What we learnt at our first expo
After giving a put-together-at-last-minute talk two months back at the Cape Town meetup, I decided to put all of the things we learnt going to rAge in a (very long! sorry!) blog post to be able to share it with the rest of MGSA. I hope it's useful to someone on the forums.
I'm just putting the intro here because, as I said, it's incredibly long. Click on the link at the bottom to get access to the whole thing but please do comment here and give any feedback you have or ask questions :)
*Pictures of cats included.
I'm just putting the intro here because, as I said, it's incredibly long. Click on the link at the bottom to get access to the whole thing but please do comment here and give any feedback you have or ask questions :)
http://www.retroepic.com/what-we-learnt-at-our-first-expo/ *RetroEpic Software is a company that’s built on the understanding that not one of us employed here is fully an expert at anything. We’re all still learning and we’re very much expected to try things that we haven’t done before and – possibly – fail at them.
Of course, if you learnt something from the experience, then it was never a failure and definitely not a mistake.
Our first attempt at showing our games at an expo was always going to be, well, messy. This is exactly the point, which is why we decided it would be a fantastic idea to take the opportunity to be part of the Home_Coded stand at rAge in Johannesburg in October this year. Rather than wait until we felt ready to take on a much larger expo overseas, as well as the costs that involves, we could get an idea of what would be involved while keeping our risks low.
This meant that our goal when we decided to be part of the rAge expo was literally to learn what it involves to be part of an expo. We didn’t expect any bump in sales – and in fact we didn’t expect to even make up for the costs involved in getting us there and back – and as we already have a strong relationship with the press in the country we didn’t see this as a necessary networking event (though, of course, getting to chat to our press in person was still a great experience).
This post, then, is going to focus specifically on the things we learnt from our very first experience of expo-ing for RetroEpic.
*Pictures of cats included.