The big lesson learned from KUBIKULO @ Where Conference was, surprisingly, that even a seemingly niche geolocation-themed conference means tailoring to a general audience. If you don’t have your product precisely defined with use-cases, people just won’t be able to understand it – experts in industry or not.

The takehome lesson was that I should have spent the 3 weeks prior working on marketing  material – effectively, the right way to convey the product. The CFP deadline was about a month before the event, and the notification was three weeks before. Then came a series of tweaks, where I suppose I thought too much like an engineer and less like an entrepreneur – it became less of a consumer app and more of a creative-types “PLM” app. But, in-between, I also spent two weeks interviewing the right CFO/COO type and attending a squabble of events and mixers, including three really misguided hackathons. Time unplanned + squandered?

Competitively, the thing I regret was not having written in advance for clarification on the format. From the format of the Where Conference Startup Showcase last year, I had thought that there was going to be a 3 to 5 minute pitch on-stage as a “first round”, but it was apparently just a table space + popularity contest, jump to minute keynote. I had prepared a 3 minute pitch for a “first round” (minify-able to 1 minute), so it’s a shame that never happened. That, and if I knew it was just the table votes prior to 5 PM, I would have played by a very different gameplan.

It’d be nice to have a secretary. But…

I’m surprisingly (for you?) still confident on continuing this experiment of launching a startup alone. Of course, I’m a strategy-savvy stubborn-strong-headed engineer-entrepreneur!