Is this going to go over well at KubeCon?

How much should you care if your startup is the hottest booth at KubeCon?

Probably not that much, actually. KubeCon is a great place to meet colleagues and connect with other Kubernetes super-users. It’s a good place to learn what other companies are doing and to build relationships that can result in joint marketing efforts and tool integrations. But it’s not necessarily the best place to connect with prospects and customers.

For most companies in the Kubernetes ecosystem, ideal customers aren’t necessarily at KubeCon. They are at whatever conference people in their industry or with their specific characteristics attend. This might be:

• A conference for insurtech startups

• An oil and gas conference

• A conference designed for managers of distributed engineering teams

• A machine learning conference

• A security conference like RSA

At KubeCon, you’ll be one of many overwhelming options and the fact that you integrate with / are built on Kubernetes won’t set you apart from anyone. And positioning your product as a ‘Kubernetes’ product might not even be a good choice — maybe you are actually better described as a security product that happens to be related to Kubernetes in some way.

When you get specific about the characteristics of the organizations that will get the most value out of your product, it becomes more obvious how you can start showing up where that type of organization already is — the publications they read, the conferences they go do. You stop being ‘just another Kubernetes startup’ and a start being a Kubernetes startup that was purpose-built to solve a very specific problem that these people have. You don’t have to compete with a bunch of options from Red Hat.