Inventing for the Rest of Us

Now back in college, I ran a couple events for the University of Texas Ultimate Frisbee Club Team. Our biggest money maker as a team, and a way to subsidize our spring season travel ($50,000 travel budget), was hosting tournaments. Back when I was there, our club team hosted two tournaments.

I learned a great deal from putting on these events, the biggest which would attract up to 30 teams, or 450 individuals to come play, and several hundred spectators. We’d organize about 45 volunteers for an event like that, so we definitely had a LOT of help.

Never had I appreciated the experience of putting on a large, high-traffic event until 5 weeks ago, when IdeaTango was officially acquired by InventBay. Since then, my focus has been on only two things, the InventBay Expo, which we held last weekend, and launching them a new website within 3 weeks.

We launched the new website October 9th, with much help from my IdeaTango partners and our experience working together. This past weekend, October 18 & 19, 2008, we officially held the coming-out party (Quinciniera or Barmitsva as it is called in other cultures) for InventBay, in the only place big enough to hold us, Las Vegas, Nevada.

The expo was hosted at the Sands Expo, in Hall A, which has 178,000 sq feet of open space. Of course since this is our first year, we only filled up 1/2 the show floor with ~130 exhibitors + another 70 booths where people could sign up for local inventor associations.

Some valuable lessons that I learned when putting on tournaments, came in handy when being an integral part of this expo:

• You can never do something on this scale alone, so the ability to delegate is more important than any other factor.
• If something can go wrong, it will. Double-check and verify everything. For example, for one of our tournaments, the person who wrote up the tournament finals bracket left it at his house, and caused our Sunday playoffs to start an hour late. Eventually this led to us shortening the finals game because we didn’t have daylight. At our expo this year, Kinkos was scheduled to print up a bunch of stuff for us the day before the doors opened. I asked our guys to double check what they received. Well, Kinkos forgot to print our speaker bios and we had to go back and pick it up 7 hours later. Good thing we checked!
• Stuff will go wrong, and rather than say that was ____’s job, just take the responsibility. Do whatever you can to fix it, even if it sometimes costs money.
• Always throw a party. I was able to convince our executive team that we needed a mixer, networking-like event either Friday or Saturday. Thanks goodness, because some of the people we talked to said that they met “so and so” and because of our party, they’ll come back next year. It’s a great way to informally talk with exhibitors, speakers, VIP guests, because once those show doors open, you won’t have another opportunity.
• Have fun. This goes with the point above. No matter what, if people have fun at your event, most will come back. Of course you need things like qualified attendees and exhibitors, but having fun can make up for quite a bit.

Let me tell you, it was fun and emotionally fulfilling to be part of such a big event, but I’m glad it’s not happening again until next year!

- Bryan Daigle