We might have accidentally stumbled across the best way attract people to your booth at a tech conference. I’ll get straight to the point and explain what we did, why we did it, and how we got there.

What We Did

Our winning formula was pretty simple, but to give ourselves some credit it was also pretty unique!

We were given a small stand in the Startup section of a large tech conference with a smart TV adjacent for showing presentations, and a tabletop with enough space for a couple laptops.

In our case though, we slapped a custom arcade game, complete with its own custom housing, on the table.

The custom housing held the controls and a flat screen monitor, which we connected to a laptop running our custom game out the back (we’ll go into more details on the game in a minute).

Instead of using the smart TV to show a presentation about our product Wasp, a full-stack React/NodeJS framework, we put up a custom QR code for attendees to scan in order to enter a raffle for a free Ducky Keyboard, along with the Arcade game winners.

At the moment, the main growth goal for our open-source framework Wasp — which is still in Beta — was to get people to learn about Wasp and try it out, and the best way for that was to check out our repo. So the QR code sent users directly to our repo, which if they starred would enter them automatically into the keyboard raffle.

Wanna see what Wasp is all about and support more content like this? Then please throw us a star on GitHub. It's the best way to support us - Thank You!

⭐️ Star the Wasp Repo! 🙏

Also, if they showed us that they starred the repo, then they could take one piece of our sweet Swag, which consisted of shirts, cool beanies, tote bags, and stickers.

“Da Boi” is our unofficial mascot, and “Da Boi” plushes were undeniably the most popular swag at our booth. It’s the reason many people struck up conversation with us, as everyone wanted one, and it was the prize each day for the top three winners of our arcade game each day

What We Didn’t Do

We actually did nothing to explain what our startup was about!

That’s right. We created a custom game, advertised a raffle, and gave away swag, without even presenting our actual product.

But that isn’t to say that people didn’t get to know about it. In fact, this unintentionally worked as a great hook, to engage people, get them spending lots of time around our booth, and then to strike up a deeper conversation about what we do.

This also had the added benefit that people were very receptive, because they didn’t feel like we were cramming our product down their throats.

Why It Worked

We aren’t able to say with 100% confidence why this approach worked so well, but we have a few assumptions:

We Kept it Fun

This one might seem obvious, but at a large tech conference there is a strong urge to convey professionalism. As a startup, we had the liberty to play it cool and not act so serious.

Keep in mind that at a two-day tech conference, attendees can easily get overwhelmed. There are countless booths, talks, and new people to engage with.

So rather than being another booth with an intimidating product, our booth was the place people could come to have fun at. And they kept coming back to our booth, not only to get another chance at winning a “Da Boi” plushie, but to just hang out and socialize.

This was a big win for us, because this also attracted the attention of other companies, who were eager to know what all the buzz was about ;)

We Kept it Simple

We tried to keep many aspects of our booth as simple as possible:

• our game was a simple, 2D platformer with one-level, in the style of flappy bird
• to get swag and enter our raffle, attendees just had to star our GitHub Repo
• if they wanted to know more about our product, all they had to do was ask

Trying to quickly understand the benefits of a full-stack framework built around a DSL can be daunting for most attendees. But free stuff, well, everyone understands free stuff.

And the main reason we were able to keep things simple, is because our goal for the conference was simple: get more GitHub stars! If our goal had been to increase the number of new users, we might not have settled on this approach at all.

We Kept People Near our Booth

Drawing in people with an Arcade Game and free Swag without even mentioning your product might sound like a cheap move, but it works in much the same way as a social media account with a lot of followers, or a cool restaurant with a long line out front — people automatically interpret other people’s interest as something worth checking out.

People kept hanging around to play the arcade game, or to check if someone had beat their high score, and this piqued the interest of others. This drew even more people to our booth out of curiosity.

On top of that, each Wasp team member at the booth had a specific task. Vince was in charge of GitHub stars and giving out swag, Filip, our main game dev, attended to the arcade and even fixed bugs on the fly, and Miho did a great job engaging passer-bys, explaining our product, and keeping people happy :)

How We Built Our Game

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

But if Lua isn’t really your thing, then you could try out KaboomJS, a similar open-source javascript game library.

It was a simple 2d platform game in the style of flappy bird, featuring a wasp that has to escape the evil JQuery monster (remember, Wasp is a full-stack React/NodeJS framework).

The score was based on how far you could get from the monster, measured in meters. The monster would get progressively faster the further away you got, with obstacles and power-ups along the way.

The housing for the game was custom built by a friend of the Wasp team, but you probably don’t have to take it that far — although it definitely contributed to the appeal. An external monitor with a game controller would have probably been just as effective!

Conclusion

And there you have it, our recipe for making a fun, creative impression at a tech conference.

Of course, these tips might not work for everyone, but it's a good reminder that everyone loves fun, free stuff,... and plushies