Our First Trade Show
The booth cost us $2,000. Nineteen paying customers came out of it. Everything in between was pure chaos.
At the time, we were a team of eight with a product we believed in and one simple idea: instead of waiting for construction companies to find us, what if we went and stood in a room full of them? Conferences seemed glamorous from the outside. Fly out, set up a booth, shake some hands, go home with a stack of business cards. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
---
The $2,000 booth
I put one of our interns on research: find out which conferences were coming up, which ones made sense for us, and what it would take to get in. She spent a few days on calls with three or four shows across the States.
The first quote came back at $20,000 for a booth. The next one was somewhere between twenty and thirty. I remember thinking, holy shit, this is fucking expensive. There's no way.
Then she called Dallas Build Expo. The show was only a couple of weeks out and they were almost fully booked, but they had two booths left. About $2,000. I like Dallas, I love Texas, and two grand was cheap as fuck. We didn't do much more research than that. We just said yes.
I got on a call with their salesperson to pick our spot, and she pulled up the floor plan to show me the last two booths. Both were shit. One was buried in a far corner, and the other was tucked behind a row of bigger exhibitors, the kind of spots nobody walks past unless they're lost. If the whole point was talking to as many people as possible, putting us back there would've been like paying two grand to stand in a closet.
So I pushed. I told her there was no way we were coming all the way from Toronto to sit where nobody could see us. I asked about every open space on that floor plan. She kept telling me those two were all they had. I kept asking anyway.
And then, magically, a third booth appeared. A corner unit, right beside the main stage, where every keynote and talk would be happening. It was the best spot in the hall, and somehow it had been "unavailable" five minutes earlier. I took it before she could change her mind.
Then I looked at the calendar. We had two weeks.
---
Two weeks
What nobody tells you about conferences is that talking to people is the smallest part of it. The rest is branding, printing, merch, logistics, and a long list of costs you don't see coming.
One of our interns and I designed two 8-foot banners and found a place that would rush-print them in a couple of days. We ordered custom merch at the last possible minute: carpenter pencils, hard hat plushies, pens, stickers, golf tees, table covers. Some of it was cutting it so close that we had it shipped straight to Texas, because it wouldn't reach Toronto before we left.
Meanwhile, I was working out the plan. Being on a corner by the main stage meant a constant river of people walking past us. The question was how to turn foot traffic into conversations. The answer was coffee. Everyone wants a coffee at 10am in a convention hall, and if they could get a good one for free at our booth, in a custom cup, we'd already won them over. Then there was the merch. These are people who bring stuff home for their kids and slap stickers on their work trucks, so it had to be good enough to want. Hook them with coffee or merch, get them talking, figure out what they do, and go from there.
Then the invoices started showing up. You pay for power at your booth. You pay for carpet, because the floor is bare concrete. You pay for furniture. And we were a team from Toronto trying to figure out how the hell to get furniture to Texas.
The original plan was for three of us to go. But this was our first conference as a company, and it felt special. The interns had worked their asses off to get us here, so I brought everyone. All eight of us were going to Dallas.
---
Texas
We landed four days before the show, and I rented a pickup truck, because you can't be in Texas without one. For the next four days I drove all over Dallas–Fort Worth, Home Depot, Walmart, and everywhere in between, hunting down tables, a TV, cables, and coffee supplies. We found someone to actually serve the coffee through a friend of a friend, days before the doors opened.
When I wasn't driving, we were training. Everyone on the team needed to know how to talk to a contractor, what the product actually did, and how to run a demo that landed in under five minutes. Nobody slept much.
And of course, things broke. On the first night, the hotel refused to check in our interns, even though the rooms were booked and paid for on the company card. These were second-year university students on their first work trip, and it was supposed to be exciting, not stressful. I drove over, raised hell at the front desk, got them into their rooms, and bought them a pile of snacks to make up for it.
The day before the show, we realized we still needed one-pagers, and printing them was going to run us over $2,000. More than the booth itself. Then one of the guys on the team went into Staples, started flirting with the girl at the counter, and somehow walked out with around 2,000 sheets of glossy paper for free. We bought a printer, sat in the hotel, and printed every single one-pager and flyer ourselves. To this day, that might be the most valuable sales call anyone on our team has ever made.
---
Two days, no chairs
Setup day was terrifying. There were strict limits on hours and people, and I was convinced we wouldn't finish. Somehow we did.
The next morning, the doors opened and it was immediately clear the plan had worked. We'd made the whole booth black, with white lights and the TV glowing in the back, so it looked like a black void in the corner of the hall. Other exhibitors wandered over just to tell us it looked sick. People walking the floor were drawn straight into it.
For eight hours straight, none of us sat down. Nobody drank water. Everyone who walked by stopped to ask what we did, and a lot of them stayed. The conversation I still think about happened mid-afternoon on day one. An older guy who ran operations for a general contractor stood through the whole demo, coffee in hand, not saying a word. When it finished, he said, "I have two people who do that full time. Both of them have told me they're burnt out." Then he took a one-pager and said, "Call me Monday." That was the moment it stopped feeling like a gamble.
Late that day, we ran out of coffee. I handed the pickup keys to one of our interns, who could barely drive a regular car, and sent her to Dunkin'. She came back with about $200 worth of coffee jugs, which I'm sure ruined someone's shift. We poured it all into a percolator and kept going.
Day two was just as relentless, with even better conversations. By the end, exhibitors were stepping out of their own booths to figure out why everyone was at ours.
---
What it turned into
We booked over 100 calls in two days. For weeks afterwards we were doing four or five meetings a day, trying to keep every promise we'd made in that hall. Nineteen of those calls became paying customers.
I remember sitting at the airport after saying goodbye to the interns. Their internship was ending, and the trip had been a going-away gift of sorts. Everyone was exhausted and a little bit in disbelief. My first thought was: when's the next one?
I went in thinking conferences were about looking legit. They're not. They're about putting yourself in front of the people whose problems you're trying to solve and letting them tell you, face to face, whether you're onto something. We spent two grand to hear it nineteen times.