we had a TC50 special edition business card created. It was basically a little flier. The cover was our company name, and if you opened it up you would see my contact info and a picture of a iPhone like device. A lot of people commented on the design, saying they liked it. Now maybe they were just being polite, but whether or not they really liked it, we had a memorable design and that is the point I think.
8. Be friendly – I can’t stress this one enough. Yes, so maybe it is true that on the day you are in the DemoPit, you are competing against everyone else in the DemoPit for those tokens. But a little competition is no excuse to be rude. Be nice to your neighbor. Some of them don’t even care about the tokens, and they will end up sending people your way if they like you. And remember this event should really be about getting feedback and building your network and being nice helps immensely, so keep focused on what is important.
9. Have marketing / press release material prepared – I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Hey, but you said no paper swag earlier.” And you’re right I did. And I meant it. What I mean by having marketing / press release material prepared is have something saved to your computer and all zipped up and ready to send off at a moment notice. There are a number of bloggers looking to cover a product just like yours, and if a Techcrunch blogger walks up to you and asks for you to send over a summary of what you are doing, be ready. You can’t ask for better publicity than that, so when it happens you want to be prepared.
10. Was TC50 a better choice than DEMO? – This final point is a really more of a question that I have been wrestling with myself. And the honest answer is I don’t really know. In regards to the price difference alone, TC50 is definitely a better deal (free vs. 30k). But in terms of the weight of the event DEMO may be better.I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine (@tomserres) whose company (Piryx) will be presenting at DEMO in two days time. And he made a great point in that DEMO has been around for 20+ years and the event takes place on a resort outside the city, so everyone there is basically stuck with everyone else for three whole days. You eat together, you drink together, and you sleep together. While at TC50 the people that you really want to meet don’t usually even hang around for the whole day. They show up, do their thing, and leave. Is the increased opportunity to brush shoulders with the movers-and-shakers in the industry worth 30k? I don’t know but it was a great point.

That brings my reflections on TC50 to a close. If you would like to hear more, or want to share a similar experience please feel free to contact me personally (@drebabels) or leave a comment below.