Leading conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt are like heaven for entrepreneurs. However, the $1,995-2,995 price tag plus travel are a lot less divine, and can be hard to justify, especially when it comes to ROI for startups with limited resources.
The startup ecosystem is already saturated, making it hard to attract the attention of the media, investors and potential partners through normal channels, but standing out from the crowd becomes even trickier when you place thousands of eager competitors from a range of industries under the same roof at the same time. Bumping into Steve Wozniak or making eye contact with Elon Musk are cool stories which will provoke green eyed envy amongst fellow tech-heads, but they are not going to help you scale your business, or make you more appealing to VCs.
While rubbing shoulders with industry leaders opens the door to potentially profitable chance encounters, other less flashy options like accelerators, smaller networking events and startup competitions offer the same — if not more — access to resources, with less competition and for a fraction of the price. That’s not to say that startups can’t benefit from conferences.
I spoke to Leo Lax, founder of SAAS accelerator L-Spark and Dave Tyldesley, co-founder of Cube Business Media, joint-organizers of the SAAS NORTH conference in Ottawa, about how to create a conference which really offers value and ROI to startups.
1. Go niche
What smaller events may be lacking in brand and reputation, they tend to make up in relevance for attendees. While a quick browse of booths at a globally-renowned conference will reveal an Aladdin’s cave of mind-boggling new technology and innovation catering to whatever weird and wonderful use cases you can imagine, opening your eyes to the seemingly infinite limits of the human imagination, the value to a startup’s growth, product or business model will be minimal.
Industry specific events allow startups to showcase their products or services to people who really understand their context, receive inspiration (or motivation) from what competitors are doing and meet valuable contacts. Rather than just acting as a “show and tell” event, founders should be able to walk away with a better idea of the market fit for their product, what consumers and investors are really looking for and what they are doing better or worse than other players.
VCs and angel investors often focus on specific industries. It goes without saying that, the chances of you meeting someone who is interested in writing about, partnering with, buying from or investing in a startup like yours is much higher at a conference which only caters to that specific industry.
2. Choose your location wisely
If you decide to hold your conference in San Francisco, New York or another global tech hub the chances are you will be able to fill seats, but you also put yourself up against the hundreds of other events taking place in that city that year.
Choosing a location which is off the beaten track reduces competition, improves your chances of engaging the local startup community, media, investors and local sponsors, but it also allows you to craft a more inclusive conference experience. While you don’t want to go too far — placing your event in the Amazon rainforest or Greenland — a change of scene can motivate people to immerse themselves in all of the event, not just the main speakers, and offers an attractive and interesting location which can sway people towards investing the time and resources to attend.
“Basing our conference in Ottawa allowed us to motivate the local tech community but also attract a large audience from out of town. When people are forced to leave their nest, they naturally get more involved in events and social meetups because they don’t have the pressure of shooting back to the office in-between presentations, or having to cut…