Conference Crashing — Not Only Luck

In 2007, I was still a graduate student at Georgia Tech and was co-founding a new company. I wanted to start building a prospective customer list, even before we had a product or a website. I found success by crashing conferences, using my student status as leverage to get a free booth. Here are 3 stories of conference crashing:

The first place I did this was at ICCV 2007 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I was there presenting a research paper of my own (so travel costs were already covered). Since I was there anyway, I talked the conference organizers into giving me a place to setup a laptop demo. I was so excited that I totally plastered all of the elevators and entryways into the conference with color flyers inviting people to my booth. The demand for information at my impromptu booth was amazing, and it one of my first big customer validation moments. I walked away from that show with nearly 100 email addresses of interested researchers.

The second opportunity was just a few weeks later at MICCAI 2007 in Brisbane, Australia. Again, I was there presenting another research paper of my own (so travel costs were covered). Again I talked the organizers into letting me run a demo. Again I had success adding email addresses to my list. However, the conference was not as centrally organized, so it was more difficult to get traffic. Also, it was interesting to run into many of the same people from ICCV at MICCAI – early brand retargeting.

ICCV Booth 2007

The third opportunity was a month later at CDC 2007 in New Orleans. This time my other co-founders had published papers, but I had not. But it was close enough for us to drive down together and for me to share their hotel room (avoiding any additional costs). The organizers of CDC 2007 were really flaky about letting us demo. They would not give us a straight answer. So we just walked the exhibit floor. A few minutes before it was time to open, we noticed that a large table near the entry-way to the show floor was unoccupied, reserved for United Technologies. So we took over a corner of the table and got our demo running in time for the exhibit. A few hours later, we had overtaken the entire table and had a nice stream of visitors. For several days we enjoyed that exhibit. At some point, a representative of United Technologies came to attend to “booth duty.” He didn’t say much. He stood on a corner of our overrun table for about 30 min, completely disinterested in being there. Then he packed up and left.

These were great early experiences to meet with prospective customers face-to-face and build an initial email list. I do not recommend attending tradeshows early on since they are expensive and not as rewarding as good inbound marketing efforts. However, when you have opportunities to get in front of people, be bold and maybe you’ll end up with a free booth!

How have you been scrappy in your startup? Have you crashed any conferences?

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