80 meetings in 3 days: how we played big in Vegas

Nobody, we Russians, are not needed.

And it's not about politics, prejudice, or accent. You just can't earn a lot on us.

Our country is big, but not very populated. Besides, frankly, not rich. Therefore, you can write long enthusiastic letters from Russia to America with love - and you will not even be honored with a short “no”.
')
You can pick off the phones - just to still hear this cold and polite "no" with your ears.

Developing Madrobots, we all experienced in our own skin.

We wanted to sell the best innovative gadgets in Russia and knocked on all doors trying to get manufacturers to sell the hottest new items in the American electronics market in our country.

But often, even if the doors were opened to us, they arranged a very cold reception.

Think I want to complain about a hard life? Not. I want to tell how the world of an employee and an entrepreneur is different.

I want to tell you how at the beginning of this year we went to Las Vegas to the largest electronics exhibition CES to stir up this indifferent anthill and provide MadRobots with new cool gadgets and how we (partly) achieved our goal.

CLIP IN THE VENDOR'S CORNER

From the first days of the creation of MadRobots, I understood that we would need extraordinary measures to fill the range of our online store.

After all, we were primarily interested in the projects that appeared on Kickstarter. And most of them did not plan to go outside of America at all: in the first year of their existence, they sometimes could hardly meet the needs of the local market.

Well, those of the vendors who thought globally, primarily focused on Asia, and then to Western Europe. In the list of priority markets, Russia trailed in their tail after South America and went somewhere in step with Africa.

This happened for one simple reason: we hardly have more than 20 million solvent customers, which is very small, and they all live in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In addition, we were not the only ones in Russia who were interested in non-trivial gadgets and tried to build bridges with their creators: starting up MadRobots, I counted about fifty online stores in RuNet that dealt with our topic.

Interest in the new direction was also shown by large Russian distributors of electronics, with whom we, a small startup created by enthusiasts, also did not have to compete: after all, we have neither comparable capital nor such large sales channels.

In general, for the previous year of work we have accumulated sad statistics: at least a third of our letters to vendors generally remained unanswered.

Therefore, we decided that the largest exhibition of electronics CES is our chance to reach interesting manufacturers, grab them by the lapel, hold them in the corner and not let go until they sign a contract.

When I worked at Panasonic, I was sometimes sent to various conferences. Riding at the expense of the company abroad, especially to Japan, is pretty cool - but, I confess, for business, the sense of these trips was zero.

Together with the Internet managers of the Japanese office, we are listening to a lecture on web design. In Japanese.

Everything is clear here (actually not).

Nobody set us any tasks. My colleagues and I spent whole days listening to unnecessary and often irrelevant speeches, reminiscent of reports at a congress of the CPSU. Only a couple of evening hours, which we spent in numerous bars and restaurants, remained free. After several days of endless performances, we filled our bags with souvenirs and returned home.

Traditional japanese food

Did you go to the fig? What benefits have brought business? No one thought to ask such questions.

I suppose that this is the case in many large companies. A trip to a profile conference in a large corporation is something like an image ritual for a company and an additional bonus for its employee.

Feel the difference with your own business!

When you don’t spend corporate money on a trip, but invest your own money in it, you want every dollar invested to bring two. And soon you begin to understand that for the sake of this you are ready to go for any feats that you simply could not do before.

IN THREE NIGHTS FOR AIPAD

Large brands, such as Samsung or Sony, also take part in CES. But this year, it seems, for the first time in the history of the exhibition, a whole pavilion was allocated to projects with Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And the organizers counted a total of three and a half thousand vendors.

I decided that I should get ready and study them all in advance, back in Moscow. True, it did not immediately come to me how ambitious this task was.

In the usual working day less than five hundred minutes. And it is treacherously small when you have a list of three thousand items on your hands. Even if you do not get distracted even for a moment and spend only a minute on each vendor, the study of the entire list may take more than a week.

Soon I felt like a smoker who decided to run a marathon to argue.

I spent hours on the list, staring at the laptop screen and putting all other things aside. At lunch, in the subway and in the queues, I took out my phone and continued my research. At three o'clock in the morning I was lying in bed with an ipad and did not allow myself to fall asleep until I “finished” another hundred positions.

So, passing the baton from the laptop to the phone, from the phone to the ipad and back, I spent three days. Missed important calls, eyes with bursting vessels and a slightly altered consciousness ... All of this was the price to pay for possessing invaluable knowledge.

At the end of this marathon, I had a precious tablet that contained data on one hundred and fourteen companies whose developments might be of interest to MadRobots - and which were to learn about our existence.

Hardly having recovered from my research marathon, I sat down at Gmail - and wrote sixty emails to vendors from my list (I chose the most promising ones). Most, as usual, ignored them. But not all - and as a result, before we left for America, we made eighteen meetings with potential suppliers at the exhibition.

With this luggage, we hit the road.

MEN IN BLACK

CES is held in Las Vegas - as you know, it is not only the gaming capital of the States, but also the largest exhibition center.

A flight across the ocean, and then also across the American continent, is always a rather tedious business. But my colleague and I bought cheaper tickets to Los Angeles via New York, and there we hired a car and, barely breaking our eyes, we drove five hours to Vegas in the desert.

We arrived in the city early in the morning, and despite the difficult flight (due to bad weather, the flight was delayed and we barely had time to dock in New York), we did not wait for the check-in at the hotel, so as not to miss a single hour of the exhibition. Passed things in the storage room and changed clothes in the toilet.

I decided in advance that we would wear costumes like “men in black” - in order to look more presentable and stand out from the crowd of geeks in T-shirts and jeans. Here, however, we have a pad.

My colleague creatively interpreted the task of taking with him a suit and tie - and donned a tweed jacket with a bow tie. We looked together weird.

When we found a line of thirty people for a couple of hours in a taxi rank in front of the hotel, we found guys in it who also went to CES and agreed to go together.

And when at the entrance it turned out that for some reason my registration was not in the system, I just bought a new ticket - because people were already waiting inside us.

While flying to Japan from Panasonic, I had never dared to do such deeds before - no one expected them from me. But we did all this way across the floor of the globe not just to gawk at the cool gadgets, drink beer in the surrounding bars and play one-armed gangster.

We came to do business - and now, armed with the exhibition plan, lists of vendors and the files collected on them, we rushed into battle.
True, the first meeting ended for us a complete failure. At 10 am we were to meet with the guys from the company Witihings.
Because of the incredible traffic jams on the way to the exhibition (we realized that this was the norm only on the evening of the third day of the exhibition) and the commotion with my pass, we lingered and ran to the Withings stand only at half past ten. The lovely brand manager Charlotte smiled at us politely, and also politely sent us away.

Withings' booth

Such a device acted like a cold shower, but only strengthened my fighting spirit.

HELLO, GIZ

People often ask me: how do you build contacts with suppliers? And so: the next three days were for us a super run, during which we held about 80 meetings with vendors.

When I now look back and try to realize this figure, it seems fantastic to me and myself. Every day we held about twenty-five meetings!

With someone the meeting lasted no more than five minutes. With someone dragged on for half an hour. We personally met with those who have already worked. They ended up with those with whom they wanted to cooperate. We found those who did not answer us (“hello, gayz, we wrote to you, remember?”) ...

WobbleWorks co-founder Daniel Cowan talks about how the 3Doodler 3D pen works.

Met the guys from the Nifty Minidrive team

Tested Omni Virtuix Platform

Do not underestimate the effect of personal presence: in the end, we brought ten new contracts straight from a trip to CES.

Yes, Russia is really not interested in anyone in America. But you should never discount personal charm and perseverance.

Thanks to the CES run, we started selling 3Doodler 3D pens , a Buccaneer printer , EverDock docking stations, a Tinke health monitor and other interesting innovations at MadRobots ... In addition, we got more than thirty new promising contacts (some of which are still working).

We did not get to the stands of large companies - we simply did not have enough time for this. Have we seen vegas? We saw through the bus window: after finishing work at the exhibition, we just went to sleep in the hotel to gain strength before the new day filled with meetings.

I am sure that many Russian distributors and dealers turned to developers of interesting projects. Much less than those who came to CES to meet them in person. Even fewer of those who compiled a dossier on their counterparts ran along a previously thought-out route and managed to hold eighty meetings in three days.

Sometimes the result is just the sum of the effort. In any case, I believe that in business it is often not the one who has solid capital, who has come up with the best business plan, or who has some outstanding intelligence - and certainly not the one who starts in the best conditions.

Sometimes the one who just makes more effort wins. Therefore, in order not to miss the chance, you need to squeeze out of each situation the maximum possible, not giving yourself any mercy.

However, I can not say that I felt after this crazy trip a winner. Rather, at some point I felt driven by a horse.

When I returned to Moscow, I had to sit back at Gmail - write follow up to everyone I met in Vegas.