Lesson #3 from the untold stories of Appirio
This post is the fourth part in a series. The original post sets the context, provides the disclaimers, and gives a preview of all of the lessons.
Nearly every business executive has Sun Tzu’s Art of War sitting on their shelf and can quote a strategy or two. Many B2B startups should consider extending the lessons of his work with the less noble lessons of high school. A desire to hang out with the cool kids, a fear of missing out (FOMO) and the need to lash out at injustice or authority all can help startups.
Marc appreciated our irreverence (I think :) — after all it was straight out of his playbook.
At Appirio, Dreamforce was one of our most significant lead generation activities of the year. We would never have the same level of budgets as our major competitors, but we needed to make a splash. So we used our size in our favor. Its rare for a large B2B company to be considered cool or hip. We took advantage of that by initially focusing our Dreamforce efforts on two things — making sure our customers were presenting in as many sessions as possible and throwing the best party. In fact, we began throwing our Dreamforce party before we ever raised any money. In our first year, our event was an unexpected success and around midnight our planner let us know it was personally costing us ~2K every thirty minutes we continued to allow it to run. Eventually our Dreamforce party would have several thousand people on the waiting list each year. Our competitors left their own events and clamored for entry to ours (particularly one GSI partner…). The psychology of what made the event effective was as simple as recalling what high school like. Like our attendees, many of us weren’t throwing the party or even invited in high school, this was our adult chance to be with the “in” crowd.
In retrospect, the Google Glass was too far, but Appirio parties were epic.
Our party even had its own url, http://dreamforceparty.com — and this led to an unexpected conflict with our partner and Dreamforce host salesforce.com. A few years into Appirio we were about to close a round of funding and needed shareholder consent (Salesforce had been a major investor in our seed round). At the last minute, with the round nearly complete and us needing the funding to make certain immediate investments, some bureaucrat from Salesforce demanded as a part of their consent, we give them dreamforceparty.com. We never found out who drove the petty request; and we probably could have escalated and pushed back on it, but we’d certainly delay our funding and miss out on investment news coverage. We chose pragmatism over pride and gave them the URL.
The team behind the party and our creativity at Dreamforce was irate and confused. They felt like we were being bullied. At the same time, it wasn’t our competitor but some bureaucracy at our biggest partner. Our response couldn’t be directly confrontational. We gathered the team and someone suggested we register dreamforce@$#@#.com. Everyone laughed and then we said what if we did? We proceeded to register over a hundred Dreamforce and salesforce related URLs — DreamforceRumors, DreamforceHookups, DreamforceRocks, DreamforceSucks, DreamforceDiamondSponsor, DreamforceSocial, etc. We knew we’d never use most of them but it was a release knowing we could and we did use a few in years to follow. We even had a major analyst write a story on our dreamforcerumors.com site.
excerpt from Appirio marketing “rumors” brainstorm
The concept of fighting against the odds or correcting injustice is a part of many effective startup cultures. For us, whether it was reducing customer’s spend on wasteful on premise software or making sure the little guy had a space to be creative, these kinds of actions let us remember there was a bigger world around us where we could still make a difference. It’s a naiveté that we often lose as we grow up as adults, but one we have to rediscover if we want to make it in a startup world — where we seldom initially have any strategic advantages.