Baby’s First Conference
Three representatives from the team at DarwinApps will be attending our first professional conference — HubSpot’s INBOUND 2016 — next week (November 8–11) in Boston.
We’re extremely excited about the opportunity, given it’s right down our alley. DarwinApps serves as the dedicated engineering development team for the marketing departments at fast-growing companies. Our clients, which include Namely, Meltwater, and Hightower, depend on us to engineer and manage the front- and back-ends of their integrated digital marketing platforms.
Finding our niche providing managed development services for marketing teams wasn’t quick or easy, but now that we’ve finally found our ideal customer — marketing teams at rapid-growth companies who need flexible, elite engineering services—we think it’s extremely important to take advantage of this 4-day “melding of the minds” of global inbound marketing professionals.
So, after huddling together with the team (and practicing our terrible Beantown accents along the way), the DarwinApps road squad is heading up the East coast with the following in mind…
Business Development? Maybe…But Not the Ultimate Goal
It would be disingenuous to say that we will be shying away from business development opportunities at a conference full of employees from prospective clients. However, going into the conference with the primary goal of locking down one or more customers would be incredibly naive as well.
Connecting with marketing professionals who can give us insight into how we can best continually serve our customers will be the paramount objective. These are the people who have felt the pain points that we have seen time and time again, whether it be from website glitches, server failures, or obstacles in optimizing their environments.
Direct feedback on their previous experiences with developers and development teams — both good and bad — will give us invaluable insight into how we can continue to refine our process in working side by side with clients.
Keeping on Top of Our Client’s Industry’s Best Practices
An equally important goal in attending INBOUND will be to stay on top of the latest and greatest best practices and tools used by inbound marketers and marketing teams.
Now that we’ve deciphered what our perfect client looks like, we know it’s imperative to keep up with emerging trends in enabling processes to improve client inbound traffic and leads. If we can fully understand the overarching and underlying goals and methods employed by our customers, we can continue to fully curate our engineering efforts to be as efficient, up-to-date, and as flexible as possible.
When it comes to INBOUND 2016, breakout sessions like “The Future of Content Consumption”and training courses that involve marketing platform integration are definitely circled on our schedules, as we look to discover that amazing new extension or brilliant automation trick everyone else will just be stumbling upon a year from now.
Speakers I’m Looking Forward to Seeing
For my money, INBOUND 2016’s featured speaker list is on par with the best tech conferences in the world, but there are a few of the featured speakers whose presentations I’m especially excited to see.
Hearing Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and inbound marketing/social media expert, will presumably be a veritable gold mine for the DarwinApps team in attempting to reach two of our current overarching business objectives: scaling our business upward and using social media to do so.
Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah — co-Founders of HubSpot — obviously attract great interest not just from myself, but from my colleagues and fellow attendees. HubSpot’s ubiquity among our clients is well-evident, and I’m interested in hearing their insight on a ‘meta’ level on how they’ve managed to succeed so greatly with their sales and marketing products…using, well, successful sales and marketing tactics.
Finally, there’s Reshma Saujani — Founder and CEO of nonprofit association Girls Who Code. For those who don’t know who she or what Girls Who Code is, I suggest taking a quick look at her brief bio on the INBOUND 2016 website. An attorney and Democratic Congressional candidate in her previous life, her nonprofit work is dedicated to helping close the gender gap in the field of technology. As I spent my first six professional years in the realm of government and politics only to leave for the greener pastures of the tech sector, I can identify with Reshma’s path — albeit with much fewer accolades to my name thus far!
See You There!
Any INBOUND 2016 attendees who would like to connect ahead of the conference, during, or after the fact, please don’t hesitate to do so. I can be reached at jeff@darwinapps.com, or on LinkedIn here. I’ll be attending with our two of our Co-Founders, Sergey Kisly and Vlad Lokshin, so feel free to connect with them as well. Looking forward to seeing everyone!
