A Poor Man’s Convention

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An interesting detail about the industry we are in is that our best marketing tools will be word of mouth and tech conventions. While there is always a place for solid SEO and some Google Ads, nothing beats entering a room with hundreds of API people.

That’s why we originally launched our open beta at NY Tech Day. Within a few hours we had met a lot of new friends and partners, and that led to weeks of follow up and exciting stuff. Now we need to look at what other conventions to join, which is a fascinating industry in itself. The number of them grows as rapidly as the number of APIs.

If possible we would attend them all, but there are two barriers that keep pre-funded startups such as ourselves from going to them all. The first is money. The second? Travel. Of course by travel we mean the cost of transportation and housing – aka money. Conferences have become their own industry but it’s interesting to see there aren’t more conferences offering some pre-funded startups a free ticket. Simply flying to another city and getting a hotel is pricey. We have been looking into where we can go and came upon an interesting discovery.

With all expenses considered, the conventions in Sweden and in Chicago come in the cheapest. It is unfortunate that Colorado and San Francisco have these great conferences that we can’t afford. Startups offer a lot of energy and new insight, so hopefully these conferences will find a way to get a few of us through the door in the future!