This is a quick review of Web Summit 2013, with some practical tips for startups at the end. The Twoodo team was part of the 10,000+ attendees at this year’s Web Summit held in the RDS Dublin from Tuesday the 29th to Thursday 31st of October. It is a huge web conference, with registered attendees from the top investor firms and hot web companies from around the world. From Drew Houston of Dropbox to Elon Musk of Tesla, there were opportunities to hear talks from the biggest names in the industry. As well as being a web conference, the Web Summit is a huge networking event including many side events, talks and workshops ranging from design to digital marketing.
“I’m an alpha-stage startup - is it worth going to?”
If you are travelling from outside of Ireland, and do not have any connections there to get you a free ticket, it is very expensive to attend the Web Summit. For this web conference, expect to spend at least €1,000 for flights, tickets, accommodation and expenses (if you are coming from within Europe). If you want a stand, that will set you back even more. Oh, and here’s a tip: being in the competition does not mean you get a stand automatically. Cutting back by only sending one member of your team severely reduces your visibility in a crowd as big as 10,000 so if you go, bring as many as you can. Wear a bright colour, and even better, a costume of some kind. Have your pitch prepared down to the letter. To get reasonable prices, book everything as far in advance as possible. In advance of the Web Summit we followed pro tips on getting in contact with people in advance of the web conference, and setting up meetings. There was a number of problems with this. First, we are not on a first name basis with many important people so most of our outreach attempts fell under the radar. We tried on Twitter, LinkedIn and via email. A small number replied but no concrete meetings were agreed upon. It’s pretty hard to accidentally brush past the one attendee from Google in such a large crowd! Also, if you are pre-revenue, you are not going to generate much attention.
Our basic advice is to go if a) you have someone to connect you directly to the people you need to meet there, b) you want to compete and already have good traction and are generating revenue c) you want to hang out with nice, interesting people and get a view of what the competition is like. The most famous people are nigh untouchable, and the beta companies have an advantage over the alphas simply because there were far less of them and thus were more visible. If you are tight on money, you can achieve the same results as we got from attending meetups in nearby cities for free.