Ignite’s first tradeshow exhibit: our product meets the public
September 29th, 2008 by Matt ThomsonI apologize for the long absence from the blog. For one, I was forced to spend a lost week in Maui. Then, when I returned, the rest of the guys at Istobe and I showed our wares at the MIT Technology Review emTech convention last week. It was a great time for a first look at our new product but a bad time to write a blog.
The MIT Technology Review invited us as a company exhibiting a new way to use a hot technology: predictive analytics. Over the course of three days, we managed a booth in “Innovation Alley” that attracted some of the 900 conference participants. Overall, it certainly wasn’t glamorous. After all, three days inside a tent on muddy, decomposing grass isn’t necessarily the way we imagined entering the trade show fray. But all in all, the event was uniformly MIT, an almost DIY-type event as far as location but with good food and a free bar.
As for our booth, well, we were almost too professional. Hell, we came with tchatchkis, a nicely printed case study that details test results, and full signage. We also put in overtime to localize our product in a effort to have a hassle-free demo. Well, we did do demos. Just not as many as we thought we might. I think Tyler, Doug, Chris and I all envisioned a rapt crowd of 20 gathered around - hunched with eagerness of course - the monitor as we went through our use cases. It was, uh, a little more one-at-a-time.
Of course, the demos did go extremely well and visitors by and large understood what we were doing. (Can’t underestimate this really.) And I will say, our demo product is solid. I can run through it and be really proud of what it does and how it does it. I can honestly say that this is really important. I’ve had to push products before that I knew were not good and that’s a real drag. So liking the product - believing unwaveringly in the product - is a must-have when you’re starting a company based on that product.
As for the tchtchkis, well we bought 100 ice scrapers to give out at emTech. We thought it was a pretty cute idea. You know, Istobe, ice. Well, I still think it was a good idea conceptually. But in practice, with the amount of foot traffic we got, and it still being fall…we still have about 95 ice scrapers. (So if you want an Istobe ice scraper, email me at mthomson@igniteanalytics.com. And word to the wise startup, if you want good PR at a conference, raffle off a crystal ball reading instead of giving away ice scrapers.
Tags: Customer Analytics, tchatchkis, tradeshows
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