I'm not a fan of startup conferences,
I think they're expensive I think that the value is not there and for the most part
I've always thought there'd sort like a money trap for early entrepreneurs I've
done my fair share of conferences always with this notion that you're gonna meet
investors and then you're gonna network and you find super valuable connections
and honestly I've connected with a few people and it's been fun but never worth
the thousands of dollars that it costs to attend one you're talking thousand
dollar-plus ticket you're talking hotels or Airbnb
'z flights it's just never been worth it for me so I quit I quit paying for
conferences a while ago but this time I'm going to Coalition on an invitation
from a company called lecture fire they're building a product called Alfie
and subscribing has been helping them out with their pitch deck so they
invited me to go they've hired a booth and they're just gonna launch or
position their product for the first time in this conference so we'll find
out as coalition is worth it let's do it
last night the conference kicked off with the sessions by Seth Rogan and by
Justin Trudeau and we've been strolling the whole time like the money trap like
this illusion that you're gonna meet or interact with somebody famous they're
just on the stage and you don't you don't really get to interact with them
and the conference itself the the space the networking the booths these people
that you get to meet the smaller speakers that you can't actually
interact with I think that a lot of the value is there but let's go check it out
if it hang around the conference face for two hours this is by far one of the
largest conferences I've attended for sure the floor space is gigantic his
painting is really cool the production value great
I think that the first thing you need to establish is the difference between a
trade show and the conference is your TechCrunch style conference where you
attempt to listen to the speakers to learn the growth marketing conference is
another one that I've attended and it's mostly about learning so you build your
schedule on the day around going to different workshops and stuff like that
and learning that is very different from a trade show which is your CES and in
this case collision I think that Coalition is really a trade show most of
the space is dedicated to boots and most of the people are hanging out around the
different foods so the different companies have set up if you look at the
actual conferences that are not by famous you know your Joseph
gordon-levitt speakers they have very low attendance so people seem to be
hanging out mostly around the booth and the company space
speaking of us if the idea of this conference is for you to see boots that
people have built I don't see why you as an apt nd would need to pay what was it
six hundred dollars to be here I've paid 700 800 dollars for a faster growth
marketing conference because I want to learn something and that's that's the
call I understand that's the cost but in here I'm assuming most of the revenue
they're making is from the sponsorships if you look at the badges of people
walking around you know attendees would maybe make 50% but the rest the rest are
sponsors they they are here to promote their own company not to see other
companies being promoted $6.00 is a lot of money for an attendee
the line for food was just insane so I'm walking out I'm walking out just trying
some place to eat I don't think that they were prepared to handle 25,000
people getting hungry at the same time
I'm stalking about the cost of the boots and as a start-up founder like this is
the first thing that I think about is it worth it for you to have a booth in here
so boots are divided into categories for the starter boots you have the small red
you have your beta and your growth startups but they're over all the same
size smallish foods not a lot of traffic I've been a starter behind those boots
and overall the value or the people had stopped by
to speed up not really worth it I think you have to a larger company so they
range from small slack had one in small ones medium the best Ralphy which are
the guys that brought me here in things hired on the medium ones have the larger
companies and then you have the huge companies like AWS Capital One that they
have a specially designed booth that I'm sure you thought of other perks
including chance on stage so you know this but you can actually pay to be on
stage in these conferences the bigger speaker is Seth Rogen dumb things be
here but the whoever spoke from capital one
I'm sure that was part of their sponsorship
we're done with day one and the best cure for my very sore feet is just a
bowl of warm and delicious ramen now as a general rule I'm not a fan of hotels
normally if I'm traveling for vacation as you've seen I would stay in an air
B&B but conferences are so tiring damn I think that I think that our hotel
is worth it
let's talk about our wine foot traffic so the medium booth I was generally
surprised by the amount of people that are actually willing to stop I
absolutely need a gimmick cigars from Alfea what they're doing by the way
as they're building a tablet that you can
when you need to wait for example on hospital waiting room or an airport you
can gravity these outlets and plug your phone in the back suite to charge it
then this gives you like an interactive thing the way they make money is they
serve ads to you but those ads are very well educated very little targeted based
on who you are and they're detecting who you are with the camera because they
don't have any login information right so the camera actually detects your
gender your age range and your emotions so it does retina tracking to find out
if you're actually looking at the eyes so the gimmick that they set up is they
put this TV screen with the algorithm that they built that calculates your age
and then people are walking by and they just seriously stop by to speak to get
their age count and it's been working rather well and I was in to surprise
some other companies are doing coffee which is also working great so you see
the lines around just to get free coffee and that's that's interesting you need a
you need a gimmick to get people into your foods foods that don't have a
gimmick they they'd certainly have less foot traffic
but when going back to our line what's the cost of one of these leads what's
the cost of one of these contacts it's thousands of dollars paid up front for
the chance to speak to a few few hundred maybe over around a hundred users that
would stop by you know and of course today so if you are an app and you're
free app or or even a paid app if you're making out of $10 per user that's not
really a good ROI you're not gonna make that money back what I understand then
is that for most companies here the value that they see in hosting a booth
and being at these pens is not really direct response marketing its brand
awareness now what do they mean by brand awareness versus direct response I start
any company should be spending around 70% of the marketing budget on what we
call direct response which is ads that you can directly track and say okay so
we spent this much money here and then we thought this 120 back and then the
rest 30% on brand awareness which is ads or marketing stuff that you can't
necessarily track so it's stuff that you really don't know what happened a lot of
social media is brand awareness larger companies might need to change how that
budget is distributed but if you're a start-up and you're just growing most of
your money should be going to direct response marketing this is for the most
part not direct response marketing so that's where my question lies is
the cost of coming here something that an early-stage startup can afford on
their 30% brand awareness project I don't think so okay some exceptions to
the brand awareness thing mr. Scholes is here and they're actually scanning
people's feet to manufacture custom 3d printed shoe soles maybe they can get
their money's worth and then North is here and this company that manufactures
glasses that have a screen on them not like not like a little glass but
actually much better done they're here and each of their glasses cost five
hundred dollars so maybe they can get their money's worth back in in the
number of glasses that they sell but for the rest of these companies this is
brand awareness
last point I I think that perhaps I'm not the target for a conference and and
the reason why I think that is I spoke to a bunch of people even the Alpha Team
that I that I was hanging around with most of the conference and they overall
feel that the connections that they made were valuable one point two payment that
they made which i think is super valid is where else are you gonna meet people
like this it's one connection that would make the whole conference worth it and I
sort of understand that if you're an app trying to get a thousand users or
exposure to a thousand downloads it's not gonna happen I don't think it's
gonna happen in a conference but if your connections are more valuable than that
either because of a partnership or because the product that you sell has a
much larger lifetime value then maybe a conference is the place to do it a
company like MailChimp I can understand what they hear because they've if you if
you do any email marketing you know them but now they're trying to expand to an
audience that doesn't do any mail marketing perhaps and then they need to
expose their brand there so I understand why that happens I just think that for
an early-stage startup the value is not there you should be spending that money
else let me know in the comments what you think let me know if you disagree of
course hit that subscribe button thanks all for watching and I'll see you next
week