25 May The WebSummit Experience

We wanted to share with you what our experience attending The Web Summit was like. As a preview – **spoiler alert**, we are already looking forward attending next year’s edition:

Investors

The Web Summit was a great opportunity to meet investors, Angel investors and VCs, willing to collaborate with your company’s success. Scheduled roundtable meetings, stand pass by opportunities and pre-scheduled meetings were the best chances we all had to pitch and show off our great products and services.

Customers

Attendees and other startups approached our stand constantly creating a great source for potential customer leads. Thankfully we had customers interested in all our products and services.

Competition

The Summit was also a great chance to get to know your competition better. By pre-looking at the startup list or just walking by Alphaville, you could learn a lot about what everyone else is doing and where the market is heading to.

Networking

Meeting other startups, CEOs, COOs, CTOs, Developers, attendees and almost everyone you can imagine was a great opportunity to create networking bonds that could eventually lead to future opportunities.

Speakers and Conferences

Over 350 world class speakers enlightened us with top level conferences in the Summit across 7 well organized stages. Even more you could meet some of them who were curious enough to wonder the Alphaville arena. For us the highlights were:

• Tony Hawk (professional skateboarder, businessman, investor):
  • “the first time I approached software developers and took pitch meetings for a video game, I was met with a wall of ‘no'”.
  • “I did stuff I felt came naturally, stuff that was intuitive.”
• Drew Huston (founder and CEO of Dropbox):
  • “I hate email, it hasn’t really evolved since the 70’s when it was born”
• Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX founder):
  • “the product just made you happy, that’s what we are trying to do”
• Niklas Zennström (founder of Skype and Kazaa):
  • “if I can do something that really works, why not make it at an international basis”
• Nasdaq opening bell with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny

Just to name a few…

Media

Media reporters were interviewing startups along Alphaville, so the Summit is a great opportunity to get excellent international exposure.

Pitch Contests

There were several pitching stages and contests organized during the Summit event. Depending on wether your company was selected to pitch, you were given the opportunity to showcase your brand and products, and even participate in the WebSummit Pitching competition.

Workshops

Excellent top level workshops were organized during both days of the event. You could apply to workshops that were of your interest, and attend afterwards, gaining state of the art knowledge in 45 minutes time.

Acceleration

Along with everything else The Web Summit teamed up with TechStars, the number 1 accelerator in the world, to give workshops to startups to better prepare their pitch for the WebSummit. Cualit was able to squeeze in TechStars event in Cork, and found it to be really productive.

Feedback

What a better place to get feedback than a 10000+ people conference. For us it was a tremendous opportunity to test our products live with thousands of attendees and get precious feedback to make them even better.

Food

As if this wasn’t enough, The Web Summit, in partnership with Good Food Ireland, brought over 60 Good Food Ireland-approved businesses from the four corners of Ireland to provide guests with tastings of Irish food from some of the country’s top chefs, bakers, farmers, cheese-makers and fishermen, as well as beverages from top artisan craft brewers and juice-makers

We can assure you, if you arrived on time, this was not an opportunity you would like to miss.

Night

Entertainment was not going to be left out of the The Web Summit as they organized night events for every day: Opening party, the Night Summit, and Closing Party. Over 30 of Ireland’s best established and up-and-coming music acts took the stage at the Night Summit, ranging from rock to electro, gospel to funk, and much more.

Wrapping it up

Overall it was a great opportunity and privilege to be selected to attend a top level event such as The Web Summit, expose our brand and showcase all our product and services to the world. We are definitely looking forward to next year’s edition.