The GroupSwim Diving Board

Well, Day 1 of the conference is in the books.  We had a great time today.  Here are some observations:

• Standing all day demoing GroupSwim is tough on the dogs; bring comfy shoes if you have them
• When people offer to give you their business cards, it is very strong signal.  They can always just claim they don’t have them or simply shake hands and walk away.  A very high percentage of people that visited with us offered them up
• I love the casual, no eye contact roll-by from competitors.  It is no big deal to check each other’s booth out.  Why even try to do it in stealth mode?  We even let someone take a picture of the application.  The way we figure it, they can always create a site or check out one of our demo environments so what the hell
• Use cabs to get around versus public transportation.  Preserve the feet because the dogs will be barking later
• If you are doing a session on the main stage, use slides.  I saw companies in the LaunchPad prep meeting get all bent out of shape because the computer they are using doesn’t have the right version of flash, etc.  I would take all the risk out of the equation if I were them.  Let’s not even talk about relying on a fast internet connection that inevitably goes down during your demo
• Ship stuff to the conference, not to your hotel if you aren’t staying there
• It is very easy to tell who is interested in your demo/solution.  The eyes, body language and note taking say it all
• I’m happy to say the GroupSwim message is resonating with people who come to the booth.  We see lots of head nodding and interest
• We already ran out of collateral to hand out.  We are making an early morning run to Kinkos (soon to be named Fedex permanently) to replenish
• Too much schwag seems desperate.  I look at some of the booths of companies that have tons of schwag.  They are giving out iPods, stuffed animals, etc.  If you ask me, if you need gimmicks to draw people over, you are in trouble.  If this is the case, they are not inherently interested in your message and are not likely to buy anyway so you just wasted valuable time AND schwag
• Napping in the lobby between demo sessions is awesome; I recommend it
• Don’t use long titles when you register for these things as they will be cut off on your badge. For the next 2 days, I’m VP of Cust
• Bring an air card so you can have 2 demos at the booth.  It is much cheaper than paying the hotel for multiple internet drops

That’s it for now.  We’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Jason and Tom