FROM TWITTER TO TINDER: WHY YOU SHOULD STOP LAUNCHING AT TECH CONFERENCES Contrary to popular wisdom, launching at a tech conference may be a bad idea unless you can leverage organic interactions at the event.

Sangeet Paul Choudary

ABOUT THE AUTHOR SANGEET PAUL CHOUDARY is the founder of Platformation Labs and the best-selling author of the books Platform Scale and Platform Revolution. He has been ranked as a leading global thinker for two consecutive years by Thinkers50, ranking among the top 30 emerging thinkers globally in 2016 (Thinkers50 Radar) and ranking among the top 50 thinkers of Indian origin in 2015 (Thinkers50 India). He is the co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit at the MIT Media Labs and an Entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD Business School. He is also an empaneled expert on the global advisory council for the World Economic Forum’s initiative on the Digital Transformation of Industries. His work has been featured as the Spotlight article on Harvard Business Review (April 2016 edition) and the themed Business Report of the MIT Technology Review (September 2015). As the founder of Platformation Labs, Sangeet is an advisor to leading executives globally. He is also an empaneled executive educator with Harvard Business School Publishing, and has advised the leadership of Fortune 500 firms, family-owned conglomerates, and key government bodies. He is frequently quoted and published in leading journals and media including the Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, MIT Sloan Management Review.The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED Magazine, Forbes, Fortune, and others. Sangeet is a frequently sought after advisor to CXOs globally on the topic of digital transformation and also serves as a fellow at the Centre for Global Enterprise in New York. He is a frequent keynote speaker and has been invited to speak at leading global forums including the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions (Summer Davos), the WEF ASEAN Summit, and the G20 Summit 2014 events. Sangeet has a bachelors in computer science from IIT Kanpur and a masters in management from IIM Bangalore.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

ABOUT PLATFORMATION LABS

Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey Parker are contributing authors to the research published by Platformation Labs, including the books Platform Revolution (coauthors) and Platform Scale.

Platformation Labs is C-level executive advisory firm and think-tank, focused on the analysis and implementation of platform business models and network effects towards the digital transformation of industries. Platformation Labs has advised governments, Fortune 100 firms and high growth startups in 40+ countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Our thought leadership and intellectual capital are commissioned and licensed by leading consulting firms globally and have been featured in leading global forums.

If you’re running a tech startup, you’ve probably tried to (or would love to, if you could) do at least one of the following: -

Get TechCrunch to cover you Launch at SXSW

Unfortunately, as launch channels go, the more unimaginative the channel, the less successful it is at getting you traction. This is because everyone else is trying to do the same thing as well and the audience has had too much of the same thing. But more importantly, these launch strategies are bumps, they’re not engines. As Paul Graham points out in his startup growth curve, the TechCrunch of Initiation (or the SXSW of initiation, if you will) may help bring in a lot of users, but those users rarely stay on. Users are distracted and if you cannot instantly demonstrate the value of your offering, they’ll hop-click-jump to the next shiny thing. There are exceptions, of course. Tech events are a great place to launch if your pitch can succinctly demonstrate the value that your offering provides (especially if you have a SAAS offering), if your key user base will actually be other startups or if your goal with launching is looking for investors rather than looking for users. But especially if you’re building something that relies on network effects, launching at a tech event isn’t going to be helpful at all.

So how do you make it work? Does that mean platforms: social startups, marketplaces, etc. should never launch at events? How does one make it work? Twitter’s breakout moment was the 2007 SXSW conference. While Twitter had been live for more than nine months, prior to the conference, it wasn’t getting much adoption. Twitter’s feed, rank-ordered by recency, would work best for a small number of users when most of them were using it synchronously. The founders needed to build a concentration in time, similar to how Facebook built concentration in space by targeting Harvard. They chose SXSW since an event affords massive concentrations in both time and space. The founders got cracking and created a Twitter visualizer. They set up flat panel screens in the conference hallways. A user at the conference could text ‘join SXSW’ to 40404, which would then show up on the screens and have the user automatically follow other active Twitter users at SXSW. With enough users tweeting and following each other, and the screens providing massive feedback to the tweeters in real time, Twitter gained the critical mass and activity required to get the platform going.

This case study lays out a key element of gaining adoption for platforms. You can’t just create awareness when your value proposition relies on network effects. You need to demonstrate the value of using the platform. Value on the platform is experienced by participating in the core interaction of the platform. Hence: The best way to launch a platform business at a conference is to ensure that the core interaction on the platform is organically embedded in the conference experience. Twitter did this with its launch. Attendees got more from the conference by participating on the core interaction on Twitter. Just like PayPal and other platforms piggybacked on underlying networks, platforms can piggyback on events by ensuring that their core interaction is embedded into the interactions at the event. The following year, Foursquare recreated the magic. While Twitter was huge at SXSW one year down, it didn’t help attendees discover the best bar around the area. Foursquare was laser-focused on getting check-ins right and was the only platform to leverage real-time location at that point in time. Again, the core interaction on Foursquare was successfully embedded at the conference. At SXSW 2013, BangWithFriends tried the same strategy, but the conference clearly didn’t approve of the core interaction they were trying to promote.

From boring conferences to frat parties Tinder, a location-based dating application that gained massive adoption a little more than a year back, launched at a frat party at the University of Southern California. We don’t know how well BangWithFriends worked at SXSW but Tinder sure wielded its magic at frat parties. By taking the awkwardness out of the whole act of hooking up, Tinder’s core interaction actually removed the friction in the core interaction of these frat parties. Users could swipe each other, get matched and, being in the same area at the same time, hook up. Location-based, real-time applications have a unique challenge while getting traction. You need a lot of people to be present at the same place at the same time. You can’t gain traction by traditional marketing; the network effect simply wouldn’t develop. The best way to develop the network effect, then, is to launch at an event and ensure the core interaction of the platform fits in at the event.

…And back to boring conferences Finally, Airbnb figured its own way to make conferences work. While an alternative to the traditional hotel industry today, Airbnb gained initial traction by launching in cities around conferences and aggregating a lot of transactions in a limited space and time. Conference attendees needed a place to stay; hosts needed to see the platform bring them some business. By launching during a highly liquid event, Airbnb ensures there was enough value created for both sides to keep them engaged and have them use Airbnb beyond the conference.

Conclusion We repeatedly see this model work out. Concentrating in space and time helps create highly liquid situations. Facebook’s launch in Harvard created a concentration in space while Twitter’s launch at SXSW created a concentration in time. Further, such concentrations lead to adoption only when the core interaction on the platform complements, enhances or removes friction from the core interaction at the real world event. Happy Launching!

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