Trade Show Story from the Early Days
In the early days of a startup, trade shows can be a large expense. There are a lot of things to discuss with respect to minimizing trade show costs, including most importantly not becoming a Conference Ho as Mark Suster describes. In this post, I share a fond memory of scrappiness at an early trade show for AccelerEyes.
The 2009 GPU Technology Conference was held in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. We were an exhibitor with a 6-foot table. We had some really cool graphical demos that we wanted to put on the largest screen possible in our booth. But, as I recall, the costs to rent a TV for 3 days through the official conference provider came out to be roughly 50% of the TV’s retail cost. No way were we going to pay that.
Also, there was no way we were paying the shipping to get a TV to/from Atlanta to San Jose, CA. Even 1-way shipping of a box that big is over $200, eliminating the desire to buy a TV in San Jose that we didn’t need long term.
Once we arrived, we discovered that we had a really nice 60″ TV in our hotel room. After some double-dog-daring amongst the 4 of us founders, we unplugged the TV and carried it down to our exhibition booth on a lower floor. It was awesome, and we had the best demos at the whole show. After the exhibition, we simply took the TV back to our room and viola, back as good as ever.
Here are some funny asides about this experience:
- Notice I used the singular form of the word “room.” To save on expense we had all 4 founders stay in the same room.
- Since we didn’t want the cleaning staff to notice the missing TV, we kept the Privacy Please sign on the door the whole week. Not a pretty sight when there are 4 guys sharing a room without any room service.
- The TV was connected to the wall with a little metal contraption that required a screw driver. We went down to the kitchen and asked around in Spanish for a screwdriver amongst the hotel staff. One of them let us borrow his Leatherman for 30 min.
- There was a fridge stocked full of goodies in the room which have RFID to detect consumption. Unplugging the TV must have sent a signal to the front desk that we had consumed the whole refrigerator, because we had a $250 charge for all the items in the fridge on our final invoice. After asking the front desk to go check to see that we had not eaten any of those items, the charges were removed.
- On the last day of our show, guys from GE in the exhibit next to us started looking curiously at our TV. Then it dawned on them and they said, “Hey, that TV looks an awful lot like the one in my room!” They had a good chuckle at our shenanigans.
Good times. Since that time, we have found that it works best to buy TVs in the trade show city and then sell them on Amazon and ship them to the buyer when the show ends. That’s been the most convenient and cheapest way to get nice TV real estate in our booths in subsequent trade shows.
How have you been scrappy at trade shows in the past? What corners have you had to cut to make your startup successful?