A startup event strategy needs the same discipline. Spend enough time around (deep-tech) startups and you start noticing a familiar pattern. The same founders appear at event after event: a composites conference this week, a startup competition the next, followed by an investor summit, a sustainability conference and another pitching session. The logic is understandable. Young companies need visibility, customers and investors, and there is always the hope that the next event will provide the breakthrough introduction. The problem is that events can very quickly become an activity rather than a strategy. Teams return with business cards, LinkedIn connections and a sense of having had many interesting conversations, yet surprisingly little changes in the months that follow. For startups, where both cash and management attention are scarce resources, this is an expensive habit. I prefer to think about events through the lens of sport. A serious athlete does not try to peak every weekend. A season is built around a small number of A-events: the competitions where performance really matters. Everything around them is preparation. Startups should approach their event calendars in much the same way: select a limited number of events, understand exactly why they matter, prepare for them months in advance and then execute with intensity. Building your brand versus going where your customers are There are, in my view, two main reasons for a startup to attend events. The first is to build a brand, which for a young industrial company is largely about building trust. An established supplier enters the market with years or decades of history, references and relationships behind its name. A startup has none of that. Particularly in composites, where qualification cycles are long and customers are understandably cautious about introducing new materials and manufacturing technologies, familiarity matters. For a startup, brand building is ultimately trust building. This is why a composites startup should establish itself visibly within the composites ecosystem. JEC World in Paris is the reference. This is where I experimented a lot to master the game when I was leading the marketing and business development activities at 9T Labs – see picture above. Depending on geographic priorities, CAMX may play a similar role in North America, alongside relevant events in China and regional events in markets such as DACH, India or Southeast Asia. At these industry events, I would encourage startups to be relatively broad. Speak with suppliers, potential customers, competitors, investors and people from applications you may not yet have considered. Explain the technology in depth. The objective is not only to generate immediate leads, but to anchor the company in people’s minds as a serious part of the composites industry. This is also where I believe having your own booth matters. If brand building is one of the objectives, visibility cannot be an afterthought. Many manufacturing and materials companies still take a fairly conservative approach to exhibition design, which actually creates an opportunity for startups. Make the company visible from a distance. Bring parts, samples and, where practical, machinery. Demonstrate the technology rather than covering the walls with paragraphs explaining it. Give visitors something they want to touch, discuss or photograph. You are a startup. You do not have to look like everybody else. And at the events where you are building your brand, you probably should not. The second reason for attending events is much more targeted: meeting the people who can move the business forward. Once a startup has selected its beachhead markets, its event strategy should follow those customers. If aerospace is a priority, composite events alone are not sufficient; you should also consider events such as the Paris Air Show or Farnborough. If aircraft interiors are specifically relevant, Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg may be far more valuable than another general innovation conference. Find the reference events in the markets you have decided to win. And go where your customers go. The physical presence can be different there. You are not necessarily trying to build a major aerospace brand; you are trying to become a trusted supplier to aerospace companies. A smaller booth, a national pavilion, a startup zone or an association stand may therefore be entirely sufficient as a base for demonstrations and meetings. As customer relationships mature, an even stronger form of presence becomes possible: being represented on the booth of a customer or partner. If an established customer displays a component incorporating your technology and identifies you as the supplier, the credibility effect is difficult to replicate with your own marketing. You are no longer telling the market that the customer trusts you; the customer is demonstrating it publicly. Four A-events, prepared like campaigns Once the industry and end-market calendars have been mapped, prioritization becomes critical. My recommendation for most startups would be to identify no more than four genuine A-events per year. This does not mean attending only four events. There will always be smaller conferences, investor meetings and local gatherings worth visiting. But an A-event is different: it is an event around which a significant part of the organization aligns and for which the company is prepared to go all in. Four such events already mean running roughly one major campaign every quarter, because the event does not begin when the exhibition doors open. A-level events should be approached as two- to three-month campaigns, with the exhibition days at the heart of a much broader engagement effort. Proper preparation starts months earlier and should be reverse-planned from the event date. Four to six weeks before the event, for example, a startup could organize a webinar around a topic closely related to the problem it solves. Better still, where appropriate, it could host a small event at its own facility. The purpose should not be to spend 45 minutes explaining why the startup is wonderful. Bring in an external expert, a customer or a research partner. Share useful data or discuss an industry challenge. The aim is to aggregate a community around the problem where the company has something […]
