52 Bicycles

That’s how one attendee described the Sales & Marketing breakfast this morning. His point was that people who “do a startup” to be cool don’t do it for sales & marketing, or don’t want to talk about that as much, so would not show. And indeed, we had a great group ready to talk shop and trade useful insights.

Again I left it without much structure, simply people getting together ready to talk shop about acquiring customers. I was asked early if there was a specific topic. I said no, and I will keep to that.

A couple of innovations this time:

1. Rather than the long table last time, we had two adjoining booths. This made for more intensive small-group conversations of 5-6 people. I think this improves if we go to 4-person tables, which I will try next time.
2. Toward the end we tried switching up booths in an informal manner. This was helpful, though it would have been better to do sooner, and perhaps more than once - getting different mixes and “neighbors”. Perhaps a 30 minute rule?

A couple of ideas for next time:

1. 30 minute rule - since the session seems to last about 90 minutes, get people to change seats twice, so we can get a good mix of conversation
2. Maybe identify people in like situations to talk as we get started - get enterprise software people together, consumer software people, etc. Then mix it up to trade ideas cross-discipline.

Overall, great brain food, good thoughts from people which are feeding my marketing planning for 2007. (And even the last six weeks of 06!) Thank you to all who came, and I look forward to scheduling for December!

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