Collision From Home: how we prepared for the biggest remote tech event of the year
A few weeks ago, we attended Collision From Home, one of the world’s largest tech conferences. Here’s what we learned, and what we got from it.
From the 23 to 25 of June, we joined Collision From Home conference. It was an excellent opportunity to align us with the latest technology trends and connect with some of the most influential companies and personalities in the industry.
Due to the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Collision team had to reimagine the whole conference in just a few weeks. They were able to build a streaming platform from scratch and host hundreds of live talks featuring startups leaders, international policymakers, and notable sports, cultural, and entertainment figures.
With more than 32,000 attendees from 140 countries, 630+ speakers, and over 1000 startups to do business with, Collision From Home for us was as big and transcendent as you can imagine.
Adapting to new game rules
If you have been in this industry for some time now, you probably know how this type of event used to be. Thousands of people gathered in a single location, talking loudly and wandering around like kids in a toy store. Well, Collision From Home was nothing like that.
Early this year, when it became apparent that COVID-19 would make it impossible to hold a live conference, Web Summit’s CEO, Paddy Cosgrave, and his team pivoted towards an online event. And boy, they pulled it off.
In only eight weeks, they developed a conferencing platform with a heavy focus on video streaming and networking. Yes, It had some minor issues and glitches here and there, but it was a successful product overall, given the pressing circumstances.
But Collision wasn’t the only one who had to adapt to the new game rules. So did we.
Our original plan was attending Collision as we did in previous years. We intended to send our team to Toronto to connect with startups that needed help to build or grow their digital products. But the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
Fortunately, at Bixlabs, we have embraced remote work since the beginning. That put us in a privileged position. It allowed us to keep our business running mostly as usual and also helped us quickly adapt to the new situation. We had to reimagine our strategy from scratch. So, we gathered our team (remotely, of course) and defined, designed, and implemented a new, digitally-based approach.
In less than three months, we redesigned the visual identity and experience of our website, making it easier to navigate and to interact with. We redefined our lines of service to make them more transparent and straightforward for our clients.
We also published new case studies featuring the most challenging projects we recently faced, and we reworked the presentations we send our clients to explain who we are, how we work, and what processes we follow.
Taking into account the characteristics of the event, we defined a new networking strategy designed to take advantage of Collision’s web platform and optimize how our marketing and sales team contacted different startups during the conference.
What we learned and what we gained from Collision From Home
We believe Collision From Home was a very promising kickoff for the future of remote events. The fact that we couldn’t physically participate in the conference helped us realize that we need always to be able to adapt our plans to any emerging circumstance and overcome the hurdles.
In this sense, Collision From Home was an excellent opportunity to test new ways to reach out to those startups and organizations we would like to work with. Although the outcomes of our strategies are yet to be seen, the experience was undoubtedly valuable for us and left us many learnings.
Collision helped us reassure that remote interactions are a powerful way of exchanging ideas and making meaningful connections. We know that there are many things to improve, but we are now definitely better prepared for the future.