4. Hustle all day and all night!
If you come to SXSW launching anything, you have to be prepared to hustle from 7am to midnight every day.
I brought Jen from our office; there was just the two of us from Posse here but it’s safe to say we met thousands of people. We were on the streets handing out stickers and our maps of Austin, lurking in hotel lobbies where influential people might stay, meeting people and spreading the word.
We were at all the parties we could make – if you’re influential and you’ve been at SXSW, there’s a good chance we spoke to you and tried to get you to download our app.
Opportunities were everywhere. On the first day when everyone was waiting to register, we combed through the queue meeting everyone and offering cupcakes to anyone who signed up on the spot.
Hustling pays off because you get to meet some amazing people! Jen and I were getting out of a cab on Saturday after buying stuff at Walmart to build our tradeshow stand.
We handed stickers to two guys as we stepped out of the cab door.
They happened to be journalists for NBC and asked to interview me for the evening news. Five minutes later, I was being interviewed on the street and they filmed us handing out stickers and sprucing our company. That night, we were the lead story on NBC News in Austin!
The next day, our tradeshow stand was packed with people who saw us on TV the night before. We’ve met too many amazing, helpful people to mention while hustling, but it’ll all led to media, speaking opportunities and partnerships.
5. Get a street team
You can only cover so much ground yourself. To maximise your impact it’s important to try to get as many people as possible representing you at the festival.
A month before, we advertised on the University of Texas jobs board for student volunteers to help launch our start-up at SXSW. Students would have the opportunity to help promote Posse for four days over SXSW, to learn how to launch a company at an event like this and would get a letter for their resume at the end.
Astonishingly, we were the only company to advertise for volunteers at UT and we had an influx of awesome applications. We chose a team of enthusiastic marketing students who did an excellent job signing up users, distributing maps and helping run our tradeshow stand.
6. Tie yourself to other people’s events
The key trick of SXSW for a band is to get on the bill at an event where everyone is going to be. If you try to put on your own show, you have the near-impossible job of promoting the show to a large group of people you don’t know and who already have a plan of events they want to go to. One of the most successful launches I ran at SXSW was when I managed to get Operator Please to play at the NME party.
It’s the same for an internet company. SXSW will try to convince you to spend $10K to throw your own party. Don’t! We don’t have that much spare cash; even if we did, I know it would be hopeless to attract the right people to our party.
For Posse, the people I really wanted to get behind us were influential women in technology. So we teamed up with a New York Women in Tech advocacy group called ‘Change the Ratio’ which was already throwing a power women’s brunch.
We paid a very small sponsorship fee (even a start-up like us could afford it) and they brought all the power women along. With virtually no effort and very little cost we got to own the hottest women’s event of the festival, and people like Randi Zuckerberg and Cindy Gallop were at our party!
I’m writing this blog on the last afternoon of the festival while waiting to get a cab to the airport. Before I came to SXSW this year, I read a lot of blogs warning start-ups to avoid it. ‘There’s too much competition,’ they said and ‘you can’t make an impact unless you’re prepared to spend up big.’
We decided to give it a shot and I’m happy to report that we did make an impact. We signed up more than 4,000 new users this week, raised our profile in the US considerably, enjoyed a ton of press, made a lot of amazing connections and we did it all on a budget of less than $10,000.
Jen and I are exhausted, but we’ve had so much fun. I’d definitely recommend SXSW and other trade shows like it if you want to make an impact, so long as you’re prepared to work incredibly hard to make it all happen.
