Should we sponsor / attend that conference?

Hi everyone! I’m going to be at Open Source Summit this week. I’m going to be speaking on a panel about marketing and open source (dirty words, I know!), recording a couple episodes of The Business of Open Source, and interviewing some folks for The New Stack’s On the Road show. If you’ll be at the conference and want to meet up, send me an email.

Since I’m doing the conference thing, I wanted to talk about how startups should evaluate whether or not to sponsor a conference. The key question to ask youself is not “Are my peers going to be here?” The better question is, “Are my ideal customers here?”

Of course, you might want to just attend a conference — that’s a different question. In that case, you do want to think about what you’ll learn and whether or not peers are there. But for sponsoring a conference, you want to prioritize conferences that are interesting for your ideal customer, not for you.

I was inspired to write this as I looked through the sponsors at Open Source Summit. Many are companies I know, many are open source startups. This is not bad, it’s just as I expected. And then, I found this company.

The Happy Hacking Keyboard is not open source; there’s nothing per se that says open source when you look at it. But they’ve clearly decided that software developers are the type of people who would get exceptional value out of a very good keyboard (they’re right! Though they should target professional writers, too). This is fabulous conference for them to sponsor. There will be no competitors exhibiting alongside them. Most attendees are their ideal customers.

When thinking about which conference you should sponsor, think about what situation will make you be like a fancy keyboard manufacturer among developers. This might mean a booth at a financial services conference, or at an offshoring conference. Whatever it means, the key is to think critically about how targeted the conference is to people and organizations who will get the maximum value out of your product and/or open source project.