B2B encompasses a very wide range of buyers, with very different allowances for risk. The article talks about what would be commonly known as Enterprise Sales, which is marked by long sales cycles, high prices, and a lot of legwork in selling. It is possible to sell B2B software where the buyer is a single person within an organisation, or a small team.
Those are much easier to sell to, because there is a much smaller amount of buy-in needed from the organisation as a whole. Because the stakes are so much lower than in an enterprise-wide deal, an MVP may be perfectly acceptable to your customers.
You can have an MVP even in enterprise B2B if the problem is very apparent and easy to define, and the MVP is easy to deploy.
I've created an MVP for a B2B product and have success in selling it by making it as easy as possible to deploy. This reduces the amount of stakeholders required to sign off on the product. The key is to be able to deliver value (solve a problem) without a huge man-hour investment on the customers end. After demonstrating value, I can shift the focus to a deeper integration and have more success because I have more people on my side to push it internally.
I think the author actually means "Enterprise B2B" when they say "B2B".
I run a B2B SaaS company. We sell to businesses. Most of them have 5-500 employees (SMB/Mid-Market). Last year we built a very simple MVP and quickly started selling it.
If you want to do this too, the buyer and idea must be compatible. The idea also has to be something the buyer wants.
Buyer: As far as I know, hotels aren't big on buying new, simple services from startups. Try brick & mortar / mom & pop stores, startups, tech companies, etc.
Idea: Tablets are a big startup cost. You're asking your first customers to pay a lot more than ours did. Or you're taking a big loss. This immediately makes it harder to get going.
Demand: Do hotels / guests even want tablets in rooms? What burning problem is this solving, how did you learn that, and why is this a great, cost-effective solution?
Hotels are definitely tough buyers, not the most tech-savvy customers. My initial idea was not in-room tablets, I hoped to achieve the same thing through apps that guests could download on their phones. I approached hotels, and even got one to pilot it, but there were many issues with that, I can go into details if anyone's interested. I pivoted into in-room tablets after that.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that hotels are not able to properly collect guest data and upsell to guests. And today's guests expect personalized experiences, but hotels can't offer that in scale. In the long run, it might turn out that in-room tablets are not the best platform, but there is no doubt that the hospitality industry is going in this direction. Looking at a website like hospitalitytech.com, this is pretty much all they talk about.
As a guest I would love the ability to order room service/food through a tablet, rather than calling the phone, and hoping the other person can understand what I'm saying.
As a hotel owner, yeah, I'm not too sure... it might just be an additional cost, and not worth the ROI.
The funny thing is that every Lean Startup founder who delays shipping struggles with excuses like this. Most customers in any market (consumer, SMB, enterprise) do not want to take a risk. He's ignoring the important advice in Moore's Crossing the Chasm [1] and Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany [2]: the people who will buy a very early stage product are a tiny fraction of your total market; you have to aggressively find them.
That process is definitely different in an enterprise market. For whole-hog adoption, giant companies will want a mature solution. So instead you find ways to derisk it. Maybe it's a pilot program with a larger player. Maybe it's proving out the technology in an SMB context. Maybe you just find one mom-and-pop hotel who pays you not in money but in their time and data. Maybe you start with a single floor or even a single hotel room into which you preferentially book people who you think will be early adopters.
The M in MVP is for Minimum, and that applies not just to the product, but to the context of use. You start as small as possible, just enough to test your hypotheses. The smaller your tests, the faster you learn.
He makes another rookie mistake here: "I still need to buy the same number of tablets to rent to hotels, and can’t even really discount the product that much." Lean Startups are not cheap startups. It cost Toyota millions to build the first Prius, but they did not sell it for millions. That's fine, because the point of your early MVPs is not to cover the expenses. It's to learn things, including about what people will pay. In Lean thinking you price based on value, not cost, and then work hard to minimize costs while maintaining value.
> The funny thing is that every Lean Startup founder who delays shipping struggles with excuses like this.
Honestly, that's the whole reason why I wrote that article. I'm struggling with that thought as well, but I don't think you're completely right on that.
> Maybe you start with a single floor or even a single hotel room into which you preferentially book people who you think will be early adopters.
This is exactly the plan I'm going with actually. But still, sourcing tablets, sourcing funds to buy them, and then developing an MVP takes time. It can't be too simple that it will be detrimental to their guest satisfaction, finding the balance is key, that's why the initial version is only room service.
> Maybe you just find one mom-and-pop hotel who pays you not in money but in their time and data.
Again, that's what I'm going after. Some people say that I should already charge them, and finding hotels that would pay for that at this stage is a waste of time, that's the point I was trying to make in the article. Finding a hotel that will pay with their time and data is exactly what I'm going after.
It's a hardware startup that is selling to Hotels. There are barriers to entry, but nothing inherent to being a B2B startup.
Bootstrapped B2C hardware companies face similar challenges.
Hotels are only one business vertical, there are hundreds of thousands of business verticals, some of which won't require as much upfront product investment to gain traction.
It boils down to this: hardware startups need funding to get off the ground.
Here is my unsolicited advice:
Find yourself a business co-founder who has experience in the hotel hospitality space. If you can convince them of the value of your idea, and the sign on, their job is to find a few hotel chains to do a paid-for pilot. This person could even be your first investor.
In lieu of that, raise a friends and family round to generate enough funds to get the hardware you need, and target a subset of rooms at a hotel (luxury room suites). You won't have to buy nearly as many tablets, and their patrons already expect a premium experience.
I have experience in the hospitality space, but I'm definitely looking for a co-founder. Bahrain is a small place, and my search hasn't been going very well so far.
> target a subset of rooms at a hotel (luxury room suites)
A pattern I've witnessed on some enterprise B2B startups is that they start out with the founder having a pre-existing relationship with a decision maker at a company.
That guy is going "my business has this problem" over a beer and the founder goes "I can solve that for you" and they work out a deal. The founder builds the MVP that solves the customer's problem and incorporates so they can get paid.
The founder iterates and continues getting paid and at some point uses the cash to hire one of those expensive salespeople who knows how to chase down decision makers.
We took a similar route. I was the customer of a business that was clearly hurting from a lack of automation and processes.
I let them know that I build software and am interested in their industry. I asked them if they would be willing to try my app and provide feedback. They said yes!
So, I got to work formulating a MVP feature list. I presented it to them and we iterated back and forth for a while. Then, I started building. More months of feedback and iteration ensued.
Once they’d been using the product for ~6 months we launched to the public.
Fast forward 4 years and we have ~1k customers.
It can be done! The first step is to talk to people, relate to them, and empathize with the issues they face in their business.
This problem gets even worse with enterprise sales. How to validate a market or use any of that "Lean Startup" wisdom when the sales process for a single customer is 6 months+, requires multiple meetings and getting 10's of the customers staff, across multiple departments, on-board? It's very hard to find any single, concrete measure of success.
Try adding a hardware product into the mix. Not only do you have to deal with super long sales cycles, each iteration of your product takes months, if not years, to release. You can't just whack together an MVP and make it better over time unless you're happy to keep doing upgrades in the field. B2B hardware products and the "Lean Startup" ethos are very hard to marry!
The article reads like the author still hasn't tried selling it. B2B MVPs work just as well as B2C product. Sometimes they work even better with the correct client giving big $$$ to build some features with priority.
From a startup founder who also had a "We will perfect the product and then it will sell itself" mentality, which was one of our major mistakes: Start stelling! Now!
Even with a perfect product the sales process will only get only 20-30% easier. Even with the perfect product you will need the same optimized sales pitch and the same optimized sales presentations.
> Sometimes they work even better with the correct client giving big $$$ to build some features with priority.
You're spot on with this. I worked in a small B2B startup for a bit over 18 months and that was always our route to market. Develop the stem of the idea, polish it enough to make it convincing in a demo, and approach a big company. They sponsor development by buying licenses, and in exchange they get a say in the development process, the features we prioritize/drop, etc. The result is a win-win: they get a product that fits their needs, we get funding and credibility.
Actually, it's not uncommon for enterprise sales to involve signing an MOU/contract without the software being ready. You don't even need an MVP. Maybe a POC or strong reference customers of related nature.
Yep. A client of mine is approaching it this way now. I’ve been building the prototype/MVP for the past couple months. The founder (my client) is an ex-lawyer and the customers will be law firms like the one where he worked. The product pricing will be in the range of $50-100k per customer. The sales strategy is to pitch the early customers with the MVP, get them to commit $50-100k for the mature version of the product delivered in two months, and use that money to fund further development. We talked to some companies that successfully approached b2b sales in the same way. I’m interested to see how it works for us.
"I don’t doubt that there might be a few hotel executives that are willing to bet on this, and sign up at this very early stage at a discounted price, but contrary to the belief of many others, this is really unlikely, and it’s not worth spending too much effort on considering the expected return."
Not worth the expected return? This sounds like a case of you wanting 'instant gratification' and to be making huge amounts of money from the start, which is bogus. With a few customers you will:
1. Be getting the use cases, bugs, feedback directly from your customers
2. Show you can get some funding and are building something people will pay for (or if they drop you, you'll understand why)
3. Have numbers, knowledge, and customer referrals which will VASTLY help getting more customers. I.e. when you are in the sales pitch, saying "X hotels have been using this for a year, and have generated Y additional sales, and have learned Z metrics about their hotel guests" etc.
As I mentioned in the article, being a solo-founder doesn't help.
There are two things I can do with my time.
1. I can go ahead and talk to as many hotels as I can, halting development. At this stage, there isn't even anything that is actually working. I have dealt with hotel sales before, finding decision makers, convincing them, etc. take a lot of time.
2. I can work on finishing the MVP (which is only room service).
Going with the first route, the expected return is way too small. Let's be optimistic, and say one in 30 hotel managers thinks this is super cool, and decides to pay for this thing way in advance. Talking to 30 hotels, arranging meetings, getting them to respond, etc. would take months.
Instead, I can get it to a point where I have an MVP that can be put in a hotel room, which can calculate the ROI it brings, which I can use to justify the cost of the product. This is the path I chose.
(I obviously talked to hospitality professionals to get their feedback, but I wasn't selling them.)
I work at a travel B2B SaaS company, and we roll out MVP products to our clients all the time. I think the key difference between selling to businesses and consumers is the appetite for risk.
So assuming you have a good product, you have to consider two things: commercial terms and SLA. This is a delicate balancing act when you're trying to shop your MVP. You don't want to underprice because implicitly you're saying the product isn't ready for production. You don't want to overprice, and set expectations too high. You also want to be careful about what kind of level of support you're agreeing to with your product. If it's an MVP, are you going to drop support after 6 months if your business can't support itself?
Good businesses consider these things before they sign-on for an MVP product, make sure you have good answers to these questions.
you probably should have at least a chain lined up to work with. or find a var/re-seller that focuses on hotels. unless you are a hotel owner you don't know what their hot buttons are.
for instance if one of your features is guests can see their bill in real-time. that might not be a feature to the owners. they might want the extra revenue of customers not knowing their bill and getting cought up in the experience. the point is you don't know.
your adding features you want not the person buying. again unless you are working with a hotel owner or have sold similar systems or were one in the past.
There's an interesting point to be made about B2C vs. B2B products.
There's a thesis out there, that in order to test the market you can put up a simple website adverstising your yet-to-be-made product and see if you get any subscribers. I feel like this applies to B2C products and low ticket B2B products (i.e. $10 per user per month).
The playing field for a serious B2B product is very different and the MVP needs to be in good shape in order to win and keep clients.
I strongly disagree with this comment (needing an MVP). For a serious B2B product you need a team, sales process and social proof/track record that convinces the customer you will deliver on your promises.
But above all, you need a product which solves a tangible, significant problem for the customer!
If the willingness of a customer to sign a prelaunch sales agreement comes down to the quality of your MVP, something has gone wrong in your sales process and the customer is just looking for an excuse to decline.
Requiring a customer to spend hundreds of dollars to use an MVP doesn't sound like an MVP...
Evrim doesn't clarify what his product is that needs a tablet, so it's hard to offer any specific advice. _BUT_ he should be finding a way to test his product with pen/paper, employee or customer smart devices, or other equipment that the hotel already owns.
> Requiring a customer to spend hundreds of dollars to use an MVP doesn't sound like an MVP...
That isn't the intention honestly, they don't need to pay for hundreds of dollars to use the MVP. I probably was not very clear in the article.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that hotels are not able to properly collect guest data and upsell to guests. And today's guests expect personalized experiences, but hotels can't offer that in scale. In the long run, it might turn out that in-room tablets are not the best platform, but there is no doubt that the hospitality industry is going in this direction. Looking at a website like hospitalitytech.com, this is pretty much all they talk about.
I considered downloadable guest apps, there were many issues with that. I can get into details if anyone's interested. I also considered smart TVs, but considering I want guests to interact with this at the comfort of their bed, I thought it's not the best solution. Although I'm using React Native for the client, so creating an Apple TV version will be trivial.
It's unfortunate but most of the B2B marketing is done at business conferences I imagine. It's not cheap to setup a booth and I imagine the success rate is not very high.
On the flip side, B2B conferences and tradeshows exist because they're able to give vendors face time with people they couldn't easily meet otherwise.
It's not cheap, the success rate isn't high, but it can be cost-effective. I've spent 20k USD on a small 6x3 feet booth space, but also gotten 40 to 50k USD over the course of a few months from conversations that were initiated at the booth.
Another point to factor in is that enterprise customers by nature have low churn... and that makes the RoI work out in the end.
I actually have limited time working on the development side, so I didn't create a website for it. At this current stage, the chances of a hotel decision maker coming across the solution and deciding to buy it seemed very low compared to the time I needed to put in to put together a decent website.
And I just wanted to rant, I didn't expect it to get this much attention on Hacker News to be honest :)
[+] [-] dantiberian|8 years ago|reply
Those are much easier to sell to, because there is a much smaller amount of buy-in needed from the organisation as a whole. Because the stakes are so much lower than in an enterprise-wide deal, an MVP may be perfectly acceptable to your customers.
[+] [-] mstank|8 years ago|reply
I've created an MVP for a B2B product and have success in selling it by making it as easy as possible to deploy. This reduces the amount of stakeholders required to sign off on the product. The key is to be able to deliver value (solve a problem) without a huge man-hour investment on the customers end. After demonstrating value, I can shift the focus to a deeper integration and have more success because I have more people on my side to push it internally.
[+] [-] Sammi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a13n|8 years ago|reply
I run a B2B SaaS company. We sell to businesses. Most of them have 5-500 employees (SMB/Mid-Market). Last year we built a very simple MVP and quickly started selling it.
If you want to do this too, the buyer and idea must be compatible. The idea also has to be something the buyer wants.
Buyer: As far as I know, hotels aren't big on buying new, simple services from startups. Try brick & mortar / mom & pop stores, startups, tech companies, etc.
Idea: Tablets are a big startup cost. You're asking your first customers to pay a lot more than ours did. Or you're taking a big loss. This immediately makes it harder to get going.
Demand: Do hotels / guests even want tablets in rooms? What burning problem is this solving, how did you learn that, and why is this a great, cost-effective solution?
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
Hotels are definitely tough buyers, not the most tech-savvy customers. My initial idea was not in-room tablets, I hoped to achieve the same thing through apps that guests could download on their phones. I approached hotels, and even got one to pilot it, but there were many issues with that, I can go into details if anyone's interested. I pivoted into in-room tablets after that.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that hotels are not able to properly collect guest data and upsell to guests. And today's guests expect personalized experiences, but hotels can't offer that in scale. In the long run, it might turn out that in-room tablets are not the best platform, but there is no doubt that the hospitality industry is going in this direction. Looking at a website like hospitalitytech.com, this is pretty much all they talk about.
[+] [-] dmartinez|8 years ago|reply
The room was expensive though, I prefer AirBnB with super hosts.
So definitely not a feature that alone would get me to come back.
Source: I stayed there.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|8 years ago|reply
As a hotel owner, yeah, I'm not too sure... it might just be an additional cost, and not worth the ROI.
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
That process is definitely different in an enterprise market. For whole-hog adoption, giant companies will want a mature solution. So instead you find ways to derisk it. Maybe it's a pilot program with a larger player. Maybe it's proving out the technology in an SMB context. Maybe you just find one mom-and-pop hotel who pays you not in money but in their time and data. Maybe you start with a single floor or even a single hotel room into which you preferentially book people who you think will be early adopters.
The M in MVP is for Minimum, and that applies not just to the product, but to the context of use. You start as small as possible, just enough to test your hypotheses. The smaller your tests, the faster you learn.
He makes another rookie mistake here: "I still need to buy the same number of tablets to rent to hotels, and can’t even really discount the product that much." Lean Startups are not cheap startups. It cost Toyota millions to build the first Prius, but they did not sell it for millions. That's fine, because the point of your early MVPs is not to cover the expenses. It's to learn things, including about what people will pay. In Lean thinking you price based on value, not cost, and then work hard to minimize costs while maintaining value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
Honestly, that's the whole reason why I wrote that article. I'm struggling with that thought as well, but I don't think you're completely right on that.
> Maybe you start with a single floor or even a single hotel room into which you preferentially book people who you think will be early adopters.
This is exactly the plan I'm going with actually. But still, sourcing tablets, sourcing funds to buy them, and then developing an MVP takes time. It can't be too simple that it will be detrimental to their guest satisfaction, finding the balance is key, that's why the initial version is only room service.
> Maybe you just find one mom-and-pop hotel who pays you not in money but in their time and data.
Again, that's what I'm going after. Some people say that I should already charge them, and finding hotels that would pay for that at this stage is a waste of time, that's the point I was trying to make in the article. Finding a hotel that will pay with their time and data is exactly what I'm going after.
[+] [-] balls187|8 years ago|reply
It's a hardware startup that is selling to Hotels. There are barriers to entry, but nothing inherent to being a B2B startup.
Bootstrapped B2C hardware companies face similar challenges.
Hotels are only one business vertical, there are hundreds of thousands of business verticals, some of which won't require as much upfront product investment to gain traction.
It boils down to this: hardware startups need funding to get off the ground.
Here is my unsolicited advice:
Find yourself a business co-founder who has experience in the hotel hospitality space. If you can convince them of the value of your idea, and the sign on, their job is to find a few hotel chains to do a paid-for pilot. This person could even be your first investor.
In lieu of that, raise a friends and family round to generate enough funds to get the hardware you need, and target a subset of rooms at a hotel (luxury room suites). You won't have to buy nearly as many tablets, and their patrons already expect a premium experience.
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
> target a subset of rooms at a hotel (luxury room suites)
This is exactly the strategy I'm working on.
[+] [-] smel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crdoconnor|8 years ago|reply
That guy is going "my business has this problem" over a beer and the founder goes "I can solve that for you" and they work out a deal. The founder builds the MVP that solves the customer's problem and incorporates so they can get paid.
The founder iterates and continues getting paid and at some point uses the cash to hire one of those expensive salespeople who knows how to chase down decision makers.
[+] [-] tnr23|8 years ago|reply
I am pretty sure this pre-existing contact was a great helper. Far beyond being the first customer.
[+] [-] jonbarker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|8 years ago|reply
I let them know that I build software and am interested in their industry. I asked them if they would be willing to try my app and provide feedback. They said yes!
So, I got to work formulating a MVP feature list. I presented it to them and we iterated back and forth for a while. Then, I started building. More months of feedback and iteration ensued.
Once they’d been using the product for ~6 months we launched to the public.
Fast forward 4 years and we have ~1k customers.
It can be done! The first step is to talk to people, relate to them, and empathize with the issues they face in their business.
[+] [-] erispoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boffinism|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|8 years ago|reply
One example is you can arrive at a simple and focused problem that has enough value that the customer would be willing to sign a paid pilot.
[+] [-] hobofan|8 years ago|reply
From a startup founder who also had a "We will perfect the product and then it will sell itself" mentality, which was one of our major mistakes: Start stelling! Now!
Even with a perfect product the sales process will only get only 20-30% easier. Even with the perfect product you will need the same optimized sales pitch and the same optimized sales presentations.
[+] [-] jclos|8 years ago|reply
You're spot on with this. I worked in a small B2B startup for a bit over 18 months and that was always our route to market. Develop the stem of the idea, polish it enough to make it convincing in a demo, and approach a big company. They sponsor development by buying licenses, and in exchange they get a say in the development process, the features we prioritize/drop, etc. The result is a win-win: they get a product that fits their needs, we get funding and credibility.
[+] [-] hboon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chatmasta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nartz|8 years ago|reply
Not worth the expected return? This sounds like a case of you wanting 'instant gratification' and to be making huge amounts of money from the start, which is bogus. With a few customers you will:
1. Be getting the use cases, bugs, feedback directly from your customers
2. Show you can get some funding and are building something people will pay for (or if they drop you, you'll understand why)
3. Have numbers, knowledge, and customer referrals which will VASTLY help getting more customers. I.e. when you are in the sales pitch, saying "X hotels have been using this for a year, and have generated Y additional sales, and have learned Z metrics about their hotel guests" etc.
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
There are two things I can do with my time.
1. I can go ahead and talk to as many hotels as I can, halting development. At this stage, there isn't even anything that is actually working. I have dealt with hotel sales before, finding decision makers, convincing them, etc. take a lot of time.
2. I can work on finishing the MVP (which is only room service).
Going with the first route, the expected return is way too small. Let's be optimistic, and say one in 30 hotel managers thinks this is super cool, and decides to pay for this thing way in advance. Talking to 30 hotels, arranging meetings, getting them to respond, etc. would take months.
Instead, I can get it to a point where I have an MVP that can be put in a hotel room, which can calculate the ROI it brings, which I can use to justify the cost of the product. This is the path I chose.
(I obviously talked to hospitality professionals to get their feedback, but I wasn't selling them.)
[+] [-] levisegal|8 years ago|reply
So assuming you have a good product, you have to consider two things: commercial terms and SLA. This is a delicate balancing act when you're trying to shop your MVP. You don't want to underprice because implicitly you're saying the product isn't ready for production. You don't want to overprice, and set expectations too high. You also want to be careful about what kind of level of support you're agreeing to with your product. If it's an MVP, are you going to drop support after 6 months if your business can't support itself?
Good businesses consider these things before they sign-on for an MVP product, make sure you have good answers to these questions.
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharemywin|8 years ago|reply
for instance if one of your features is guests can see their bill in real-time. that might not be a feature to the owners. they might want the extra revenue of customers not knowing their bill and getting cought up in the experience. the point is you don't know.
your adding features you want not the person buying. again unless you are working with a hotel owner or have sold similar systems or were one in the past.
[+] [-] Blackstone4|8 years ago|reply
There's a thesis out there, that in order to test the market you can put up a simple website adverstising your yet-to-be-made product and see if you get any subscribers. I feel like this applies to B2C products and low ticket B2B products (i.e. $10 per user per month).
The playing field for a serious B2B product is very different and the MVP needs to be in good shape in order to win and keep clients.
[+] [-] louisswiss|8 years ago|reply
But above all, you need a product which solves a tangible, significant problem for the customer!
If the willingness of a customer to sign a prelaunch sales agreement comes down to the quality of your MVP, something has gone wrong in your sales process and the customer is just looking for an excuse to decline.
[+] [-] jonwachob91|8 years ago|reply
Evrim doesn't clarify what his product is that needs a tablet, so it's hard to offer any specific advice. _BUT_ he should be finding a way to test his product with pen/paper, employee or customer smart devices, or other equipment that the hotel already owns.
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
That isn't the intention honestly, they don't need to pay for hundreds of dollars to use the MVP. I probably was not very clear in the article.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that hotels are not able to properly collect guest data and upsell to guests. And today's guests expect personalized experiences, but hotels can't offer that in scale. In the long run, it might turn out that in-room tablets are not the best platform, but there is no doubt that the hospitality industry is going in this direction. Looking at a website like hospitalitytech.com, this is pretty much all they talk about.
I considered downloadable guest apps, there were many issues with that. I can get into details if anyone's interested. I also considered smart TVs, but considering I want guests to interact with this at the comfort of their bed, I thought it's not the best solution. Although I'm using React Native for the client, so creating an Apple TV version will be trivial.
[+] [-] cialowicz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrydag|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siddharthdeswal|8 years ago|reply
It's not cheap, the success rate isn't high, but it can be cost-effective. I've spent 20k USD on a small 6x3 feet booth space, but also gotten 40 to 50k USD over the course of a few months from conversations that were initiated at the booth.
Another point to factor in is that enterprise customers by nature have low churn... and that makes the RoI work out in the end.
[+] [-] isalmon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PanMan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evrimfeyyaz|8 years ago|reply
And I just wanted to rant, I didn't expect it to get this much attention on Hacker News to be honest :)
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewartjarod|8 years ago|reply