How to get the max out of attending a conference

A guide for early-stage founders

With so much of today’s business communication taking place on Zoom & Slack and inboxes saturated with vendor spam the perceived value of meeting people IRL has gone up substantially, making conferences a very attractive option for early-stage founders to build top of funnel.

But attending a conference is also very expensive, both in terms of the direct costs of travel, passes, sponsorships etc and the opportunity costs of being away from your day-to-day operations. It’s a big upfront investment without any guarantee of results, so you need to have a plan to get the most out of it.

You can’t wing it by just showing up on the day and hoping to magically bump into people. Nor can you rely on just having a booth to generate you a ton of qualified leads. You need a framework to qualify conferences, to decide what kind of presence to have and a plan to maximize being there.

Three of my clients asked me about this topic in the last month so this is what today’s newsletter is all about. It covers:

• How to decide if you should attend a conference

• How to decide what kind of presence to have at a conference

• How to prepare ahead of a conference

• How to make the most of a conference speaking opportunity

How to decide if you should attend a conference

The simplest way to qualify a conference opportunity for your business is to figure out how many people in each of the following 3 groups will be attending: