15 Minutes at the Top of the World with TechCrunch 50

Written 10 months ago

We travelled (a combined) 11,858 miles and more than 30 hours from Argentina and London to arrive to San Francisco and present our non-profit project (The Whuffie Bank) at TechCrunch50.

We feel so lucky and honoured to have been chosen. It was an amazing experience and every mile travelled was worth it. There are some experiences and lessons we want to share, specially for international startups presenting next year.

0. Present your Startup with a Working Product by June

We already had a nice working version of The Whuffie Bank when we presented our project as a candidate for TC50 this year. Right from the beginning we aimed on having a live version of the site by June when the deadline for suscription arrives. Needless to say: Be innovative. Your product is all that matters. Forget talking about your team’s background and egos. Nobody will ever ask you about that.

1. Arrive early to SFO

Try to arrive as early as you can to the Bay Area. We had more than 1 day off before the first rehearsal and it was very important to recover from the jet lag and be able to practice and perform more relaxed. You enjoy things more when you had a decent sleep.

2. Rent a car

If you drive, we recommend that you rent a car . Not only Palo Alto (where the rehearsals are) is not that close to San Francisco but also there are too many awesome places around to miss it. You have to cross the Golden Gate, go to Sausalito, walk through the Stanford campus. Go to Sillicon Valley, work from a bar and feel how many people are talking and working on technology startups. You can feel the geekness in the air (and not in that bad way you are thinking of).

3. Don’t miss any rehearsal

Rehearsals are super important and probably where you will learn most. Our presentation went from a 5 to 8/9 in two rehearsals. The first one was at Sequoia Capital. As soon as you get into their offices they have a presentation of all their funded companies (Google, Cisco, Yahoo, Youtube, Atari, Apple, etc) that made it a very inspiring place and also (a little) intimidating. It was a good intro to TC50. 
The feedback we got from Jason, Tyler and all the TechCrunch Team was insightful, to the point and relevant to what we were presenting. Even if you think that your presentation is “perfect”, it will be improved a lot. The “Show, don’t tell” lesson will stick in your head.

We even had the chance to do an optional rehearsal on saturday morning that was key to improve the presentation. If you are offered the chance, take it. 
And don’t forget to practice, practice and practice. Specially if your mother language is not english. It doesn’t matter where you practice (it could be a bar, room at the hotel, during dinner or even in the shower).

4. Relax and Enjoy

Presenting in front of a tech-savvy crowd and thousands of people viewing online is not easy (not to mention the quality of the panel). But they are actually very good listeners (even when they look like they are playing with their iPhones) and will pay attention to what you have to say.

In our case, we had a lot of support from all over Latin America. They even organized a “flashmob” to support our project and there were hundreds of Latin Americans watching our presentation live online.

It will be your 15 minutes at the top of the tech world, or at least your first 15 minutes :-)

Relax and enjoy.

5. Prepare to be Techcrunched

Once you launch, the real real work starts.

Have your servers ready. Cache as much as you can. And setup everything to record all that feedback (Get Satisfaction, Google Analytics, Contact Info, etc) and be able to reply to it on the fly. It will be the only way to leverage that exposure. That first day after the launch is crucial.

We opened the website to the public as soon as we finished the presentation. In 12 hours our twitter account went from 0 to 900 followers, we received almost 20,000 uniques visits and hundred of feedback by email and Twitter. Not to mention a post in TechCrunch and VentureBeat, an article in Wired by Bruce Sterling and a lot of other blogs. We are flaterred and overwhelmed by the feedback and attention we received.

As in any web project what’s more important is the feedback you can get. And being a TC50 finalist is the best place in the world to be able to get that.

5. Arrange meetings

Take advantage of your time in San Francisco and the fact that you are a TC50 finalist to arrange meetings after the conference. Meet prospect clients/partners but also with people from your country that are based there and could share some experiences and people to meet. You won’t have a lot of opportunities to be able to meet so many interesting companies (and people) at the same time in one place.

We (really) want to thank @jason, @arrington, @heather and all the TC50 crew for giving us the opportunity to be there and also to be open to crazy/experimental ideas as the one we presented.

The event was super well organized and we were treated as rockstars during all week. 

The Whuffie Bank Team

P.S.: If by any chance there’s a RockBand demo at the demopit next year, make sure you hijack it from early. We did :-)