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...
No comments:
Post a Comment