Everything We Learned About Developer Conference Sponsorship

Attending developer conferences has been a big part of our demand-generation marketing strategy at Permit.io, basically ever since the company was founded. But if you look at our booth from two years ago and compare it to the one we have now, you’d barely be able to recognize it’s the same company. And it’s not a budget thing—it’s about a strategy we’ve taken a long time to develop, that changed drastically from conference to conference, and the experience we gained along the way.

2024 VS. 2022

In this blog, Gabriel and I will try to share some of this experience with you in the hope that you’ll be able to make the most of it at the next conference you attend as a sponsor.

This article will cover a few important points we think every startup going to an event, be it big or small, should consider before investing valuable marketing budgets and effort in doing so.

These are: Understanding the overall challenge of marketing to developers, Selecting the right conferences, Setting the right goals, Creating a multi-dimensional funnel, and creating an engaging booth experience.

Let’s dive in -

⁠The Challenge of Marketing to Developers

Marketing to developers is a serious challenge (You can read a deep dive into this subject I’ve written in my article “Oh no, don't look - it's Developer Marketing”). In short, many marketing professionals make the mistake of treating developer marketing as if they would regular B2C marketing, employing similar classic marketing strategies.

It’s common to see developer-focused companies adopt a marketing approach: “This is frustrating (because you’re bad at this). Let us take care of this for you (because we are great at this).” Take the classic Old Spice commercial:

What’s the take here? “You are doing a bad job at selecting your products. Old Spice does it well, so let us do it for you”.

Taking this approach into the developer space is one of the worst things you can do.

In general marketing, your biggest competitor is another company that does something similar to you. In developer marketing, your biggest competitor is often the developers themselves.

This is especially true for us. Fifteen years ago, people used to build and implement their own authentication. Today, it’s highly uncommon, with the vast majority of developers agreeing that using an outside solution is simpler and safer. The field of authorization today is at the same point as authentication was 15 years ago. If we criticize developers for building this functionality in-house, we do nothing but foster resentment.

How do we fight this? We don’t. We present ourselves as an alternative to people who don’t want to build authorization themselves, and we stand behind those who do and offer them help in the process through engagement - this is the heart of our conference booth strategy.

Before we dive into that strategy, let’s start by discussing which conferences should you pick to attend.

Which Conferences Should You Pick?

When deciding which conferences to attend, it’s important to consider your goals and resources. Community-based events, like local DevOps Days or JS events, are great for making meaningful connections. For small startups, this means you need to focus on building strong, lasting relationships rather than simply aiming for volume - quality over quantity. It’s great, but at the end of the day, you’ll have to be prepared for a rather small number of connections.

On the other hand, if your goal is to reach a larger audience and generate numerous engagement points (more on what those are soon), larger developer conferences are the way to go. These events allow you to connect with a broader range of developers, even if the relationships may not be as deep initially.

While we focus mainly on large events, we often attend smaller events and engage with the community directly instead of investing in an expensive sponsorship. If the goal is, as we said, to foster a good relationship with a small number of people, you don’t really need a booth to do that. Sometimes, just attending, chatting with people, listening to what they are working on, and introducing yourself does the trick.

Creating a Multi-Dimensional Funnel

Let me go ahead and say this: startups often struggle with developer conferences because they focus on lead generation. They find it almost impossible to compete with large companies and their enormous marketing budgets. So what’s the alternative? Let’s talk about two things - what are you expecting to get from the people who attend your booth, and what can you offer them back?

Our booth at WeAreDevelopers Berlin, 2024

What are you expecting?

Many companies set up a booth at a conference to pitch their product to whoever’s asking, scan a couple of hundred badges, and call it a day (aka, go home and send out a couple hundred cold emails that get marked as spam). We did it a couple of times, and the effort and budget we sunk into it felt like a waste.

This mindset was the direct result of the expectation to stumble upon the perfect persona who is in the precise mindset of instantly falling in love with our product, integrating it the next day, and signing a multi-million dollar deal within a week.

Now, we do have this persona in mind, but we also understand that it takes a lot of time, effort, investment, and sometimes pure circumstances that don’t depend on us for a developer to get to that point.

This is why we try not to build our entire marketing presence to pander to that specific unicorn of a persona. Instead, we try to build a multi-dimensional funnel that allows every developer attending the conference to gradually engage, on the level that fits them, with us, our community, and, eventually, our product.

What can you offer?

We believe every type of engagement happening at our booth should bring mutual value.
As we aim to avoid the mindset of “if this person is not an immediate lead, they are of no use to us,” we created a multi-dimensional funnel with several types of engagement “Layers,” each more in-depth, to fit every type of person who approaches the booth. Attendees are, of course, not limited to a specific layer, but we’ll see how each layer provides benefits for both us and them:

• Just dropping by - Every person walking around a conference wants to see what the different booths have to offer. This means we have their curiosity, but we need their attention (More on that in the next section). A lot of people will just take a look at the booth, maybe even ask about what the company does, and move on.
  
  We need to make sure these folks leave the booth knowing our name and what we do and have a bookmark somewhere in their visual memory that says, “Those folks were cool.” If they grab a sticker and think it's funny or cute, they get something nice to keep, and we learn something useful about our visual marketing. If they didn’t understand what the product was or took a look at the booth, said “Meh,” and moved on, we learned from that as well.
  
  I’ve had people at conferences ask me to explain the product in one sentence. I think that should always be your initial default go-to.

• Low-commitment engagement - If a person sticks around for more than ten seconds, we can offer them to participate in some sort of low-commitment engagement, which we measure as engagement points. This can include starring our open-source project on GitHub, signing up for our newsletter, or signing up for one of our live streams (both of which are not Permit.io commercials but rather actual informative content about software development). In return, they get a cool piece of swag to take with them.
  
  The mutual benefit here is evident—we create engaging content meant to benefit software developers and encourage them to engage with it, with the aim of gradually building a relationship.

Speaking of livestreams, you can listen to a lot of what I converted here, along with some really interesting points from Render ATL’s CEO Justin E. Samuels in this “Developer Conferences & Communities” livestream video:

• Participating in a booth activity - Our booth always includes some sort of activity that visitors can participate in (More on this in the next section). This type of activity always includes something cool the participant can take home with them to remember us by. It takes longer than picking up a sticker, but it gives the visitor a memorable experience.

• Getting a demo - We always have a person on standby who can give the most highly engaged booth visitors a quick demo of our product so they can see how things work with their own eyes and ask more technical questions. These demos are reserved only for the most interested visitors who, upon listening to our initial description of the product, want to see it in action.

A single concept unites this entire funnel: every person who enters it has an opportunity to hear about the product (if they want to) in a way that does not impose anything on them (I’ve seen the sigh of relief when people ask me, “Do you want to scan my badge?” and I ask, “Why?” dozens of times), provides them with benefits, whether through something to take home or a new interesting resource they can learn from, and provides us with critical information about our product and its marketing.

To foster this type of funnel, it's important to consider:

• The people manning the booth: the team attending the conferences to represent the company is always highly diverse, with each member having a different set of strengths. Some can give a highly technical, detailed pitch of the product, while others are great at engaging people on a more friendly, casual level.
• Knowing your audience: We’ve developed a framework to identify, within the first five seconds, who a visitor at the booth is and where we need to place them in the funnel. Understanding what we want to give them, what engagement points we want from them, and who the right person is to handle them.
• This funnel is not lead-generation focused: If you expect to leave a conference with leads that you can cold-email later, this is not the way to go. We’re not saying lead generation is not useful at all, and we do feel like we are missing out sometimes. What encourages us is people coming back, sometimes months after the event, telling us, “I didn’t have this problem, but when I encountered it, I knew where to go”.

Some booth visitors come back to us as users, some as users of our open source, and those who don’t still provide us with a lot of benefits.

With all the conceptual parts out of the way - let’s talk practice. How do you provide booth visitors with a good, interesting experience without pouring all of your company’s budget into it?

Creating an Engaging Booth Experience

If you're working at a startup, your marketing budget probably doesn’t allow you to afford an enormous booth at the center of the event with giant screens, a seating area, and a designated bar. But that doesn’t mean your only option is to have two people sitting in an early 2000s corporate-looking booth handing out pens and begging people to listen to their sales pitch.

If you want to grab people's attention, and you only have a very small space and budget to do that, you have to think outside of the box. Here are some pointers on how to do that:

Telling a story

A person is walking through the conference. They see your booth. What goes through their head? If you want them to think, “Oh, interesting, I wonder what these folks do,” you need to create a booth that makes them ask this question - putting your logo and a vague slogan doesn’t spark much interest. Yes, even if you have a screenshot from your platform. If someone needs your product (And hopefully they do), tell them a visual story of why they need it. Even better - aim to make them feel something instead of giving out dry information.

Don’t be afraid to be “off-brand”—that's okay. You need your company name and logo to be visible and recognizable, yes. But doing something that actually stands out can really help people notice, take an interest, and remember your booth after they leave. You are competing with dozens of other booths, some of which have much more physical presence than you. Stand out.

In our booth at Render Atlanta we decided to go with a vintage early 2000s theme for the booth. It made people curious about what we do from the get-go, and we could tell them that it's our way to show we are down with helping people who want to do things “The old fashioned way” - without Permit.io, as well as people who want to do things “The modern way” with us. We made up a fun story and designed the booth experience around it, and it made people want to engage with us.

Make it fun

People come to conferences to learn about technology and new products, listen to interesting talks, and gain new insights into their work in the software development field. But they are also coming to be entertained. If you focus your entire booth on people forcing a sales pitch on passersby, people are going to avoid it. Even if you give them a sticker.

Now, we've seen dozens of ways that people seek to entertain those who stop by their booths. It could be games of chance, a claw machine, or a “Coding challenge” of some sort (I honestly never understood the idea behind sitting someone down and forcing them to do a task they’re not really interested in just to get a plushie instead of them walking around the conference with their friends and having fun).

But the fact that there are a bunch of ways to entertain people at your booth that people have already thought about doesn’t mean you can’t think of something cool and original.

In our DEVWorld Amsterdam booth, Dana Petrov provided attendees with live, hand-drawn, great-looking illustrations they could take home.

It’s never about how much money you throw at it

I think the best example I can give is from the last conference we attended - WeAreDevelopers in Berlin. There was a booth by a very large company that brought in photography equipment worth thousands of dollars and a designated illustrator. They gave people little glass cases with a picture of themselves in a superhero suit (All the same suit, BTW) with the company logo. This setup alone was probably worth more than our entire marketing budget for the conference.

We bought a CRT screen, a 90s vintage keyboard, a printer, and a webcam and let people create 90-style playing cards with their faces in them and print them on the spot. The whole setup cost less than $1000$ to produce, and our line wasn’t significantly smaller than theirs.

My point is that there are always creative ways to innovate, think outside the box, and give people fun, memorable experiences they will remember you by - and they have nothing to do with budgets.

⁠Something to take home - Planning your SWAG

Swag is another point where you have to be innovative. It’s hard to think about completely new concepts of what you can give away at your booth, but even if you do a thing that’s been done before, make sure you do it in a way that is high quality and memorable. Sure, people like socks and shirts. But making high-quality swag that’s actually useful and memorable will make you stand out. The more unique your offer, the more people will be drawn to the booth, and the more people you can talk to and engage with your booth experience.

(I’m not saying socks are a bad idea, but if you are going with it, make sure they are interesting, like these awesome OPAL socks produced for us by Premium Socks Factory.

We decided, among other things, to go with puzzles - we made a different one for each conference, turning them into sort of a collectible item people can already expect and look forward to.

The same goes for the raffle - when we were deciding what to raffle out, I kept thinking that “Everything has been done before”. In the last couple of raffles, as part of the vintage theme, we gave out PS1s with games, and people were very excited about them. Think about swag like you would about a gift for one of your developer friends - what would they love to receive but probably wouldn’t buy for themselves?

Putting People First

I think the most important takeaway from our experience in the past few conferences is:
Don’t put the product at the forefront; Put people first. If you think about your booth as an entertaining experience for people at the conference that allows them to engage with your team, do something fun, get something cool, and learn something new, you will stand out from every other booth that is trying to market a product or get your email. Creating this type of atmosphere was the main aim of our marketing strategy, and we can say we are thrilled with the results we’ve seen. It has allowed us to listen to developers - instead of pitching something to them, understand their needs and, if we are able to - offer solutions.