A startup event strategy needs the same discipline.
Spend enough time around (deep-tech) startups and you start noticing a familiar pattern. The same founders appear at event after event: a composites conference this week, a startup competition the next, followed by an investor summit, a sustainability conference and another pitching session. The logic is understandable. Young companies need visibility, customers and investors, and there is always the hope that the next event will provide the breakthrough introduction.
The problem is that events can very quickly become an activity rather than a strategy. Teams return with business cards, LinkedIn connections and a sense of having had many interesting conversations, yet surprisingly little changes in the months that follow. For startups, where both cash and management attention are scarce resources, this is an expensive habit.
I prefer to think about events through the lens of sport. A serious athlete does not try to peak every weekend. A season is built around a small number of A-events: the competitions where performance really matters. Everything around them is preparation.
Startups should approach their event calendars in much the same way: select a limited number of events, understand exactly why they matter, prepare for them months in advance and then execute with intensity.
Building your brand versus going where your customers are
There are, in my view, two main reasons for a startup to attend events. The first is to build a brand, which for a young industrial company is largely about building trust. An established supplier enters the market with years or decades of history, references and relationships behind its name. A startup has none of that. Particularly in composites, where qualification cycles are long and customers are understandably cautious about introducing new materials and manufacturing technologies, familiarity matters.
For a startup, brand building is ultimately trust building.
This is why a composites startup should establish itself visibly within the composites ecosystem. JEC World in Paris is the reference. This is where I experimented a lot to master the game when I was leading the marketing and business development activities at 9T Labs – see picture above. Depending on geographic priorities, CAMX may play a similar role in North America, alongside relevant events in China and regional events in markets such as DACH, India or Southeast Asia. At these industry events, I would encourage startups to be relatively broad. Speak with suppliers, potential customers, competitors, investors and people from applications you may not yet have considered. Explain the technology in depth. The objective is not only to generate immediate leads, but to anchor the company in people’s minds as a serious part of the composites industry.
This is also where I believe having your own booth matters. If brand building is one of the objectives, visibility cannot be an afterthought. Many manufacturing and materials companies still take a fairly conservative approach to exhibition design, which actually creates an opportunity for startups. Make the company visible from a distance. Bring parts, samples and, where practical, machinery. Demonstrate the technology rather than covering the walls with paragraphs explaining it. Give visitors something they want to touch, discuss or photograph.
You are a startup. You do not have to look like everybody else. And at the events where you are building your brand, you probably should not.
The second reason for attending events is much more targeted: meeting the people who can move the business forward. Once a startup has selected its beachhead markets, its event strategy should follow those customers. If aerospace is a priority, composite events alone are not sufficient; you should also consider events such as the Paris Air Show or Farnborough. If aircraft interiors are specifically relevant, Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg may be far more valuable than another general innovation conference.
Find the reference events in the markets you have decided to win. And go where your customers go.
The physical presence can be different there. You are not necessarily trying to build a major aerospace brand; you are trying to become a trusted supplier to aerospace companies. A smaller booth, a national pavilion, a startup zone or an association stand may therefore be entirely sufficient as a base for demonstrations and meetings.
As customer relationships mature, an even stronger form of presence becomes possible: being represented on the booth of a customer or partner. If an established customer displays a component incorporating your technology and identifies you as the supplier, the credibility effect is difficult to replicate with your own marketing.
You are no longer telling the market that the customer trusts you; the customer is demonstrating it publicly.
Four A-events, prepared like campaigns
Once the industry and end-market calendars have been mapped, prioritization becomes critical. My recommendation for most startups would be to identify no more than four genuine A-events per year. This does not mean attending only four events. There will always be smaller conferences, investor meetings and local gatherings worth visiting. But an A-event is different: it is an event around which a significant part of the organization aligns and for which the company is prepared to go all in.
Four such events already mean running roughly one major campaign every quarter, because the event does not begin when the exhibition doors open.
A-level events should be approached as two- to three-month campaigns, with the exhibition days at the heart of a much broader engagement effort.
Proper preparation starts months earlier and should be reverse-planned from the event date. Four to six weeks before the event, for example, a startup could organize a webinar around a topic closely related to the problem it solves. Better still, where appropriate, it could host a small event at its own facility. The purpose should not be to spend 45 minutes explaining why the startup is wonderful. Bring in an external expert, a customer or a research partner. Share useful data or discuss an industry challenge. The aim is to aggregate a community around the problem where the company has something valuable to contribute.
This activity then creates material for a broader communications campaign. The webinar can be promoted through social media and direct outreach; insights can become further posts, video clips or discussions. Customers and partners can be encouraged to communicate joint projects or applications publicly.
I would also make much greater use of press releases. Many startups reserve them for fundraising rounds, large customer wins or factory openings, when they can also be useful for technical results, collaborations, webinars and event-related announcements. The important point is that the release should contain something of value rather than simply announcing that the company is “delighted to participate” in another exhibition.
Do not communicate simply because you are attending an event. Use the event as a reason to say something worth hearing.
The same proactive approach should extend to the organizer. Contact them early and ask what opportunities exist. There may be a conference slot, a panel, a startup stage, an innovation area, a demo island or a side event organized by the exhibition or one of its sponsors. Asking costs very little, and even if there is no opportunity this year, the relationship has started.
If an event is truly an A-event, you probably want to return year after year. Over time, getting to know the organizers and consistently providing useful content can move a startup from simply attending an ecosystem to becoming one of the companies helping to shape it.
Startups can also create their own events within the event. This can be as simple as a coffee, lunch or end-of-day gathering at the booth, or a scheduled technical demonstration that gives people a reason to be there at a particular time. For a more targeted format, organize a private evening gathering close to the exhibition and invite a carefully selected mix of existing customers, prospects, partners, community members and perhaps some industry media. It does not need to be extravagant. Twenty-five relevant people having good conversations in the right room can create more value than hundreds of anonymous visitors passing a booth.
The principle behind all of these activities is to multiply the number of touchpoints. A prospective customer might first see a press release six weeks before the event, then a clip from your webinar, followed by a joint announcement with one of your partners. At the event, they see your CEO on a panel, encounter a component in an innovation area, visit your booth for a demonstration and finally have a longer conversation at your evening gathering.
What looks like one three-day exhibition can actually become six or seven meaningful touchpoints with the same target customer.
For an unknown startup, this concentration of visibility can accelerate the process through which recognition becomes familiarity and familiarity becomes trust.
When the doors open, execution matters
After months of preparation, the event itself deserves the same discipline. The company has invested in logistics, booth construction, demonstrations, travel and communication; people across the organization may have spent hundreds of hours preparing. The team on site now has a responsibility to convert that investment into interactions.
I would start every day with a short but proper briefing. Which priority customers are expected? Which meetings are already scheduled? Who do we still need to find? What did we learn yesterday? Everyone should understand the objectives for the day and their role in achieving them.
Some simple rules also help. Personally, I would avoid phones and laptops while people are on booth duty. Few things make an exhibition stand less approachable than several employees standing behind a counter looking at screens. Instead, the team should actively engage. Move toward the aisle, make eye contact, start conversations and bring relevant visitors toward the demonstration.
Your entire company has invested in getting you to the event. Once the doors open, the job of the team on site is to create as many relevant interactions as possible.
Particularly when meetings have not been scheduled in advance, this inevitably becomes partly a quantity game. You need enough interactions to discover which ones contain quality.
This is important to explain to technical staff as well as commercial colleagues. Two engineers who find an interesting topic can easily spend an hour discussing it, but the exhibition floor is rarely the best place for that conversation. As a rule of thumb, I would aim for five to ten minutes for an initial interaction: enough to understand the person’s role and challenge, explain the relevant value proposition, demonstrate the technology and establish whether there is a reason to continue.
If there is, schedule a proper follow-up in a quieter environment or after the event. There are obvious exceptions for a dream customer arriving with a concrete project, but in general the exhibition floor should be treated as a place for first touchpoints rather than hour-long technical meetings.
The exhibition floor is for first touchpoints. The deeper conversation, and the conversion, comes next.
At that pace, one proactive team member can have six to ten conversations per hour. Across several people and several days, this creates a substantial top of the funnel from which the genuinely interesting opportunities can be qualified.
Some teams may even benefit from gamifying this, either through individual leaderboards or collective objectives for meaningful conversations and qualified follow-ups. The important caveat is to choose the right metric and adapt it to the culture of the team. Rewarding badge scans will produce badge scans; the objective is relevant conversations that create a reason for a next step.
The conversion starts before you leave the venue
Finally, every meaningful interaction needs to be captured while the information is still fresh. After 30 or 40 conversations, seemingly small but commercially important details quickly disappear: a customer is evaluating thermoplastics, the CTO needs to join the next discussion, a new program begins in Q1, fire performance is the key concern, or a 20% cycle-time reduction would unlock the project.
The tiny details from the conversation are often what make the difference in the follow-up.
Whether the company uses a sophisticated CRM or a simple shared system matters less than the discipline of using it. Business cards can still be useful, while badge scanning is efficient but sometimes provides generic or outdated information. Saving a LinkedIn profile can often make subsequent enrichment easier. If a particularly important conversation takes place, it is worth stepping away for five minutes to capture the details rather than trusting that everything will still be remembered eight hours later.
At the end of each exhibition day, the team should therefore debrief and ensure that every meaningful contact has been entered, qualified and given a next action. This makes the post-event process considerably more effective, because the event is certainly not over when everyone flies home. In many ways, this is when conversion begins.
A generic “Great meeting you at the show, let’s stay in touch” creates little momentum. A follow-up referring to the customer’s specific challenge, the data they requested and the technical meeting you agreed to schedule is very different.
The value of a good conversation comes from turning it into a clear next step.
The goal of an event is not a collection of pleasant conversations. It is to create relationships, projects, partnerships and ultimately business.
This is why I would rather see a startup execute four A-events exceptionally well than attend 15 events without a clear strategy. At the key events of your own industry, build the brand and anchor yourself in the ecosystem. At selected end-user events, go where your customers are and focus on access and conversion. Around both, create a campaign that starts months beforehand, peaks during the event and continues until the opportunities have been properly followed up.
High-performance materials deserve an equally high-performance event strategy.
The competition may take place over three days, but the result is determined by what happens in the months before, the intensity of the execution on the day, and what you do with the opportunities afterward.
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About Catalysium
Catalysium is a Switzerland-based platform dedicated to accelerating innovation, business growth and investment across the composites and advanced-materials industry.
Through its three complementary pillars – Advisory, Insights and Ventures – Catalysium supports entrepreneurs, industrial companies, investors and ecosystem partners in shaping the future of high-performance materials.
Disclosure: Catalysium sponsors the JEC Composites Startup Booster. This piece was not paid for or commissioned.