Missive’s First Trade Show

The time and energy invested in our product metrics pipeline allowed us to answer questions like which industries are extracting the most value out of Missive.

After crunching our numbers (organization size, core functionalities usage, ease of onboarding), the answer was:

1. Logistics/Transportation (mostly brokers & carriers)
2. Travel/Property management (luxury travel agencies, tour operators)
3. Finance/Legal (accountants, law firms)
4. Retail (various sectors)
5. Manufacturing (various sectors)

With this insight, our next question was: where can we meet as many people from these industries in person? Our first instinct was to attend industry-specific trade shows.

With that in mind, three weeks ago, we identified FreightWaves Future of Supply Chain in Atlanta as the biggest short-term opportunity. We contacted the organizers and negotiated an interesting package:

1. A 7-minute demo on the live stage
2. A 6x6 booth
3. A 10-minute interview on "What the Truck?!?" radio show

Organization

Once confirmed, we had two weeks to organize the whole trip. Two team members would go: Janie (COO) and myself (CEO). The first thing I did was to make noise about our attendance. I posted on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and the Hampton founders community. My angle was to be transparent about us having zero experience and going there to learn as much as possible.

Instantly, people started to reach out privately to give tips on how we should approach this to get as much ROI as possible. I want to personally thank two people. Vic Cherubini, who proactively reached out, organized his thoughts around trade shows before our call, and shared valuable insights:

I also want to thank Maxime Villemure, an ex-pro poker player turned logistics entrepreneur, who reached out on X and proposed a call to teach me everything about 3PL/Logistics and his industry.

With these personal coaching sessions and Janie’s firsthand experience with trade shows, we understood the need to reach out to as many people as possible before the show.

1. Contacted our existing customers in the industry
2. Make noise on LinkedIn/X
3. Cold outreach to attendees

The first two were easy. The last was harder as we did not have a list of attendees. However, the Future of Supply Chain website had logos of all the businesses attending. We took screenshots, then used ChatGPT-4o to identify the domain names related to all logos. We then passed that domain list to Hunter.io and got a list of possible email addresses to reach out to.

Janie then proceeded to message people on LinkedIn or cold-reach them via email about our presence at the event.

Execution

All in all, we successfully scheduled two demos through these messages. Not bad, but not great. The good news is the conference wasn’t huge, so all attendees saw our booth, making pre-booking meetings less important.

Vic provided excellent tips for our booth, but we ended up having no time to implement most of them. We kept things simple. Arnaud quickly created a video that we looped on the TV:

I used my laptop to demo the product directly to attendees. All in all, we did 33 demos at the booth. I did a good job with the demo on the main stage, both highlighting the pain of brokers dealing with a massive volume of emails and the solutions Missive has to offer (team inboxes, AI, rules & automation, custom integrations and analytics).

Many people also discovered the product while listening to the radio interview I did live on the What the truck?!? Radio show.

We mostly encountered three types of leads:

1. Potential customers (brokers)
2. Potential industry-specific integrations (TMS)
3. Content/marketing partnerships (industry influencers, founders)
4. Big shots (investors, VPs of large logistics businesses)

We scanned their badges and took screenshots of the person to remember post-event who and what. Janie also took notes in the lead retrieval app. Janie spent our airport transit day following-up with everyone we talked to or showed interest.

From our conversations, I assume we can hope to convert at least 5 organizations, all having need for 50 seats each, to Missive.

Conclusion

We have yet to assess the ROI of this trip to Atlanta, but just as an experience it was an absolute eye-opener and I came away wanting to invest way more resources into attending industry specific trade shows.

One quote from Paul Graham I absolutely abide by is “action produces information”, and we absolutely did with this first trade show.