This month has been super exciting for the imgZine team, especially since we got to travel to Silicon Valley with Rockstart Accelerator. The trip has been amazing all together, but attending TechCrunch Disrupt last week has certainly been one of the biggest highlights. The conference is the place to be for startups, especially if you’re hoping to meet investors and get a good grasp of what’s happening in your field. However, being one of the most anticipated happenings in the tech industry, finding tickets for the event can be quite an undertaking.
(Photo: the CEO of imgZine, Marijn Deurloo, in the Startup Alley at Techcrunch Disrupt)
We were too late to book a ticket to join the conference’s Startup Alley so unfortunately we weren’t able to showcase our product from the get-go. Luckily, we’ve always been pretty resourceful guys and with the help of Babelverse, we managed to get some last-minute tickets to visit the event as audience members.
To our surprise, we noticed an empty table on the Startup Alley on the second day of the conference. A friendly Korean guy was reading his email on it. We made some conversation but eventually our Korean friend left and we had the table to ourselves. Being mobile fanatics, we started to check our email on our iPads and some people started approaching us thinking that we were presenting a product. After some consideration, we decided to hijack the table in good fun and we set up our iPads, laptops and business cards for display.
Fellow startups in surrounding tables started asking questions and we jokingly explained that we were setting up our station ad hoc. Suddenly we had a real Startup Alley spot and we had several good discussions with people interested in our product. People could not find us in the catalogue, of course, so we explained that we were last minute attendees. After 2 hours, we had a meeting somewhere else in lovely San Francisco so we took off and left the empty table to its destiny. Perhaps another startup found its way there, all in all it served us well!
