Is your company a showpony or racehorse?
One of the things I’ve learned since starting Drafted is that if we decided to participate in every conference, contest, pitchoff, and tradeshow that came across our radar, we would spend 0 time actually working on making our company successful.
We’d be trying to win a race with a show pony.
10 years ago, there weren’t that many startup accelerators, incubators, or startup contests. Good because it wasn’t distracting, bad because marketing was a struggle.
As a founder, when you get opportunities at media contests (e.g TechCrunch Disrupt), conference contests (e.g Salesforce Dreampitch), university contests (MIT 100K), and now even TV shows (SharkTank) to promote your company and gain a lot of exposure, it seems amazing! Too good to be true!
A few of my friends started a company while at MIT, once said that “our plan is to keep winning startup contests to get free funding”. I’m still not sure if they were joking or not.
You’ll even start to get inbound email marketing from many of these with stuff like:
“This is a huge opportunity for you to get in front of millions of eyeballs”
“You’ll have an exhibition booth at this networking event with top angel investors attending”
“Winners of this contest will receive $250,000 in funding from XYZ ventures, free Amazon Cloud services, and some other free shit that you don’t care about”
I admit — it’s really, really tempting to go to every single one of them.
Why? Because startups founders generally face rejection 90% of the time — from potential investors, customers, hires… even significant others. But if you can put on a bit of a show, you can easily get some quick dopamine hits from people complimenting you about your success and congratulating you on building something cool, or having that genius idea.
You go to one of these things and come home with a fat stack of business cards from people who seem genuinely impressed with you and your company and your product — huge ego boost.
It’s like crack — you get a ton of Twitter followers and likes, complete randos on LinkedIn start making connection requests like “hey baby lets network”…ok maybe that one is just creepy, but you get the idea.
Be careful — or your startup might go from being a racehorse to a show pony.
In startup world, the demand for exposure, funding, wisdom, and high quality connections is much higher than the supply. Inevitably, contests, conferences, and other gimmicks that offer these and even charge for entry will continue to exist because of this demand. But don’t be fooled, they may not have any real long term benefits or ROI.
“But what about the intangibles? What about building momentum? What about building your brand?”
Momentum and brand are emergent properties that come after you can build a baseline of consistently overdelivering to your customers with a great product.
Momentum and brand are emergent properties that come after you can build a baseline of consistently overdelivering to your customers with a great product. At least in the early stages of your company, they won’t come from being a showpony at tradeshows and contests.
Just say no.
Probably the hardest types of events to say no to are the ones with the best marketing behind them — where you get personal messages from the organizers telling you that “your competition so-and-so is going to have a panel spot because they are doing a silver sponsorship, but we can probably get you in for bronze if you have budget issues.”
When this happens, point yourself in the opposite direction and run for your life.
Because you never, ever want your startup’s destiny to be controlled by reacting to the competition, much less reacting to a popularity contest completely made up with arbitrary standards.
Ok — so does this mean that you should never do any kind of events or participate or get your name out there? Of course not. Here are some questions that I ask myself (and sometimes the organizers) if I’m considering a shiny new object.
- Will we have an opportunity to reach the entire audience of the event?
This one is super important — it could mean that they will give you an attendee list or that they give you a speaking spot on the main stage. You cannot get into an attention war. - Will the total event cost be less than your current average deal size?
If the answer is yes, then that puts the odds in your favor of getting positive ROI from the event, which is a minimum requirement. - What is our BATNA for this event?
Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement, term borrowed from negotiation 101, basically if the event didn’t exist, what else can you accomplish with those exact time / money resources? E.g if you have $5,000 to spend at a conference that promises 100 leads, but you know you can get 1 lead for $5 on Facebook Ads, then your BATNA is 1000 leads. - Is the event an energy booster or drainer?
It’s really easy to dismiss this one, but most likely you don’t have a dedicated “events team” yet. Some events can be really fun and an energy booster for your whole team, whereas some events can be really draining and suck the life out of the people who have to work on it, including you.
You don’t need to have the prettiest pony. You just have to win the race.
You can read more dumb writing by me on the Drafted blog, Medium, and LinkedIn.
