RSAC/Blackhat booths don’t have to suck
Cheap tchotchke, pushy salespeople and silly gimmicks. Vendor booths are often considered horrible wastes of time (and money). But we think they are great and keep recommending them to friends.
It’s not because we throw money around either. We never raised capital, so even though we crossed $19m in ARR last year, we still watch our marketing spend judiciously. We don’t do airport ads and we don’t pay fancy analyst firms. (In fact, we still don’t do any outbound sales). But.. our booths have gotten steadily better and we show up religiously at about 5 shows every year.
A few years back we wrote a post on running our first RSAC booth. We detailed all the costs involved, and though we’re a bunch of cynical, bootstrapped, technical founders, we reached the counter-intuitive conclusion that the booth actually worked out well for us. As a follow-up to that post, I wanted to share lessons we’ve learned since then.
We’ve strongly recommended booths to other security startups, with somewhat mixed results. This post explains what (we think) makes booths win for us (with some do’s and don’ts for friends).
