Ruby, Pirates and Rhum at ArrrrCamp 2014

Ahoy mateys,

As planned, our team went to ArrrrCamp 2014 in Ghent for the opening of Translation.io’s public beta.

One thing we did not mention, though, is that we were their main sponsor… unintentionally! Indeed, no one else opted for the same level of sponsorship as we did, and we thus became their biggest sponsor. Some of the participants may have thought that we were largely financing the conference.

The organizers graciously gave us the opportunity to present our product during a 5-minute lightning talk scheduled right before one of the wonderful presentations. As stressful as it may be, we were delighted to be able to pitch Translation.io to all 250 participants at once!

Here are the slides we had prepared:

The organizers had also arranged a place for us to display our flyers, roll-up banners, and all our branded gift mugs. Some people seemed interested by our product and very quickly understood the benefit of using GetText (for those who were still to convince).

Full Disclosure

The conversation rate from our presence at ArrrrCamp was not as successful as we had hoped, with only a few new registrations, but we suppose that few developers actually had an urgent need to translate an application right at that moment. Since the feedback we received was very positive, we hope the participants will remember our product when they’ll be in need of an efficient way to translate an application.

Ultimately, we believe we have gained “karma” among the community, so we have that going for us, which is nice. What’s more, providing support to a conference as cool and fun as ArrrrCamp is already a success in itself. Now we’ll have to get back to work on our web marketing strategy. Though not as fun as meeting people at conferences, it’s actually a more effective way to reach future beta testers and clients with a much more satisfying conversion rate.