The startup lemonade stand

We left for Vegas one day in advance. The plan was to get to our booth, install it and be ready for the following day. Unfortunately, our flight got mixed up and we reached Vegas at 7 PM. For those who know me, no, I didn't get lost during the flight. For the last time, I never get lost, I just don't always take the shortest path to get somewhere. Anyway, there was no problem, setting up our booth should was a 5 minutes thing thanks to velcro and a turn key booth we had ordered. Did you know that velcro was invented in 1941?

Next morning, we show up at our both at 8 AM. The show opens officially at 10 AM. Surprise, no booth!

Nothing, not even a carpet!

No panic, not yet. We are not exactly on the shortest path, but we can still adjust. We reach the CES booth and ask what's going on. No problem, we were transferred to a bigger booth nearby. CES is huge, nearby meant crossing the equivalent of a big shopping mall. We reach our new booth 10 minutes later. Big problem. Not only is our new booth not a booth, it's a meeting room, but it's also taken! So we walk back to the CES booth and try to keep our calm. After a few phone calls they decide to give us our old booth. We remind them that our space is still empty, where's the booth? Top priority they said, our booth will be ready as soon as possible. We reach our empty booth at around 9. At 9:30, news we got was that the CES president is aware of the problem, we have top priority, but still no booth. Quarter to 10, we set up a black jacket on a large suitcase with a pyramid of giveaway boxes on top. It look like we had a lemonade stand.

The show opens its doors and we were there acting like nothing was wrong. So many people are attending the show, it is unbelievable. Most are walking by fast, no time even for a fast 3 bullets. We are with a simple "free phone calls" to slow them down and then with the other bullets. We quickly get a lot of attention and traffic.

Around lunch time, a team is assembling our booth nearby. Once ready, they stop the traffic and slid it quickly. Five minutes later, our posters are up and we are ready to go. Amazingly, having no booth at all didn't have that much an impact. Lemonade stand was working just fine, the lesson learned is not to invest too much in the booth, more on the props you hand out. Our mobile pain reliever boxes were really attracting attention.

Fasten your seatbelt!

A former Mobivox associate used to say: "to pitch a message, you need 3 bullets. Not two, not four, exactly 3. If you have only two, it will appear as not enough. If you have more than 3, people will forget". We believed so strongly in the concept that our web site was designed with 3 main themes: free phone calls, cheap phone calls and WiFi hotspots. We could of have built our booth with these 3 themes but we have decided to take a slightly different and less boring avenue to try to stand out from all the booths. Our's was designed with 3 panels: Mobile Blues, Mobile Cure and Mobile Antidote. And, you guessed it, inside each panel, we had 3 bullets.

The concept was to handle out fake pill boxes with "Tribair - Mobile bill pain killer - Extra Strength" to as many attendees as we could. We dressed up as doctors to get noticed even more.

Once our plan on paper was finished, we actually had to have everything printed in time for the conference. We finally got all the stuff the day before leaving. We had no idea how much space and weight would take the 4,000 boxes filled with fake and humorous instructions. Finally, it all fitted exactly in 4 large suit cases at the exact weight limit. Everything worked out almost perfectly, we just had to pay a few extra $ for our own luggage.

On we were to Vegas…

CES, preparation

November 2010, Tribair had just been launched its flagship product. It was a successful lift and take off. Wouldn't we have looked really stupid if nobody had downloaded the app? Of course, all our friends did but they didn't really had a choice. The Tribair app quickly picked up steam and spread to the entire world.

Like many startups, we don't have a big marketing budget. Every dollar must count. We did a few press releases that were successful but we wanted more impact. We never considered seriously buying Google adwords. We had done several experiments with past companies. For some, where a user generates lots of revenue, investing in key words works. In our case, each user generates little revenue. Therefore we need to get our marketing dollars to generate many users, not just one at a time. The ROI (return on investment) is just not there for us. For Tribair, we can measure the ROI quite precisely. For the press release, we measured an immediate increase in new users per day and number of payments per day.

Right after launch, a few TV techno shows called. But we quickly learned that we had to pay a fortune to be aired. The ROI might of been there, but we didn't want to risk all our marketing budget at once. So we looked at another alternative: conferences. There are several conferences in the telecom industry. Which one should we go? Again, ROI provided the answer. What we wanted from a conference was our dollars back, big time. The best way for Tribair to get its investment back is to find big partners such as calling cards, restaurant chains offering a free WiFi, travel web sites, large web communities, etc. Acquiring only one white label solution for a big partner would largely pay for the conference costs.

The second goal of the conference was to build Tribair brand name. The better known it becomes, the more chances we have of finding partners and the more users we get for our own application. After looking at several possible conferences, CES 2011 clearly stood out. Most conferences were just too consanguineous for us. Too many companies in the same space fighting for a very limited amount of cheese. CES was 10 times bigger than anything else, was very diversified and an excellent venue for us to meet all kinds of people and companies and to get known. The only problem was that it was only 5 weeks away, including Christmas holidays. We asked for a booth and were extremely lucky to run into a cancellation, only a few booths away from Skype. So we jumped on it. Of course, we realized we had no physical booth, no marketing material, nothing ready for the conference.

To be continued...

What you said...

We have recently attended a Usability Fix event organized and hosted by Bolidea in Montréal, QC, where different features of our product has been tested.


These are the key lessons we learned:

• there is still room for improvement in our registration process 
• the upper left icon to change the country code is not understood as such by everybody
• some clarification / help is needed to make free calls
• when typing a password, it should not show in clear
• our payment process appears too long and not convenient (especially on a phone)
• most users would like a Paypal option to facilitate transactions

We're now back to the bench!

Many thanks to Alexandra, Sarah, Heri and other testers for your valuable inputs.