Announcing The TechCrunch50 Conference: September 8-10, San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Announcing The TechCrunch50 Conference: September 8-10, San Francisco

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18 pointsraghus12 comments

Conferences to show off new startups are a good thing, but it seems like a bad plan to make the startups launch at the conference. Unless the date happens to be exactly when the startup would have launched anyway, this constraint is going to force them to launch either too early, or too late.

Launching late is very dangerous. Someone else is probably doing what you're doing, and if you launch even a couple weeks later your company could for the rest of its life be described as an X-like site, where X is your competitor's name.

Launching too early is even more dangerous. The right time to launch is as soon as you have something (a) useful and (b) not totally broken. Which means that launching early = launching something useless or broken.

Also, I read somewhere that launching at a conference means that you're one of dozens of launches over a short period of time, and you have to compete even harder for coverage from press/bloggers. Whereas, if you launch on a non-descript day, you may be the only interesting thing happening all day, and get a copious amount of coveage.

The alternative view is that having a hard launch date acts as a forcing factor to get your code up to shape. From personal experience, I found that having committed to giving a demo has made me work that much harder to finish it. Otherwise, you can keep on pushing back your launch date.

For what it's worth, last year, a handful of companies didn't end up launching on the day(s) of the conference (probably because they weren't ready vs strategy)

how did Xobni get it's timing right?

Has anyone been to last years? If so, what was it like?

I was in the Demo Pit -- was good since I'm from Canada, and got to tour the bay area. I wouldn't recommend the Demo Pit -- people spend most of the day in the conference and either head home or make a quick pass through the pit. You will mostly be speaking with service providers. For the price, I wouldn't recommend the conference either (for entrepreneurs, there are much better ways to use the $). If you do end up in the Demo Pit, I would strongly recommend getting a slot on the first day.

Last year, we were the only Demo Pit company to use the student rate ;) This year, the student rate is $149 to attend the conference.

I highly recommend submitting your startup and or attending if you can!

We were also in the DemoPit and from it received our first pieces of press.

We Demoed on the 2nd day, but both of us wore our startup Tshirt and had rented tablet PCs with EVDO cards/service (best to bring your own Internet) to show as many people as we could on the first day.

yikes $2000 to attend - better be a vc or at least have some vc cash to burn, but they are offering $195 tickets to student, time to go sign up for a few community college classes.

charging a lot less i.e. $500 per a ticket would still keep those you don't want out. Also if your charging $2k/ticket any idea why you can only give $50k to the winner?

Profit maximization.

There's a very thin line between profit maximization and greed.

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