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Subscribe via emailMatt & I are at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Like many of you, I lived through the first Internet bubble. One seminal learning that impacted me in a positive way during the first boom was buying a few aeron chairs for my home at an auction selling off Corio’s assets. Their offices were spectacular. They had hundreds of aeron chairs still in plastic wrap, never having been sat in.
I’m sensing a similarly concerning indulgent attitude at Web 2.0 Expo. We bought a used scaffolding and updated the artwork for our first trade show booth. It’s fine. It fits us. Second hand it still cost us about $4,000. That’s a lot of money. We also save a little money by forgoing the $1,200 Internet connection in our booth. We can run blist on our laptops and have the ability to conduct a good demonstration of the capabilities of the application. The Web 2.0 Expo organizers charge you for carpet for your 8 x 10 booth. I like the industrial look of the sealed cement floor in our booth.
Candidly I’m not sure if the return on investment will be positive or negative on our trade show booth. I’ll let you know in a few months after we’ve logged some mileage out of it. There are a few companies here at Web 2.0 Expo which have apparently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their booths. I’m pretty up to date and know what many companies, including startups, are up to. But some of these are companies I have never heard of. Last night there were a number of over-the-top parties hosted by other equally unknown startups.
I hope this indulgence is experimental – companies just trying to find their way in the marketing world, learning what works and what doesn’t. I’m hopeful the lavish spending on booths and parties doesn’t reflect a trend reminiscent of 7 or 8 years ago.
Hey kevin-
Great stuff – and important stuff to hear and track. Not to “talk my own book,” but having done the “startup exhibitor” thing myself, I think a lot of startups assume that expos are the way to go without realizing that a little searching and research can help them find exhibit opps at smaller, more focused events that include carpet, trash cans, internet (!), etc….and no, I don’t just mean Defrag. There actually is a great spate of offerings to choose from, and perhaps, following the herd is not always the most economically efficient option.
In any case, i’m loving hearing your thoughts as you run the track of the startup again.
I’ve never looked at blist, and hope you do well with it. I’m a software dev mostly custom db apps.
I just wanted to point out a disjunction in your thinking. On the one hand, blist will never be offered to run locally. On the other hand, you’re running your blist demos in local most at the show.
Now, the point isn’t that you’re a hypocrite at all…I’m sure the ‘local – never’ policy was arrived at for good reason, and I understand why you ran locally at the show. But your own decision makes the case that the no local deploy aspect of your software is an immediate limitation. Just pointing out the obvious…good luck with it.
@rooftop,
I totally see your point.
At the tradeshow, what I was doing was saving $1,200 by running all three of a web server, a database server and our app within the confines of my PC.
In hindsight, we should have signed up for an air card so that we could “bring our own Internet” to the show. As was, we couldn’t demo some of the really fun social features and as importantly, lots of people asked “how do I sign up?” and it would have been much better to answer “You can do so right here.”