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As an additional data point for startups: despite a few people ridiculing CES, it worked out great for us. Accounting for flight, employee salary, hotel, food,
by jayliew 14y ago
As an additional data point for startups: despite a few people ridiculing CES, it worked out great for us.
Accounting for flight, employee salary, hotel, food, etc. and the booth space (about $4,000 for that tiny booth), we're already ROI positive. Everything that continues to pour in after that is just pure profit (being scrappy helps!) We're glad we did it.
If you're "making something people want" and you do that 1 thing really really well, don't fret over the cosmetic details that other companies with deeper pockets can afford pay for. At least that was true for us at CES, North America's largest consumer electronics show.
On a final note, we'll reward you with a surprise gift (guess what it is!) if you give up your embedded firmware engineer friend to join us. We focus more on merit; the lack of paper qualification is not a problem :) jay@doublerobotics .com
- wglb 14y agoCool looking product. Having done shows in the past, I know how much energy they can suck out of everyone, and cost. Good that it was such a success for you.
- jayliew 14y agoIt was definitely exhausting, but also exhilarating :) Thanks!
- petercooper 14y agoI came here to ask "How much was it?" and here's the answer.. thanks! :) Conferences like CES seem to do very well for a reason and I suspect that's because they work, as you've found. If they can get away with charging $4000 for even such a small space, a lot of companies there must be getting a ton of value out of it :-)
- jayliew 14y agoHi Peter, yes - it does work! But just to elaborate further, I don't want to make it sound like if you cough out $4,000 and with just a bare-bones booth, you'll get the kind of attention we did at CES. I do think this $4,000 booth at CES is a good way to amplify existing "success" (loosely defined on purpose). There are definitely knock-off and undifferentiated products that didn't see as much success as we did. Imho, it's a coin-toss if you don't already have some evidence to suggest that there is some "success" to amplify. CES wasn't a causation of success. But the right product compensated for a cheap bare booth.