Well, sorry it took me a few moments to provide a recap to the MN State Fair event. It was a long day, long night and I had some family things to attend to this morning before finally getting back to my computer.
Overall I would say the event was a success! I'll be honest and admit there were some things that could have gone better. At the same time we had some good surprises too. So yeah, there were both good and bad surprises, which during an event like this would be expected.
I'll start with the unexpected "bad stuff" first and end with the positive second.
So just to remind people - our Vericoin booth was part of a bigger booth titled the "MN World Fair Expo 2023" aka Expo 2023. The purpose of Expo 2023 is to raise awareness/donations for Minnesota to host the World Fair in 2023. So part of the reason they were excited to have Vericoin be part of the booth was to display "future technology" like digital currencies and 3D printing (for example). So with that being said - they had our Vericoin booth tucked behind everything going on with Expo 2023. I was hoping we'd have more front and center space, which we did not, which was disappointing. I took to MS Paint with my pro graphics design skills to show what the set up looked like:
The brownish/red rectangles were the entrance to the building. Red lines was the way traffic was moving. The blue rectangle was our booth. The black circles on the outside black line was were Expo 2023 posted informational stations. And the orange circles were Expo 2023 volunteers.
With them being all over the place we had no chance to get people to actually come into the area and talk to us about Vericoin. So as a result we had to ditch hanging out behind a table and just force ourselves front and center to stay engaged with everyone walking by. The blue circles where were my friend Jake and I were mainly standing.
So with all that in mind - we basically stood front and center with the laminated Vericoin Flyers, business cards and our phones with VRC loaded into them in hand. Nothing really changed in the sense we talked to as many people as we could about VRC. The disappointing part was the fact we couldn't pull people in to sign-up for the drawing, which to be honest no one really was interested in doing anyway. Which meant we were unable to collect any information to follow-up with people on a mass scale.
So this second "bad piece" was
by far the biggest issue of the whole day. There were times when no one could use their phones! We did not see this coming but due to the mass amount of people in such a compacted area (there were seriously tens of thousands of people everywhere) - there were times when no one could get 3G/4G connections to work. It was taking anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes for people to actually get a connection and download the VRC wallet, at the best times! There were a handful of people who were patiently trying (one family stuck around for probably 15 minutes) but just straight up couldn't get a connection at all. We tried walking outside, going around the corner but no matter where you went there were just mass amounts of people everywhere!! So that was a huge unexpected surprise. For those who were interested in collecting some VRC but couldn't receive any - I handed them my personal information and asked them to contact me personally. There were about 5-6 people who seemed interested in following-up - we'll see if they do.
I will also admit when I am wrong. Both altcoinUK and buy4crypto talked days before the event how handing out $1-5 was so insignificant people wouldn't be interested. Being that I work marketing events all the time and see the hoops people will jump through to receive: a sticker, a free candy bar, a free pen, etc. - I thought we'd have no problem handing out $1-5 free dollars in Vericoin. Well they were absolutely correct that people had no interest in that. We had to bump the price tag up to $25/person and even then most people weren't interested in talking. So instead of doing the high volume/high mass interaction as we had planned - we changed gears and did the quality vs. quantity piece. The only people we handed out VRC to were people we spent a good 5-15 minutes talking to us which was really the time it took for them to get the wallet downloaded, account registered, and Vericoin sent over anyway. As a result - depending on how many people do actually follow-up. We have almost half our VRC stash 5,900 left over from the event. I'm going to leave this for another discussion but I am thinking there is 1 of 2 solutions to having this left over VRC. I'm happy to provide a refund to those who donated. Surprisingly enough I know where about 85% of the VRC came from - so given the fact we started the day with a little less than 12,000 VRC I can pretty much give back everyone 1/2 of what they donated. Or I can rollover this stash for the next event I have coming up on 9/4/14. I will only take feedback from those who donated as far as what to do with this. I am open to either idea.
Whew... ok. So I want to turn my attention towards what went well. For the matter of time/space I am going to be more brief on the good parts. I know I was a bit heavy on the details explaining what didn't go as planned above. But again, please realize we had a wonderful day and really felt the event went well. I am not just saying that because I ran it - it was an awesome day!
First piece being: we had some REALLY good conversations with a lot of people. Even though we didn't hand us as much VRC as we anticipated don't let that fool you into thinking we didn't talk to a lot of people, because we did! iPhones, dumbphones, no phones obviously kept many people from receiving any VRC during the event. We made sure to get them the proper information to read more about Vericoin, showed them the website, and gave them contact information to follow-up with, with any questions.
A big positive was the fact all the Expo 2023 volunteers were willing to help us pass out Vericoin business cards. So even though they did get in the way of blocking our booth and really had their own agenda - they were still nice in helping us pass out business cards and were helping pull people in to hear about Vericoin. That was a nice surprise. Also with the remaining 100-150 business cards we had - the Expo 2023 booth said to leave them there and that they would pass them out over the remaining 2 days.
Probably the best surprise of all was that we had a great interview with the Minnesota Secretary of State who was at the event briefly to help support Minnesota businesses. This is something that was recorded and will be edited down. As soon as I have a copy of this piece I will be passing it along to the Vericoin community. The best part of the interview was that he specifically continued to refer to Vericoin (not bitcoin) as a way to help businesses grow. All in all we recorded for about 5 minutes. I'm not sure what the final piece will look like. We also had some great photos during the day - which again are coming from multiple sources and will be passed along when all collected.
I also talked to a few people who seem interested in investing some money into VRC. This is not on any large scale but I do believe as a result of the event we will be getting a few more thousand dollars invested in the coin. I am following up with these people personally and am going to help them get accounts set up to move forward.
I am going to just leave it at that for now. I know this is (another) long post by me. So much time and effort went into planning this event and I really do appreciate everyone help! I don't want to just forget about it and move on but at the same time - I have the next event for VRC coming up in 5 days! 9/4/14 I am hosting my bitcoin meetup's group next meeting to discuss all alt coins, obviously I'll be talking VRC - and should have a very engaging night, given the fact all people attending are already involved in the bitcoin community.
Hey Thanks for the time you put into this project. Veri decent of you to do. +1000000
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