A last minute tech conference invite

Building a startup helps you connect with a lot of interesting people. And with interesting connections comes unexpected surprises and opportunities.

So we were pleasantly surprised when one of our connections called us up and offered us a last-minute booth at the New York AI Summit earlier this month.

We’re not (yet) an AI-focused product, but we knew that a lot of folks from the local tech community would be there so we accepted the invitation without hesitation.

The only catch was the weekend was quickly approaching and the conference was being held first thing the following week. With basically zero time to prepare, our booth would consist of a folding table and whatever else we could throw together in the one day we had before the end of our workweek.

Once the initial euphoria wore off, we started to realize what we got ourselves into.

We didn’t have any branded swag to give out.

We didn’t have a budget for fancy giveaways.

Heck, we didn’t even have a way to show a compelling product demo.

So how on earth were we going to make it a successful conference?

Defining our conference success metric

The first thing we did was define what a “successful” conference would look like. More often than not, founders and tech executives blindly attend conferences without giving much thought as to what they want to get out of them. Without clear goals, it’s impossible to come up with a plan for achieving them. And to whoever out there needs to hear it - the number of free socks, t-shirts and AirPod cases you collect is not a legit success metric.

Here’s how we thought about it: We’re an early-stage startup with a B2C app. For many of our users, the adoption of our app was a “here and now”, quick decision. People usually resonate with the problem we’re solving (we let you share all the payment methods you accept in a single link) and then onboard quickly and easily. So we decided that in the context of the tech conference showroom, our success would be measured in the number of people engaging with us at our booth. The more people we could attract, the more people we could talk to and convince to try Anywaypay.

If we walked around the room and tried pitched people on Anywaypay, we thought they might find it off-putting and out of context. After all, we’re not an AI tool and this was an AI-centric conference. So we needed to get people to come to our booth and talk to us naturally.

A creative place to promote our product

The plan sounded good in our heads and on paper, but it was easier said than done. We still needed to come up with a way to make it happen.

All of the promotional real-estate throughout the conference hall was taken already. Even if we could get a small piece of it on short notice, we had no time to produce an asset that would stand out in a crowd.

We needed a cheap, creative, unique way to grab people’s attention and attract them to our booth. We needed a setting that wasn’t already saturated with other company marketing materials and we needed to make sure our materials were cheap and quick to produce.

With these constraints firmly in place, the solution became clear:

The bathroom, of course.

We reasoned that the bathroom was the one place where everyone would be at least once throughout the day. And we assumed that no one else in the conference was using that space to advertise. If we could take advantage of this opportunity to grab people’s attention at a time and in a place where they least expected it, we had a shot at making the kind of impression we were aiming for.

So we went ahead and printed a couple of simple flyers. They included our branding, a QR code to download the app and some edgy wording that seemed bathroom-worthy:

Someone owes you money? Don’t get pissed. Just get Anywaypay.

Don’t piss away your cash. Get Anywaypay and keep track of who owes you.

When we got to the conference hall the next day, we snuck into the bathrooms and hung up our signs above the urinals:

Success!

it didn’t take long for us to see we were on to something. Our bathroom signage made people chuckle. We heard people joking about it (we visited the bathroom a few extra times to check). And most importantly - people started to come over to the booth to say hello and give us a high-five us for our clever marketing campaign (let’s hope they all washed their hands… 🙂).

And it didn’t end there. The experiment continued to bear fruits even after the conference was over. We received complimentary messages and someone even posted about us on Reddit!

What we learned

We’re proud of how this experiment turned out. But our main reason for sharing this is to highlight some of our key learnings that might be useful for other startups and marketing teams. So here’s what we learned from this experience:

• Setting “extreme” constraints can force you to come up with creative solutions

• Conferences can be effective promotional environments, but only if you define your success metrics clearly and then make a plan for hitting them

• Good marketing gets people’s attention. And getting people’s attention is easier when you’re not trying to shout over other competing marketing materials

• Good ideas speak for themselves. They don’t necessarily need a lot of time or money to work well

Hopefully you found this helpful. We may or may not continue to hang up Anywaypay flyers in random bathrooms, but one thing we will certainly be doing is re-applying these lessons as we continue to scale our marketing efforts and grow our Anywaypay user base.