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