Sponsoring Conferences
Our experience at Mergify with conference sponsoring.
Last week, I wrote about my experience attending conferences.
Over the last year, we've tried to expose Mergify at conferences to reach out to developers. We’ve done various conferences in Europe and the US—the largest being QCon San Francisco 2023 and Devoxx France 2024. We sponsored those events and ran booths for several days all day long to talk to engineers.
The pattern we’ve seen has been interesting. First, QCon San Francisco was the smallest it’s been over the last few years, as far as I can tell. While 1,400 people were expected, counting the number of people seated in the keynote session revealed less than half of that were present. We talked to tens of engineers without great success. It turns out that trying to sell your tool for an early startup like Mergify is not efficient at all in such a place. Companies tend to do that when they are way larger to raise brand awareness and penetrate the market more efficiently.
At our stage, this was a lot of money spent for barely any gain.
As Mehdi, my cofounder and CTO says, “no great engineer will go to a conference to find the next tool they’ll need.” Indeed, I don’t believe any good engineer should wait 6 months for the next conference they will attend to find a product to their technical problems.
Doing market education, as we tried, over a booth, is utopian. Here’s the typical dialogue that would happen:
– Engineer attending the conference: “Hi! What does Mergify do?”
– Mergify staff: “We offer merge queues for your GitHub repository. Do you know about them?”
– Engineer attending the conference trying not to lose face: “Yeah, for sure!”
– Mergify staff: “Do you use one in your team?”
– Engineer: “No, we don’t need one.”
– Mergify: “How so you’re happy merging outdated PR or running a lot of CI on every PR?”
– Engineer: “We… dont’… well… err… what are we talking about exactly?…”
The truth is, 95% of the engineers we talked to have no clue what a merge queue is. Actually, 80% of them don’t know anything about Git besides the basics (i.e., commit and push), and chatting for 10 minutes over a booth is not a good place to educate them.
Speaking at conferences is a way better strategy, as the advent of the Developer Evangelist role has demonstrated over the last years. If well executed, it’s cheaper and can have a far better outcome than sponsoring an event.
You could imagine that sponsoring an event buys you a ticket to speak, but it’s not the case by default. Some conferences allow you to buy speaking time in special, dedicated rooms, for example, but you usually don’t get any special treatment over the regular CfP.
I really need to talk about that CfP game.