The Growth Meta: Events as a Growth Channel

Why you should be doing in-person events sooner than you think

This week’s post comes from Katia Ameri, Rose Johnson and Shrikala Kashyap, who help run Tech Week and who make the case that IRL events are an underappreciated growth channel for startups.

The Tech Week team just announced that submissions are now open for hosts looking to run an event at Tech Week Boston (5/26 to 5/31) and Tech Week New York (6/1 to 6/7). Apply here.

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As the team behind Tech Week, we’ve grown the program to over 3,000 events across three cities. We’ve watched founders close enterprise deals, sign term sheets, and make their first hires all from a single well-run gathering.

After four years of running Tech Week—which started with just a few hundred events in LA in 2022, when marketing budgets across tech were tightening—we now have a pretty clear picture of what separates events that move the needle from ones that are just a line item on the marketing budget. Even as the economy has ebbed and flowed since then, budgets for Tech Week events have only increased, which tells you something about the ROI founders are seeing from this channel.

Most importantly for this audience, we believe that events should be a central part of your launch strategy. They are wildly underutilized by early-stage founders and represent some of the highest leverage go-to-market activity you could be doing.

Why events still matter

There’s a contrarian case to be made for in-person events right now. Every other marketing channel is getting noisier with the rise of LLMs. Social media is a knife fight in a back alley on a moonless night. You can use AI to send hundreds of emails, but recipients will just use AI to reply, “Please stop contacting me.” However, in person and live is a different type of magic. There is no way to automate a handshake, a demo over drinks, or the feeling a prospect gets when they meet the founder and decide they trust this person enough to buy from them.

Events are also the rare channel where the audience finds you. These types of conferences can allow you to decrease your acquisition costs because a potential lead has already flown cross-country for the week and is looking for things to do/learn. Most early-stage marketing is about defining a target persona, building a universe, and then paying through the nose to reach them. With events, especially during an industry gathering like Tech Week, you capture people you never would have targeted. Importantly, they are a different type of lead versus what you may purchase through an ad. They arrive at your event in a more open headspace versus someone who has been relentlessly hounded by your sales staff.

Most importantly for early-stage founders, events compress timelines. An enterprise deal that’s been stalling over email can close after a 45-minute conversation at a happy hour. A recruiting pipeline that took weeks of sourcing can materialize from a single fireside chat. And because event platforms like the one we offer for Tech Week collect LinkedIn profiles and contact details at RSVP, you walk away not just with the people who attended, but with a lead list of high-intent people who applied to attend as well. Time is your most precious resource in your first 12 months, so using events to get more done faster, is the most valuable outcome.

And don’t stress about cash, events are remarkably cheap if you’re resourceful. Several of the most successful events we’ve seen cost the founders almost nothing because they brought on sponsors to cover the tab. And events don’t even need to be expensive! It is about cultivating a vibe, something that cannot be purchased. Plus, at Tech Week, you can list your event for free!

Make the event your product

The thing you don’t want is to just host a happy hour with your banner on it. As an early stage founder, you need to design the event itself to be a demonstration of what you’re building. When someone experiences your product in a live setting rather than reading about it on a landing page, you skip the entire awareness-to-consideration funnel. They get it because they just lived it. Here are three approaches we’ve seen work exceptionally well.

Your event is your funnel. Sweatpals (SR004), a social fitness app from a previous speedrun cohort, co-hosted “Coffee & Chill” during New York Tech Week — a Saturday morning wellness event with cold plunges, a DJ, and networking, all inside the Classic Car Club in Manhattan. It was packed. And even crazier, people had to pay to get in. The Sweatpals team was able to demonstrate their product around community fitness, and not burn through piles of cash. Attendees walked away understanding the product because they’d just lived it – and that’s the shortest path from demo to acquisition.

Bake conversion into the event itself. The smartest founders make the event part of their sales funnel, not just the start of it. Sitch (SR005), an invite-only matchmaking app backed by speedrun, hosted the closing party for New York Tech Week. Entry was free, but only if you had a completed Sitch profile. Completed profiles were checked at the door. Every person who walked in was already an activated user, and Sitch promised to match attendees with someone afterward, turning the party into the first step of the product experience.

Bring a speaker who makes the marketing do itself. Northwood Space, founded by Bridgit Mendler, hosted an event during LA Tech Week on their literal factory floor (usually off limits) and talked about the next war being fought in space. Panelists were from all the heavy hitters: Anduril, Astranis, etc. and they had Ed Ludlow from Bloomberg moderate. This type of panel not only draws in attendees, it can also act as a form of external, organic marketing, with the event receiving coverage in Bloomberg.

The things everyone gets wrong

For this channel, the before and after details are what determine the event’s efficacy. Too often, we see founders pour all their effort into the actual party itself while neglecting the small things that will allow this to truly be a gamechanger for their business.

Before the event, invest in two things: a differentiated concept and a curated audience. There are hundreds of events happening during Tech Week in any given city. A generic mixer won’t cut it. Either lock in a speaker people want to hear from, or come up with a format that’s genuinely different. Then, put in the work on your invite list. The events that overperform are the ones where someone spent a week DMing people on LinkedIn and personally curating who would be in the room.

During the event, capture everything. You’ve spent weeks organizing a speaker, a venue, catering, and vibes—and then no one records the hot takes, no one posts a recap, and the whole thing dies the moment the last person walks out. Your event hits a hundred people max. Your content about the event should reach tens of thousands. Always, always, always be gathering content from the event to then share with the world.

After the event, follow up relentlessly. This is the single biggest missed opportunity we see. Planning an event is exhausting (ask us how we know) and by the time the event wraps up, founders tend to be drained and want to move on to the next thing. Don’t. The ROI of your event doubles with proper post-event execution: sales follow-ups, social media recaps, nurture emails to every RSVP who didn’t attend. This is the single most cultivated audience you will ever have! They just spent hours hanging out with your brand and product, so use that to your advantage. We highly recommend having the sales funnel ready to go before the event even starts. Come with a plan, leave with booked revenue.

How to use tech week

Tech Week is coming the last week of May starting with Boston and New York soon after (June 1-7), and event submissions are officially open!open. Listing your event is free and puts you on the same calendar as some of the biggest names in tech. If you’re building something and you want to get in front of the right people, submit your event here.

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