Taking over a 48-hour startup competition taught me how to get clients

I run a small consulting business on the side, and lately I’ve been thinking about what’s actually gotten me clients, as opposed to what I assumed would. The thing I keep landing on is something I did at 20, for an event I didn’t even start.

I entered it first

In 2010 I was a student at RIT. Two friends had started a competition called RIT48: pitch an idea Friday morning, build it over 48 hours, demo it Sunday. I competed in the first one. My team built a website for designing and sharing résumés. When RIT’s news office asked me about it the following year, I said it was “a great way to test the waters and actually build something that’s real.” I still think that’s the best description of it.

After that first year I got to know the two founders, and the next year I took it over. I ran it in 2011 and again in 2012. The first person I told about taking it over was a professor, Professor Weeden. She’d seen it the year before and she gave me her full support. I couldn’t have done it without her. She helped with rooms and buildings, got me in touch with other professors, and helped me navigate the school. I even got the university president to open the event.

I didn’t have a vision. I found something small that already worked and decided to run it harder than anyone else would, and I fixed the parts I thought could be better.

I thought it would be a fun thing to do.

How I got GitHub to sponsor a weekend in Rochester

We had sponsors like Microsoft, Mozilla, and GitHub (this was back before GitHub was part of Microsoft). People ask how a student event pulled that off, and the answer is boring: I emailed them, and then I kept emailing them so it didn’t die in someone’s inbox.

Two things helped a lot.

First, once I had one sponsor on board, I told the next one. “GitHub’s in.” That did more than any pitch. Every yes made the next yes easier.

Second, I sold the back of the t-shirt. Bigger logo, more money. Students love free t-shirts, so I knew the shirts would get worn, and I told sponsors exactly that.

Red Bull didn’t like the idea of putting their logo on anything that wasn’t theirs. So they didn’t sponsor. But they showed up with a Red Bull truck and handed out free drinks all weekend anyway, which is honestly a better story.

How I got judges to fly in

I got judges and mentors to come from all over North America to Rochester for a student competition, and all I did was ask.

I asked people if they knew people. I asked for references. When I got a name, I’d pitch them and lay out the plan ahead of time so they knew exactly what they were saying yes to.

I went after alumni, which I didn’t appreciate at the time. The 2012 judges were Pete Karl of Bocoup, Marc Weil of CloudMine, Darrin Nelson of Sirius Computer Solutions, Greg Koberger of Mozilla, and Eric Carlstrom of EverTrue. Every one of them was an RIT grad. They had a reason to come back, and a reason to care about the students in the room. Nobody flies to Rochester in March for a stranger.

The weekend

Friday, 9 a.m., registration, then an opening ceremony in the Center for Student Innovation. At 10:15 every team gave a 60-second elevator pitch to the judges. Then 48 hours.

Free food, free coffee, a lot of sugar and caffeine. Teams were exhausted and you could see how badly they wanted to win. The prizes were cash, plus introductions, plus interviews. The 2011 winners built The Bar of the Day, a one-day discount at a different bar every night of the week, which, for a college town, is about as product-market-fit as it gets.

It was intense, and it was a big success: the local TV station came out, the university wrote it up two years running, the whole thing.

I raised the money from sponsors, from the school, from wherever I could find it. A good chunk of running an event is just finding the money and finding the people, and then the people do the rest.

What happened after

I never pitched anyone or sold anything. But after running it, people came to me.

One group flew me down to New York City, wined and dined me, and asked me to come work on their startup. An RIT alum who’d started DateNight (a service to help busy couples actually go on dates: events, babysitting, the logistics) reached out. The newspaper writers, the TV producers, the anchors who covered the event remembered me, and they covered my other events and launches for years afterward.

Running the thing made me the person people called, and not because I was the best engineer in the room. I was running the room.

How it died

I left school and moved to California. I found people to take it over, and it kept going for a couple of years, then faded out. It was hard to support from across the country, and the people running it leaned on me heavily. I did what I could, but I ran out of hours in the day.

That’s a real lesson too. The thing depended too much on one person. If I did it again, I’d build it to survive the host.

If a 20-year-old asked me

If someone were to ask whether to take over something like this, I’d tell them to. It’s a lot of work. You’ll spend a lot of time double checking things, talking with people, and adjusting. And have fun with it.

Fifteen years later

What gets me, looking back, is that every technique in this story is standard advice for growing a business. Find a thing that works and run it harder, use one yes to get the next, ask who people know, go after the people who already have a reason to care. I already knew all of this. I did it at 20, for someone else’s event, and it worked. I just forgot I knew it.

So that’s the plan for the consulting business. Less pitching. Find the room where the people who’d hire me already are, and be the one running it. That’s what the podcast and the newsletter are for, and it’s the same trick as the t-shirts: show up somewhere people already are, and be the one who organized it.

-Matt

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Coverage

• RIT News, February 2012: RIT48 Looks to Create the Next Big App
• RIT News, March 2011: RIT48 Entrepreneurs Burn the Midnight Oil and Beyond
• 13 WHAM TV segment on RIT48