Lessons on Shooting Your Shot.

The most important industry conference of my life started today.

BattleFin Chicago 2024 — the prestigious conference focused on Al and Alternative Data for Financial Services and Consumer/CPG companies. If you were to design the perfect conference for my startup, this would be it.

A bunch of the top hedge funds and data companies would be attending. Citadel, CME, Uber, Microsoft, Databricks. A literal who’s-who in the world of institutional AI and data.

Which made for the perfect opportunity for an AI alt-data startup founder like me to get in front of prospective clients. If we could sell our data to a top fund or consumer enterprise, it would completely change our business. The big break we’ve been looking for.

I found out about the conference a week ago from a friend. One of the biggest conferences in our industry was coming to MY city in only a few days time? Immediately I knew I had to be there.

I went to the website to check tickets. That’s when I saw the bad news.

The tickets to get into the event started at $9,000 — about 10x my max budget. And worse yet, even if I could find the money to get in, the tickets were fully sold out.

I’d found out too late. All my excitement turned to dread. I blew my shot.

But guess what?

I got in anyways.

Here’s how:

Once I saw the ticket price and ‘sold out’ notice on the website, I took to LinkedIn. I tracked down every employee at BattleFin I could find and messaged them. Here’s my message to the COO:

I had nothing to lose.

Then I went to their company page and tracked down their most-recent couple posts about the event and liked/commented on each of them.

I needed them to notice me and consider letting me in.

And after a few days of waiting in angst, I got a response:

Todd had seen one of my recent videos on my LinkedIn and asked if I’d be willing to make one about the conference in exchange for getting a free ticket. The video he saw? Me talking about building my dumb coleslaw app with AI…

Ultimately, he is a business man. He recognized this as a low-risk, low-cost opportunity to promote the conference, and knew full-well that I would be forever grateful to him if by going to the conference I was able to close a business deal. A win-win.

I was ecstatic, to say the least.

Not only did I successful negotiate my way into this conference, but somehow the stupid 1-min videos I’ve been recording and posting to LinkedIn have resulted in some real-world tangible value.

Moral of the story:

Shoot your shot and put yourself out there. What do you have to lose?

Peace,

Ramsey