Speed Marketing: Helping startups with their growth in person
TLDR; It’s like speed dating, but talking about business growth and marketing with vetted mentor.
If you are still here, I’ll go into more detail about GrowthMentor speed marketing events 😀
With the GrowthMentor platform, people connect 1:1 via online calls to talk about all aspects of business growth with a heavy emphasis on growth marketing. Here’s a breakdown of the topics discussed in the last year’s 12,538 calls:
Our speed marketing events simply take away the online aspect and plop people down face to face.
We generally host this type of event in our hub cities as we need a good number of Mentors to make the magic happen.
Ingredients for a great speed marketing event
- A city with a vibrant tech scene
- At least 5 Growth Mentors keen to participate
- A large area where we can have stations set up and folks can move around with ease
- An additional networking area for those not participating
- Local entrepreneurs and marketers who are ready to take things to the next level
Aticco has hosted two of our events and the most recent one at their Bogatell – Coworking en Poblenou location (pictured above) was perfecto!
Who are they for?
Attendees of these events mirror our actual community members in that they are majority founders, with marketers coming in close second.
Speed Marketing events offer a unique and highly beneficial platform for founders and marketers, providing them with a rare opportunity for face-to-face interaction with experienced mentors and industry peers.
These events act as a melting pot of ideas and strategies, where attendees can gain immediate, personalized advice and insights tailored to their specific business challenges.
Vassia Axarli : CMO @ FerryhopperThe speed marketing session in Stone Soup from Growth Mentor was very helpful and to the point. I had the chance to implement some of the comments and advices in social media and Google Ads at Ferryhopper!
What happens during the event?
All of the mentors have a ‘station’ where they stay put. We do a quick intro in the beginning where the mentors share their main expertise and then other areas they are down to speak about so that the participants can target who they want to speak with. If you are all about SEO and someone is an SEO specialist, you’re going to want and try to start with them.
The participants pick a station to start at and then when 15 min is up, we yell ‘SWITCH’ and everybody moves on to the next station. It’s that simple!
Our meetups are always a casual environment, but the game like ’round-robin’ aspect of it really lightens the mood and you’ll see people scrambling to get LinkedIn contacts before moving to the next station and laughing about it all.
Depending on the size of the group, participants may not get to speak 1:1 with every single mentor during the timed meetings, but that’s the beauty of the GrowthMentor platform – they can meet 1:1 with any of the mentors they would like at any time.
Why do we host these gatherings?
It’s fun! The atmosphere is always buzzing and I do believe a bit of this is because of the game like atmosphere with timers and movement every 15 minutes. Most of us in the tech world are used to sitting at desks all day and sadly not having too much face to face interactions with real live humans, so this is a real treat.
We do a lot of networking meetups that are casual and totally informal – come as you please- type of thing and those are great, but this definitely is more lazer focused on getting actionable advice. If you attend a happy hour meetup, for sure leave you’ll leave with some new contacts, maybe a new client or 2 and hopefully some renewed motivation after meeting with other innovators. With the speed marketing events, I 100% guarantee that you are leaving with a handful of actionable advice that you can start implementing the next day.
Where do Speed Marketing events happen?
All of the speed marketing events we’ve done so far have been in Coworking spaces.
As we share a common audience of tech professionals it’s a win-win for coworking spaces to host this type of event. They can invite all of their members as an added perk for their community. What startup founder doesn’t want a free evening full of actionable advice from seasoned professionals?!
Our host in Tbilisi was the uber trendy Fabrika Hostel. This venue is a hostel, a co-working space and home to numerous small businesses.
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When do they happen?
If all of the previously mentioned ingredients are present, we’re totally down to set one up. If we want to get down to the nitty-gritty of when, we’ve found Wednesday nights and Thursday nights to be best for meetups or events like this.
Robin Schuil : Founder @ VendoraThe event was very useful. It was really nice to get some fresh outsider opinions on our marketing strategy and helped us realize that we need to invest more time in influencer marketing and link building. An example of that is a survey about secondhand shopping for Vendora.gr that we just created. We plan to share the results with the public once we’ve collected a good amount of responses.
How can I participate?
Let us know that you are interested! If your city isn’t a hub, you can connect face to face (via the magical interweb) with over 600 mentors – most of them opting to give their time for free to our members.
If you are coworking space or accelerator who wants to set this up, hit me up on LinkedIn! You provide the space and I’ll bring the mentors and the social media promotion 🙌
To keep up to date with all of our events, follow us on LinkedIn
