What I Learned from TechCrunch50 - 6 pieces of advice for future presenters | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned from TechCrunch50 - 6 pieces of advice for future presenters

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21 pointskitsguy16 comments

> "Have your product ready for launch at the end of your presentation. If you’re product is still in powerpoints or “closed beta” or “invitation only”, don’t bother coming to these conferences."

Having sat in the TC50 pits, I noticed one major mistake was not giving out free invites to the people in the room (and streaming live)! There were amazing demos that had everyone drooling to try only to get turned off (and away) when they found out there was no free demo.

Big examples were CitySourced, http://www.Cocodot.com and http://www.perpetually.com. If CitySourced had given out a free version for the day they launched, they could have had enough downloads at the end of that day to give them the top position in the App Store. Everyone around me took out their iphones, checked out the app store only to see that it costed 2.99 and put away their phone. Cocodot looked absolutely stunning and especially with a lite photoshop app built in for customization. It had us all wanting to try it only to get turned away when there was no free demo.

As Jason Calacanis pointed out, probably about 200 people in the room had over 1000 followers on twitter. If they launched a great product, they could have had 200,000 people hear about them via twitter alone. (Maybe a bit of a stretch, but not if you consider the 3000 streaming viewers and some people had 5000 or 10000 followers).

In short, if you do a demo day, don't forget to capitalize on the publicity by letting people try it!

Wait, so people were drooling over CitySourced but then weren't willing to pay 3 bucks for it?

Something seems very wrong about that.

Drooling might have been an over dramatization on my part. But I think there was a #citysourcedcommittee (something like that) started on twitter.

I did hear multiple mutters of two ninety ninety around me because they neglected to mention a price on downloading the app. They are trying to build a tribe (in Seth Godin's words). Their application is not very good if only a few are reporting issues and they could have overcome some chicken and egg issues by making it free for a week.

I think the real issue might be the fact that these were applications that did not solve an immediate pain and yet wanted an upfront payment. In CitySourced's case, there was no graffiti or potholes in the room for people to report but people wanted to download it and play around. Perpetually required maybe months of caching to see a benefit but wanted a $99 upfront fee. (They've since started offering a trial)

I think you're mistaking CitySourced for Clixtr (conference/social photo sharing). I don't think City Sourced is in the app store.

I think you are right. I got them mixed up. Clixtr did look pretty slick and we couldn't try it out for free (which they've since changed). CitySourced was similar in that it didn't even have an application ready.

Thanks for pointing that out.

I learned that TechCrunch will spam their RSS feed all day for a week, causing me to unsubscribe :(

I think most people don't unsubscribe. We wait for these TC50 updates all year like it's startup-news Christmas. And we run the ustream video throughout the day too.

Is there a greasemonkey script to automatically hide every HN headline with a number in it?

Yes, sir - thanks to my hero, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Xichekolas

Check out http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

Fantastic, thanks!

If the rumors are to believe, there won't be any future TC50's.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/09/16/tc50-techcrunch50-founders...

If the puppet is to be believed...

Techcrunch create rumors and controversy to get links, mentions and pageviews? Never! Maybe there won't be a future TC50, but what about a TC60 or TC100? Haven't they run that gag before?

I think Arrington's favorite publicity stunt is the "argument".

Now I want to see a picture of Scoble's business card...

You know those plastic pictures that change based on the angle you're viewing them at?

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