"I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility." -- Jack Kerouac. On the Road.

Like Jack Kerouac, I write all my blogs using a single typewriter scroll.

I don't usually write about DoltHub marketing. We tend to keep this space focused on the tech behind Dolt and DoltHub. But today, I'll talk about a new endeavor for us, conference booths, and ask for some advice.

Traditional DoltHub Marketing

What was DoltHub's marketing strategy up to this point? You're looking at it. We started at three blogs per week and recently upped our volume to five blogs per week. Everyone on the team writes blogs. We employ a "shout at the internet until it listens strategy".

We write blogs about many topics but we often have these three main intents:

1. Make DoltHub show up for some search term
2. Have the blog get up voted on social media, usually Reddit or HackerNews
3. Tell our users something new, either a release or new documentation

This strategy has the main benefit of being free, besides the time it takes to write the blogs. It seems to be working well enough. But we are starting to get the feeling that we had reached almost all the people that would find Dolt from the channels we try to frequent.

We've tried a number of other internet-based approaches: paid search, paid social, and cold email. We've generated a few leads but definitely the return on investment seems low. Our target customers are engineers. We're engineers and we think paid search/social and especially cold email are annoying.

Conferences

Which brings us to conferences, the hand-to-hand combat of marketing. We've attended conferences as just regular attendees, speakers, and with a booth.

Being an attendee is pretty close to useless. You have to approach speakers or people at the scheduled networking events and cold pitch them Dolt. The people manning booths are generally in sales or marketing. Attend a conference if you want to learn or be sold to. Do not attend a conference on a normal ticket and expect to sell.

Being a speaker is better. You have a captive audience of the people in attendance at your presentation. However, most times you are speaking about a technical subject related to the product you are building. It's not a sales pitch. We've had limited success generating sales leads by sending speakers to conferences.

Having a booth at a conference is best for Dolt. People walking around the conference hall have the intent to learn about products. You have all manner of folks, but importantly for us, there are also technical management and engineers pacing the floor. I'll dig into our booth strategy in the next section.

The downside of conferences is cost, both in dollars and time. A booth at large conferences can be more than $50,000, for instance at AWS Re:Invent. We try to stick to conferences with booth price tags less than $10,000. Then you have travel for at least two people. Soloing the booth is tough. A conference is usually two or three days of lost work as well. A conference booth must net at least one new customer on average to be worth it.

Conference Booths

We were recently at Ai4 and our booth was a hit. We had multiple people say versions of "you are the coolest company here".

Our script goes something like this.

Passer By: What is Git for Data?
Dolt: Dolt is a full MySQL-compatible database with all the Git features: push, pull, branch, merge. Like Git and MySQL had a baby.
Passer By: <Intrigued. Questions follow.>
Dolt: Would you like to see a demo?

A Dolt turns the laptop around and proceeds to show off the Dolt command line, SQL interface, and DoltHub.

This is usually enough for the person to understand the product. We finish with a "Did any use cases come to mind when we were showing Dolt to you?" The potential customer usually has some data versioning use case in mind at this point and that starts a whole new conversation. At then end, we ask to scan their badge so we can email them documentation and follow up.

It helps that Dolt is free and open source because this is a soft sell. Just try it. We just want users.

This environment seems to work for us. We have multiple meetings booked as follow ups to Ai4 last week. We learned we need to get in the trenches and talk to people face-to-face more.

Conclusion

Booths at conferences seem to work for us. We've done Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Ai4 this year so far and we're booked for MLOps + Generative AI World 2024 in Austin in November. Do you attend a conference where a Dolt booth would make sense? What conferences should we get a booth for? Let us know on our Discord.