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Ben’s List 11

Following our last Coffee with Sesame, I went and shared my concern on Twitter about the current practices of some virtual event vendors towards event producers. In a nutshell, if your business growth and valuation relies on events’ weakness during a pandemic, you’re not building a sustainable edge.

The founder of SaaStr replied back with an interesting comment – follow him for juicy tweets and business advice:

We wrote about the importance of communities in the event industry and the trend is only accelerating.

This week’s reading list features a bunch of interesting articles about community and marketing. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

We also spotlight consumer, femtech and foodtech news, together with a couple of crazy scientific pieces.

Enjoy!

Community

Moderating in moderation

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A tactical guide to kickstarting your community

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Why Executives Should Care About Internet Communities

“Communities aren’t social media, you cannot broadcast your message and expect to succeed. Imagine if you went to an event, got up on stage, and yelled “buy our product” over and over. It wouldn’t work, and your reputation would take a greater hit than if you said nothing at all.”

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Marketing

50 Best Marketing Books for Beginners and Life-Long Learners Alike to Level-Up in 2021

“Shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020, Carlos Gil talks about how to use new features and platforms that immediately engage with your customers — all through a humanistic approach.”

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@Amazon

20 Ways Businesses Will Engage Social Audio

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FemTech

Femtech in France

Femtech has historically been segmented into four main categories: reproductive health (including menstrual & fertility solutions), pregnancy & nursing care, pelvic & uterine healthcare, general healthcare and wellness. But we believe the industry today can be better understood by breaking it down into the following categories:

  • Menstruation
  • General healthcare
  • Wellness & sexual life
  • Fertility
  • Pregnancy
  • Motherhood
  • Menopause
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Consumer Tech

Consumer Technology Report 2021 (Edition #2)

High5 to our friend and Startup Sesame Season 4 alumni Joao, CEO of Lovys!

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  • (report) heartcore.com/insights#report

FoodTech

80+ Female FoodTech Founders, Leaders And Investors You Need To Know

Food for thought: Celebrating women and gender-equality only 1-day a year isn’t nearly enough. We all need to work towards a future where highlighting female leaders isn’t a necessity.”

  • foodhack.global/articles/80-female-foodtech-founders-and-leaders-you-need-to-know :: Nicola Spalding

Science

Memory transferred between snails, challenging standard theory of how the brain remembers

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The edge of our existence: A particle physicist examines the architecture of society

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you might also like

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Events 2 days ago

Last week, I spent three days at Bits and Pretzels in Munich — a startup-focused event with a distinctly Bavarian flavor. Think Oktoberfest meets startup conference, complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and more beer than you might expect. As someone building an AI-powered event platform, I went in with a specific mission: Observe how startups actually market themselves at events. Here’s what I discovered: GoodBytz: The power of good demos What they did: Robotics startup GoodBytz set up a booth where its robots prepared kaiserschmarrn (a traditional German dessert) all day long. Why it worked: Nothing beats seeing a product in action. While other booths had brochures and demos, GoodBytz’s robots were actually cooking. The smell, the movement and the end result stirred together an experience that people will remember and talk about. The lesson: If you have a physical product, show it in action. The old writing adage generalizes well: Show, don’t tell.  Let people see, hear and touch the product. WeRoad: The bathroom hack What they did: Posted “Missing Investor” flyers in bathroom stalls with QR codes pointing to their website. Why it worked: Pure genius. Every startup at the event was looking for investors, but the “Missing Investor” headline, while a bit on the nose, proved irresistible. Plus, bathroom stalls are one of the few places where people have 30 seconds to actually read something. The lesson: Think about where your target audience’s attention will remain undivided. Sometimes, the most effective marketing leverages the most unexpected places. Emqopter: Visual impact matters What they did: Designed a bright orange booth that displayed their drone prominently. Why it worked: In a sea of grey, white, beige and brown, Emqopter’s bright orange booth was impossible to overlook. The drone was real, too, and proved a real conversation starter. The lesson: Your booth is competing with hundreds of others. Make it visually distinctive and ensure your product is the hero. Quests: Community building using the product What they did: Created a busy, branded booth with accessories (toy car, traffic cones, a bulletin board) and used their anti-loneliness app to build communities among founders at the event. Why it worked: Quests used their product to solve a real problem right at the event, and the busy booth design generated energy and curiosity. The lesson: Use your product to solve a problem at the event — if it’s possible, of course. Demonstrate your value in real time. Dyno: Event-themed marketing What they did: Distributed branded electrolyte packs with the tagline “Your hangover ends. Your pension lasts – with Dyno.” Why it worked: Dyno aligned its messaging perfectly with the Oktoberfest theme. Every attendee was thinking about beer and hangovers, so Dyno’s goodies were quite relevant. The tagline was clever, memorable, and directly addressed a pain point most people at the event might have to deal with later. The lesson: Tailor your marketing to the event’s theme and culture. The more you tie your messaging and product to the context, the more memorable you become. So, what did I learn? Event marketing is about more than just showing up and setting up a booth; you have to understand your audience and create experiences that people will remember. Here’s what really struck me: most startups and even big companies don’t know how to leverage events properly. They book the booth, show up and hope for the best; maybe they bring some branded pens and a pop-up banner. Then they’ll go back home and wonder why they spent €5,000 in exchange for 50 business cards that never convert. The startups that stood out at Bits and Pretzels understand something fundamental: event ROI isn’t about booth size or location; it’s about strategy, creativity and planning. None of the startups above improvised on-site, or planned something the night before the event in their hotel rooms. They laid everything out 4-6 weeks before the event. A solid pre-event strategy is what separates successful event marketing from expensive booth rental.  But what matters most for early-stage startups is that you don’t need a massive budget to stand out. WeRoad’s bathroom stall hack probably cost €50 to print the flyers. A standard booth package at Bits and Pretzels would go for €3,000 to €5,500. The ROI difference is staggering when you compare the cost per meaningful conversation. That’s the difference between simply spending money and investing smartly. Building Sesamers has taught me that helping startups find the right events is only half the equation. The other half is helping them understand how to maximize ROI once they’re there. Good props aren’t a marketing expense; they’re opportunities to meet customers, investors and partners, and strike up engaging conversations.

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New Materials 3 days ago

Lios Group, the Irish startup behind SoundBounce, was a winner of JEC Composites Startup Booster 2018, and has been making significant strides since taking home the award.

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New Materials 1 week ago

Tree Composites aims to accelerate the energy transition with innovative composite joints.

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