Nutshell SXSW: what $100k gets you

nutshell.com

11 points·andyfowler··4 comments

As an engineer on the team, I was skeptical about working the booth. I'm much more comfortable staying heads down writing code, iterating on designs, and just staying focused on building the product. But it was a good experience to get out and talk to people about Nutshell, and listen to what they have to say about CRM.

Can you make an attempt at quantifying the ROI? Obviously will be easier to do at +6 months and +12 months but can you speak to your expectations?

We'll definitely be trying to do this in a few months, when we get an idea for what kind of general bump we saw in trials / signups. But a larger part of this endeavor was beyond direct sales.

Personally, I met a NYT reporter who's prepping a story on small-business CRM, I met the person in charge of CRM for Sony Music, and . Several of our larger customers stopped by and saw us as the mature, growing company that we are.

We had a great conversation with the CTO of one of our competitors at a meetup of The Small Business Web.

We're prepping to launch a rebooted Zendesk integration, and we bumped into their sales team at a bar one night.

It'll be several months before we can put a harder figure on those interactions, but we'd never be able to buy them on Adwords.

I'd love to hear from our peers on the value they're able to gain from this kind of thing!

Meeting Nutshell users and the wider market; I personally feel better placed to make informed design decisions.

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