What’s Finovate?
If you’re a technology company that is innovating in the financial services space then Finovate represents one of the best options to get in front of 3 types of stakeholders, Financial, Media, Investors.
Planwise, as technology startup, solving a large consumer problem centered around people’s life plans, especially when they involve some form of credit product like auto, student, personal or mortgage loan – it was perfect.
Pros & Cons
Technology in itself is a market but in most cases that technology applies to another market or vertical so being able to get our technology in front of people at whom the technology is aimed brings with it pros & cons.
Firstly people, got it, for the better part, which was great, however they also were quick to help us understand the potential gaps in the product. I am happy to say most of these we were aware of. Despite having a rock solid demo product we could have always done more but we certainly got some interesting input which has fed back into the development process already.
The format of Finovate is that you get up on stage in front of 1000+ people and have their attention exclusively (exluding tablet, phone or attractive fellow attendee sitting nearby) for 7 minutes. This is like 50 times the size of any normal focus group and despite not having the formality of survey etc with the advent of twitter etc you can get a pulse in the room. After the session a lot of people came up and gave us feedback. Only about 50% of those wanted to sell us something they had or partner etc, the rest were just interested in providing feedback.
One tip, before you do a demo like this go and connect with as many people as you can. You don’t even need to talk shop just create a connection
If people have a connection with you before hand the tend to give more feedback than if the first they’ve heard of you is when you strut out on stage.
Cons? well, and this is not a biggie, but for us, launching a tool aimed at the US Consumer, the vast majority of whom are not living & breathing financial services everyday, there was not a lot of our target market at the conference itself but most people we spoke to were able to make the leap to see how this would benefit non-finance people.. after all, it’s their customers we are talking about.
I feel like we squeezed 99% of the value we could have out of the 2 days. The only thing we could have done to get more out of Finovate would have been to be even further along our development timeline. I think I would have said that regardless.
Scoreline
So, and some of you may have read this first, what was the net result.
Spend – In total, to get Ryan & I there, participate, to have the PR people active before, during & after and other directly cost, I estimate the total spend at around $18,000. For 2 days right? . .. well, not really. I’m not even 1/3 of the way through my follow ups a week later and our PR people (Resound Marketing for those in need of a firm, I’d recommend them) have secured us more press and coverage than we could have possibly hoped for, especially given the early stage of our company.
Our objectives in going to Finovate were
1. Set a meaningful target date to deliver a version of the product that we could show/give to people
2. Establish a brand, positioning & presence
3. Get on the radar of possible Venture/Funding sources
4 Meet with potential distribution partners and better understand how that might work (an oft repeated question from the VC we speak with ‘how will people find planwise?’)
And the score line
1. We produced a version of the product that was tight as for the demo.. people got it, it worked 100% and enabled us to have real conversations with people about what we were doing and planning to do
2. We launched planwise brand, site etc only 6 weeks before Finovate. By Finovate we had thousands of visitors a month to our site, hundreds of beta users signed up and following finovate we have been featured in 5 publications .. with another 5 looking to provide coverage once we launch. The pinnacle of this was a 9 min interview on Fox Business on Tues 9/27 which we will post later. Fox Busieness? how on earth did you get that?! .. yeah, I’m not sure, a combination of good timing, a good story and a good PR firm (thanks again Resound!). More on that in a future post
3. Over the 2 days of the conference and in the days that followed we were approached by 3 potential angels and 2 VC firms, 5 times the number of approaches we have had to date, a result we are very happy with given we are still in private beta.
4. Spoke with over 10 possible distribution partners who collectively have end users in the 10s of millions and all of whom are a complimentary fit our platform/capability and all of whom approached us. Since Finovate we have managed to secure one already to be our beta launch partner, more information on this to come.
Summary
All in all we are happy with both what Finovate was able to deliver to us and what we were able to achieve over the week we were in the east coast. I think one of the key lessons is if you’re going to launch your company using a high profile event then pick the right event and then be super organised as to how you’re going to get maximum value from it and ensure these objectives are clearly communicated to your team.
A big thanks to the guys at Finovate who really helped us get to the event solidly and accordingly to market generally.
[...] with a product fit for a showcase. This was all covered in a separate post which can be found here. We also had learned a lot about our message, brand & positioning and iterated in these areas [...]