Best, A

One lesson life in high tech has taught me is to get a very good understanding of your user community’s motivations to use a product. We had a great idea that needed some tweaking to fit user needs. What most aren’t seeing is the result of our competition held at the show where users who had the most compelling “use case” would win additional stuff. This forms the basis of product design and marketing for future releases.

The party was intended as a thank you for our focus group and also a vehicle to keep them in the loop as an extended focus group. We have had some really exciting ideas thrown our way and they will be in future releases.

I agree with the feedback on promotion (it should be a business generator) - this party was intended as a thank you to the local (Ottawa) focus groups that helped us tremendously in defining this product and its uses.

In closing, the focus groups shed light on aspects we never considered in our initial feature/functionality matrix. Target market focus groups are a good way to get hard hitting feedback (both good and bad) for a new product.

Your dead on and there is one more key point. It’s a waste of money at a stage when a company that is likely VC or some form of venture backed needs to maximize what they are doing. Throwing a big party is a lot of work. In the case of TechCrunch and GigaOm, someone else paid for the parties as they were “sponsored” so burn rate is not really impacted.

My concerns speak to “judgement.” Had Hullo sponsored a series of back to school parties in Montreal at Lavel and McGill University, at Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, etc. across Canada in consort with on Frat and One Sorority they likely woud have had a bigger buzz billed than to their own “community” in Ottawa.

Parties are a marketing event, but events have to also be business generators. My guess is that over 50 percent of the people at the party already knew about Hullo, and that in many ways makes the party self serving, not promotion.