We’ve never had a coherent strategy for growth. Especially not for tracking results, and which channels work best.
The last big growth thing that we did was sponsor Stripe Sessions 2 years in a row. This conference is one that basically was full of potential Stunning customers. It was incredibly well-run, and when we did have a glitch or two, we felt very taken care of. It had about 5000 attendees, and I even got to give a talk to a crowd that ended up being standing-room only.
We had conversations with people from large companies that everyone has heard of. We got a lot of leads, but only one of them has panned out yet, because no one was really ready to try Stunning yet. They all had too many other projects going on. This is a thing that I’ve noticed with conference attendees. People are looking for solutions, but generally there’s a good bit of lead time between them finding out about us, and us closing the deal.
It appears to be correlated with the size of the company, which is expected. Many small/mid-size companies aren’t attending conferences, because it’s pretty expensive, especially these days with airfare and hotel costs being pretty high. So you get a lot of people showing up at your booth who can afford to send people to conferences: Fortune 500 companies, and a lot of VCs… and unexpectedly, students looking for internships.
We’ve had some good talks with potential customers since then, and I hope to see some growth from this in Q4 when we’re scheduled to start following up. It takes awhile to close some of these deals, but when they close, the impact is usually pretty dramatic. And these will be pretty easy to track.