I am sitting in the audience at the TechCrunch50 conference, the second annual west coast meetup put on by the highly popular tech blog TechCrunch (I guess this makes one of my first “live blogging” attempts…).
I wanted to shoot of a quick post about one one of the things that good entrepreneurs do: THEY MARKET THE HECK OUT OF THEMSELVES. Good entrepreneurs are hustlers, and good hustlers are entrepreneurs; you can’t really tell them apart. How is anyone else, customers and/or investors, going to know that you exist if you don’t get out there?
In Pittsburgh, we have the 3 Rivers Venture Fair, but if you are a local startup and you limit yourself to just that one venue of exposure, you are missing out on a big world out there; you are acting like a small fish swimming in a small pond!
Many startups believe that all they need to do is spend some money with a reasonable PR firm, and voila, they have checked the publicity box. No way!
Not only are there significant super-regional venues to gain exposure (Mid-Atlantic Venture Conference comes to mind), but there is a large and growing national stage where you can show off your ideas: DEMO, TechCrunch, and a bunch of national-regional venues like Mashable and PE Hub’s large city tours.
These events cost money – they aren’t cheap, some coming in as high as $15-20K (!!) for your 6-10 minutes of fame – but they give you two great pieces of value:
- EXPOSURE – you get covered by the national mainstream press (if you are lucky, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, etc) and the national technology blogosphere (TechCrunch, Mashable!, VentureBeat, Center Networks, etc). All of this filters down to the regional and local levels as well – local papers, if you play your news right, and local bloggers (like me!). You cannot underestimate the importance of this coverage – it gains you a user base and name recognition with potential investors. As an example, see all the outstanding coverage on one of our portfolio companies, Rudder – here, here, and here.
- REFINEMENT – this is the most important of the two – you get the ability to compete for mindshare on the same stage with some of the best startups in the world. Like most competitions, this is hard – you have refine your business model, refine your message, and polish your delivery until it short, sweet, and to the point – this takes time and is very painful. But in the process, you improve the value proposition of your business. How many overweight and unattractive and unpolished contestants are there on the Miss America stage? Not too many… they have been filtered out (and sorry that isn’t a perfect analogy, but it is the first to come to mind). The process of putting your startup on this national stage will help improve your startup by its very nature.
There are companies from all over the US and the globe here – California, New York, North Carolina; Israel, Paris, London, Turkey, Japan – but nobody from Pittsburgh. What’s up with that? GET OUT THERE!!
PS – in the epic battle between DEMO and TC50, I think the early lead is going to DEMO (we have partners at both conferences) – DEMO seems to have the experience, professionalism, connections, and staying-power to remain the dominant west coast conference… sorry TechCrunch.