Between September 12-14th Bizzabo participated in TechCrunch's Disrupt Startup Alley, one of the world's leading events for startups. Like most other startups at TechCrunch, we were mainly trying to accomplish 3 things: add new users, get some good publicity and find investors. Let me share a nice anecdote on how we got this amazing post on The Next Web.
We are a young and upcoming startup, based in a small cabin in central Israel. Our vision is to make business networking at events much easier and way more effective than it is today. Travelling and participating in TC Disrupt was a big deal for us. It is a big expense and we needed to get the most out of it. The strategy was to split forces – 2 founders flew to San-Francisco where they set up an awesome booth (See Picture below), and the rest of the Bizzaboers (and a few girlfriends and family members) backed us up from home (watch video). It might look like fun but the time difference between SF and Tel-Aviv is 10hours. The conference was 3 days long and started at 9am and ended at 7pm every day (7pm-5am Israel time) --> lot's of coffee…
The guys at home were monitoring the event hashtag and targeted every tweet that was relevant to our trip goals (potential users, journalists and investors). So this is how we got Sherilynn Macale to write this cool post about us – tweet by tweet:
Needless to say, this post alone was worth the long and tiring nights – we got hundreds of people to sign up to our website and tweet about us. Ah, and it also served our other 2 goals – adding users and finding investors 😉 stay tuned. We are confident that if Sherilynn hadn’t been as dynamic and responsive as she was, this wouldn't have happened. Thanks Sherilynn!
Our 2 cents from this occasion:
- Have someone to back you up in social media while you are pitching your ass off to attendees
- Be active – reach out! Reporters don't bite (at least most of them).
- Be creative - We decided to give people the chance to fly helicopters and land on our logo. It worked for us.
- Build a kick-ass product! You need the reporter to like it 😉
