Startup Festival Recap and the Lessons I Learned First off, props to Phil Telio, Alistair Croll, Rebecca Croll, Guy Vezina, all the volunteers (too many to name) and anyone else who helped promote and pimp the shit out of Startup Festival.

It was a fantastically fun and action packed event drawing some of the biggest names in the startup world. I learned so much, especially at the off festival, Lean Analytics event at RPM/Year One Labs. Props to Alistair and Sean Power organizing it!

Anyways, I’ll just list off the things that I learned to make the most of my experience and improve upon the next time I ever decide to a go to a conference of this magnitude and scale.

To those who are reading to the end, would love to read your thoughts and give me some feedback.

What’s your plan?

Before I even went to the festival, I had a very clear goal in mind while I was prepping for our (false start) launch. If you’re spending upwards to $1000 (in my case anyway) you better have damn good reasons why you’re spending good time and money away from building your product.

I had a very clear intention of who I wanted to meet, what outcomes I wanted to achieve and the very steps I needed to take in order to achieve those outcomes, which all required a lot of planning, hustle and serendipity. In terms of planning, I made a list of all the names of people I wanted to meet being, Sean Ellis, Hiten Shah, Dan Martell, Jason Bailey, Charlie O’Donnell, Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure, and James Levine.

Of those 10 people I had on my list, I thoroughly researched each and every one of them, reading their blogs, engaging them on Twitter, email and watched their Mixergy interviews if they had one. In Sarah Prevette’s talk, she mentioned that if you’re looking to get help, have a very clear ask, so the entrepreneur, (potential) investor or advisor can actually help you. Is it an introduction? Specific advice about their domain expertise? Don’t waste your time or the time of the person you’re asking advice from.

My goal was to get a few minutes of their time to ask for advice and start the conversation and continually follow up with each and everyone of them to show them my team’s progress in the coming months.

Don’t be a douche bag When attending an event like this, I knew I could be drowned out by the horde of startups that attended this event. I wanted to stand out from the crowd and not come off as a douche bag by straight up pitching.

I asked, learned and applied advice distilled from Sarah Prevette (Sprouter), Dan Martell (FlowTown) and Chris McCann (Startup Digest).  The general consensus was to get advice by asking well thought out questions and maybe the conversation (no guarantee) would revert back to you where a small window opens where you can tell them about your startup/story.  Only at that point you can follow up with email and continue the conversation afterwards. It’s a subtle change in your approach, but the outcome can be entirely different had you gone in and spitfiring everyone with your pitch.

Ya ain’t gonna get funded, fool!

Chances are, going to a festival like this when you’re not showing any traction or being “teh hotness” of the Festival like the LocalMind team getting funded a few days before the Festival.

You’re there to start the conversation and *maybe* something will happen afterwards.  You just have to hustle and keep iterating on your product and keep those relationships that you’ve built warm by showing your progress and asking advice wherever you think you they could help best.

As Jeff Clavier had mentioned in one of his blog posts regarding how many people he’s funded after being pitched at a conference:

Out of the thousands of people who have pitched us at conferences after a talk, how many have we invested in. You might have guessed the answer: zero.

Like Charlie O’Donnell mentioned in his talk, you must value your time and the relationships you build. Don’t burn your chances of potentially working together or helping one another in the future by being “that douche bag” that pitched, hounded and annoyed the fuck out of the speakers at the conference.  Focus on the long term and invest the time to build real relationships.

Show genuine interest and offer some value (at least try to)

What are you interested in besides getting funded?  There’s a reason why McClure is famous for his saying, “Don’t pitch me bro”.  Him, angels, and VCs get pitched all the bloody time.

They’re like that hot chick in the club. They’re highly sought after, but probably way out of your league. What makes you think you’re going to be any different from the army of startups that have attended the conference as well?

As much as you’re interested in getting funded to follow your dream, you have to know the person you’re interested in on some level. For Dave, one of his passions is his Geeks on a Plane endeavor, so if you could help him out in some way (I don’t know how), he’d remember you. But even then, that’s not even enough.

The value you truly offer should come from your startup should have some amount of varying success to even register a blip on his radar or any other angel or VC’s radar.

Leverage your community

In retrospect, I didn’t do a good job on this one at all and dropped the ball.  I should have made more of an effort of reaching out to other Toronto area entrepreneurs to have a more organized approach in hanging out.

While they may be not on the same team as you, they’re still your brothers (and sisters) in arms in spirit.

It can especially tough when everyone is going about going after the next sought after event or after party.

Shit ain’t going down at the conference

Real talks and more intimate and off the record conversations happen at the off festival events, be it after parties or presentations. If you’ve been around the startup scene for a while and start building relationships with other entrepreneurs who’ve had some varying degree of success.

There is no real magic trick to this, if you show some promise and don’t be a douche bag and assuming you’re “cool” and “savvy” enough, you might be invited – no promises though.

Assuming you’ve made some sort of warm connection, just keep on following up and keep those would be mentors and connections warm.

The follow up

Be sure to connect with your contacts and ping them once every so often, be it on Twitter, LinkedIn and email. A good way of engaging is through their blog posts as well, which shows that you’re reading their content and putting thought into whatever their post is about, and hell, even learning from them.

Sooo, this was a mind dump on my part, as I wanted to put out what I observed and what I’d learned throughout the festival.  Any tips?