How I marketed to 2,000 prospects for ~$0

I'm in seat 25-C, economy-class. 30,000 feet in the air. Halfway back to Seattle from Austin.

My shoulders are sore. My stomach is confused. My brain can't decide if it's time to work or sleep.

I'm on my way back from Current, the only conference important enough to get me out in person in the last 12 months.

Current is the industry's biggest data streaming conference, bringing together dozens of companies who use Kafka. It is, in other words, a gathering of my best sales prospects.

Sounds great, right? There's just one problem. Nearly every company attending has a bigger marketing budget than me—often over $50,000. How can I compete with that?

I'm going to take you through, in detail, about how I got in front of 2,000 prospects on almost no budget besides the cost of my time.

Left or right

If you walk around a tech conference, you'll pretty much see two ways of getting attention.

First and most obviously, you can buy an expo floor booth. Pay more dollars, get more physical space to place big signs. It works and it's an easy solution if you're packing a lot of cash.

I thought hard about buying space, but in the end decided it's simply impractical as a solopreneur. Besides the high price tag, running a booth alone sounds exhausting and lonely.

The other option to draw attention is to do something.

I saw plenty of attempts: vendors bringing in baristas with free, high quality coffee; an entire booth staff dressed in Oktoberfest lederhosen; and even a person walking around in a Wookiee costume.

I applaud all of these strategies, but each of them have one key problem: any other company could do them, so they're not memorable.

With only a micro budget on hand, I fell back on my motto: it's better to be "only" than "best". I thought hard about what I could do that no one else can.

I came up with 3 things and worked my butt off in the 2 weeks before the conference to make them happen.

Making a mobile expo booth

If you don’t have expo floor space, what do you have left? The space your body takes up.

I printed a normal-looking product t-shirt: on the front is the ShadowTraffic logo. But on the back is something unusual: a large QR code with the text "FREE KAFKA TEST STREAMS".

When you scan the QR code, you're taken to a customized language page that delivers on the ad.

Fun, unique, and exactly the kind of thing engineers at this conference want.

I roamed the expo floor the entire first day, stopping and talking as much as I could to keep visibility high.

Was it worth it?

The shirt cost just $46 and netted ~50 scans. Fewer than I'd hoped, but it came with a surprise benefit: whenever someone wanted to know more about my product, all I had to do was spin around to give them great answer on their phone.

Incredibly useful.

The only thing I'd do differently next time is pack lighter! I carried my backpack at my side to have easy access to my laptop, but that made my shoulders wicked sore by the end of the day.

Helping every other booth look better

Is there anything else you can do without your own physical space? How about sharing with those who do?

About 4 weeks before the conference, I looked up the published vendor list and emailed everyone I knew on each of their marketing teams.

I made a simple offer: I'll build a killer customized demo data set for free if you use it on the expo floor.

Why do it for free?

Before each conference, everyone scrambles for high quality demos to stand out from the noise. It's stressful grunt work that no one wants to do.

In exchange for the hard work, I get to walk around the expo floor showing people where my work is on display.

I emailed the offer to 25 companies. Of those, 8 were interested. In the end, I worked with 4: StarTree, Lenses, StreamNative, and Kannika.

You'd have to ask the vendors themselves how much they benefited (their booths looked pretty busy to me), but each of those took only a few hours of my time and built a lot of good trust.

Easily worth it. I'll make the same offer next year.

Getting on the Big Stage

Are there any other ways you can share space with others? It turns out yes: the keynote stage.

About a month before the conference, I remembered that every Current keynote has a major demo: Confluent shows off all its newest products, and to do that, it often needs a complicated synthetic data set.

I reached out to the team that works in that area and made the same offer: I’ll build a very high quality, sophisticated data set for a quick shout-out during the keynote.

I spent about 5 hours making their data set absolutely perfect, for for my sweat, Confluent put together a killer end-to-end demo of their platform.

Worth it? Watching the keynote from the expo floor, my phone immediately erupted with notifications.

Web traffic had a quick spike, my LinkedIn post blew up, and a handful of free trial signups came in the door.

Everyone walked away happy:

• Confluent got a bunch of stressful, complicated work done for free

• The demo went off without a hitch and made their products looks great

• Confluent came off as a great steward to the little guy in the community

• I got a huge increase in awareness.

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Engineers like to talk about how soulless marketing can be: websites packed with BS claims that don't mean anything.

But I hope I showed you in this post that when done right, marketing is precise, planned, thoughtful, and incredibly valuable for both those who produce and consume it.