Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

Ben’s List 9

I was asked recently by one of our members what exactly is the purpose of Selected. It’s not fully dedicated to events and it’s not only about technology and startups. So what is it about?

I’d say that we’re still exploring what topics matter to our diverse audience. And we still haven’t found yet a single topic because the audience is quite diverse.

We have founders, investors and marketers working at VC funds, consultants and event organizers in the mix.

What do they all have in common apart from a desire to know better than others what events are coming up and which ones are relevant. Does it mean we should only write about events?

We believe the content part of Selected can and should be a lot more diverse than that and while we keep experimenting with our editorial direction, we’re welcoming your contributions as well: smrs.link/writers.


Book

The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage

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Community

How to Build a Community to Grow Your SaaS Company

“Early-stage recruitment for a community is a bit like early-stage sales — start with the soft targets. We wrote highly personalized emails to a select group of existing customers, friends of the company, thought leaders we’d featured in content, and so on. We had to manage expectations — they needed to know they’d be walking into an empty Slack group — and let them know we appreciated their support while we built it up around them.”

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Product

Tried and true product-led startup advice

“Remove assumptions about the order of how you build and go straight for projects that offer unique value. While your product will be a work in progress for years to come, you can immediately put this in front of your early cohorts to gain feedback, show early activation, and work towards building retention.”

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How Product Analytics Maturity Feeds a Product-Led Startup Strategy

“Product led growth (PLG) startups get the product directly to the end user (at any level or role in the company) with minimal friction, and then use the product’s value to drive growth. These early adopters refer their colleagues, and their delight is what fuels further adoption.”

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https://openviewpartners.com/blog/product-analytics-maturity/ :: Hannah Maslar

Zero to 1: Product Fundamentals for Go-To-Market

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Marketing

Shadow Newsletter for Evergreen Emails in ConvertKit

“If you want to get more complex, you can dig into automations where you pull people out of the shadow newsletter at the right times to pitch them an offer or deliver another sequence. By setting up a shadow newsletter for your email list you can relax a bit. You’ll know that new subscribers are being taken care of.”

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Sustainability

Spotlight on Play It Green: Sustainable Lifestyle Tips for Greener Communities

“…this gentle journey of sustainability will create lasting change”


Health

Vaccine Distribution Scenario Modeling

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Travel

Planes of the future will feature virtual reality, yoga studios, and lots of cauliflower

“Plans include wider seats, lights that reprogram circadian rhythms, and cabin air that’s more pleasant to breathe. Also, they might finally speed up the ­Wi-Fi.”

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Music

Art + Math + Blockchain + NFT

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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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