Denver Startup Week is a celebration of everything entrepreneurial in Denver and is the largest free event of its kind in the world. It is built by the Denver community, for the Denver community. The PlaceWise crew had the opportunity to attend the Denver Startup Week sessions of their choosing this past month - here are a few of the team’s biggest takeaways:
Anna Hogan - Account Coordinator
I found that Jason Bone from Skookum had an awesome talk. He really brought some interesting statistics and situation to light that I found to be incredibly helpful to the retail and digital industry. One thing that we here at PlaceWise are always focused on is the mobile experience for a user, Jason pointed out in his presentation that “52% of customers are less likely to engage with the company because of bad mobile experience.” And if they are having a bad experience the company might never even know. According to Jason, “67% of customers mention bad experiences as a reason too churn. But only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers actually bring complaints to a companies attention.” Over all, we as companies have a responsibility to communicate with our customers and ask them about their experiences in order to be successful because they might not voice it until it’s too late.”
Jonny Pomerleau - Account Coordinator
“Building real relationships as a digital focused brand”, was my favorite event at Denver Startup Week. The new telecom company Visible led this event, and they shared many interesting ways that they are trying to disrupt the telecom industry. Their focus is offering a phone service, where they will have zero retail locations, which means they will have to offer superior customer service digitally to retain consumers.
They have had many innovative marketing techniques that were able to gain a lot of traction and online engagement. One of their campaigns they ran “404 store not found” was used to reinforce that you don’t need a physical store to get great cell phone service. A big reason they decided to have zero retail locations is because they insist that nobody wants to spend time in a cell phone store. This was an approach that I have never seen before, and it was told that it was much less expensive renting vacant store-fronts than using billboards.
Channing Childs - Director of Product
As we look to scale our development team in 2020 I focused on sessions around hiring, team building and culture. Here are some key takeaways from the sessions I attended:
Hannah Wilson - Content Marketing Manager
I really enjoyed the “Quality Over Quantity: How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Budget” session. While the speakers talked fairly high-level about the most common social media platforms, they also provided a few suggestions about custom audiences and content types that will be interesting to implement!
Hannah Roe - Application Engineer
My favorite session I attended was “Imposter Syndrome: The Career Killer And How To Overcome It”. As a self taught developer, Imposter Syndrome is something I struggle with. The session was packed, standing room only! It was great to put everything into perspective and realize that Imposter Syndrome is something that a ton of people deal with, even CEOs and higher ups in great companies.