How to benefit from major industry events... when you cannot attend them?

Where were you last week?

Where you one of the lucky ones, attending LeWeb'10 in Paris?

Oh. No. You couldn't.

I can get that. But did you benefit from it?

You should have. Here's an example of "how".

As other key industry events, LeWeb'10 attracts hundreds - if not thousands - of people that, as a startuper, you must meet. I'm talking journalists, bloggers, VCs, angels and influencers.

But because your company's a startup, you have to allocate your (scarce) resources in the best possible way, on a daily basis, and to make a long story short, you had to (reluctantly) decide not to attend. Ok. Not THAT big deal. That would have been a major error if you hadn't take this opportunity to meet all those influencers and present your company.

That's precisely what I've organized for one of my beloved customer: Kwaga, the SmarterEmail semantic toolkit. We've organized a private tour of the Opera Garnier, home of the famous Phantom of the Opera. Key bloggers, influencers and journalists just looooooved it, and so did Kwaga ;-)

This opportunistic operation allowed Kwaga to meet key people and to establish relationship with them, while sharing a unique experience. This is exactly the kind of operation I encourage my fellow startupers to organize, think about, share and benefit from.

When you don't have the resources, think leaner ;-)

Do you have any other ideas of the kind to share? Please do so in the comments!

See the full picture gallery:

What if good enough was actually enough?

I went lately to one of Eric Ries's leanstartup seminar, in Paris.

Very inspiring and thoughtful as expected. Some of it reminded me of Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece": an artist, never satisfied with what he considers his life's masterpiece, keeps on amending it during years. When half mad he finally shows it to a friend, the poor fellow has to face the lamest doodle ever.

The Unknown masterpiece is amongst the most famous novel challenging the sense and the meaning of Arts.

Now, transpose it to IT. Especially to innovative IT. You know, those products and services that have and will undoubtedly change the way we work, the way we communicate, our relationship to others etc.

- Craiglist: the most popular online classified ad site in the US ? The poorest UI and functionnalities we've ever seen = 20 million people visit the site each month, viewing and self-publishing more than 17 million ads and forum posts (check this Wired story)

- Twitter: a limited number of caracters to tell everyone non-sense all day long =
and the list goes on like that.

Now I've been recently talking to a bunch of startup-ers and, as so funnily illustrated by Ries, they're all of them more or less stuck with existential issues of the kind:
- my product/service isn't ready - I must add features
- I have to delay the launch
- How can I raise interest (not mentioning money) with semi-finished product?
- I need 10 extra genius-developers to finish it
...

Basically those guys are changing the way we will buy on the Internet, travel, manage our inbox, manage and animate our community, and obvisouly invent a new way for us to do so.

How on earth could the know how we - users- will react to it?

Well they can't.

Ries best advice remain: try, fail, ask your users, correct, try again...


As one of those happy "early adopters" of those new services I'd love to say:
1 - Don't forget that we -the users - have, first of all, to understand your product
2 - Need support to use them
3 - would love to exchange with you on our experience
4- would then, and only then, love to have more features :-)