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Tell HN: A Demo Day without the investors

140 points by tagspace ↗ HN
When Harry (my co-founder) and I started Trevor.io we obviously needed customers. We'd often bonded over Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale", so it was a no-brainer that every month, like clockwork, we'd get on that €50 Ryanair flight to London, to spend a week pitching potential customers / partners / anyone who would listen. We tried as best we could to rotate which lucky friend or family members' sofa we would be sleeping on each time, so as not to out-stay our welcome.

One event that we ended up doing again and again was called TechHub Tuesday Demo Night. It was an epic monthly event (first Tuesday of every month) hosted by the most sought after startup co-working space on London's famous "Silicon Roundabout" (yes, us English can't quite fill a valley yet with our startup scene, but we sure can fill a roundabout!). The event was an opportunity for up-and-coming startups to show (not tell) what they had built, and get instant feedback from the community. Importantly, you had to have built something (an app / website / platform / etc.) and, unlike competing events, it wasn't about trying to pitch for investment. It was a welcoming, enthusiastic audience of fellow entrepreneurs, builders and product lovers. Pitching your product here was always a buzz.

Unfortunately, like many other great ventures, TechHub London was one of the unlucky victims of Covid 19. In the summer of 2020 they slipped into administration, and with it TechHub Tuesday Demo Night. We've very much missed it - both presenting and attending - so we have decided to do something about it.

We are pumped to announce that next Tuesday we are launching our very own Tuesday Demo Day with a twist:

- it will be 100% virtual, - and 100% free.

This means that you can join us from the comfort of your couch. Bring a beverage of your choice and be ready to be give our startups the feedback and advice they need to take themselves to the next level.

We would be absolutely delighted if you would join us (https://hopin.com/events/trevor-demo-day-global).

52 comments

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hjkm
Excited about this!
gwnywg
I was attending Tuesday Demo Night, we had our office in Cisco incubator that was located at Wilson Street. I registered, very curious about this event :)
tagspace
Nice! Hope we can live up to your expectations :)
mothsonasloth
I am in Manchester, is this for people in the London "bubble" only?
tagspace
Everybody welcome - from anywhere :)
nicgrev103
Love it. Great for there to be something for people who want to pitch but aren't looking for investment.
chayesfss
outside $$ can be a bad influence on passion projects. Stuff that might make a buck or two, yea okay but man can they kill a passion project and angood engineers idea.
alejoar
Just signed up! Might hit you up to present sometime if you plan to keep doing this every month.
tagspace
Nice. Yeah, please do. Would be great to have your demo next time!
WildGreenLeave
After reading your post halfway I was ready to book a ticket to London just to attend this event and meet other entrepreneurs trying to get feedback on their product. Sadly enough I continued to read that it does not exist anymore. I hope that at some point it gets replaced by another offline event, be it in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin or anywhere else in Europe.

Up until that moment (or up until you decide to do an offline event too :-)) I am joining. Just signed up! :)

tagspace
Yeah - it's hard to beat a good offline event. Hoping to do an offline version soon too :)
ricardobayes
Hard to beat Web Summit in this regard. In my opinion people in the UK had always a weird arrogance towards startups. Everyone you talked to thought you are stupid not to be in real estate or finance like everyone else.
smithcoin
Metabase is free if self hosted, you charge per query.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

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catchmilk
Is the plan to do this in regular intervals? If so, would be great if we could get a recurring entry for the calendar.
tagspace
Good point! Will see what we can do
bsenftner
I love the idea of a place where a global reach of entrepreneurs can pitch directly to the London investor community, via a virtual event open to anyone. That it itself is a worthy startup.
ricardobayes
The London investor community is/was basically non-existant unless you already have significant traction. Idea-level funding doesn't happen, ever. There are much better opportunities elsewhere.
dt3ft
Love the idea! This could turn into a regular event! I may even sign up to demo as well :)
0xPersona
I'd love to attend an in person version of this in London. I've long felt that we need more events like this in the city.
dom96
Interesting! Just signed up :)
yaseer
Great Idea! : )

Aside on TechHub London:

Unfortunately, their descent started well before COVID. We were a tenant in our last company before TechHub moved location in 2019. It was a terrible building - an order of magnitude worse than the competition. The community started to leave from Q2 of that year and COVID was just the final blow.

Real shame too, as the community had some character missing in most office spaces. Best of luck cultivating something like that again, virtually!

tagspace
Thanks for the inside scoop yaseer. And yeah, fingers crossed places like TechHub will thrive again.
breck
Awesome! Registered.

Will you record and put on YouTube async as well just in case family stuff pops up and I have to miss?

tagspace
Nice!

We may do for future events ... but we really want this event to have a community feel, so being there in person is what it's all about :D

breck
> in person

But didn't you say virtual?

I really think YC has nailed demo days with their latest iteration. Short 15 minutes update from the leaders, then you watched the 60 second pitches from their companies at your leisure online.

tagspace
Perhaps in-person was the wrong word. "Present" is perhaps closer to what I meant. We want our presenters to have an audience. We want audience participation / questions / feedback. We want to create a buzz. ;)

Not saying that YC's format doesn't achieve that. It's just different.

But either way - totally see your point on posting it online afterwards.

breck
> We want audience participation / questions / feedback

Gotcha. Breakout rooms I assume? This makes sense with breakout rooms where you shard the audience into small groups of ~4 or so. Then you get (N/4)^2 interactions

Otherwise it's a waste of time as you only get 1*N interactions.

tluyben2
Excellent idea! Will sign up! Hope for these offline events to come back to London and other eu places. Even the offline demo events I used to be in the jury of are still not back or just went out of business.
mojuba
Excellent, just signed up!

How do you select the speakers?

tagspace
Great question!

We have been blown away by the amount of interest, today alone, in presenting at next month's event.

We think that the most important things should be:

- you've actually built something (not just an idea on a slide deck)

- you can demo it (we want to see behind the curtain)

- what you're doing is uniquely interesting (not just another ride sharing app)

- the problem you're solving is also understandable by a non-technical audience

- and, of course: your team are passionately bursting with excitement for what you're building :)

Apart from that, we'd ideally like to find a way for anybody to speak.

cheptsov
An amazing idea! Applied as a speaker.
tagspace
Nice! We've had a lot of interested speakers, which is awesome.
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thih9
Are the tickets still available? When I click on "Register", I see one option of "Free" with the text "Closed".

And if the tickets are no longer available, will there be more?

nailer
Same here. Additionally - will you be running more in future? I'm travelling to Lisbon for Solana Hacker House on Nov 1.
rogansage
The capacity has been expanded so you should be able to get in now! And there will be more events. If you sign up to the event page, we'll let everyone know about future events :)
dekervin
Same here, i wanted to register. But it says closed.
rogansage
The event capacity has been expanded now - if you want to join it should be possible from the event page :)
mooreds
We had something like this in Boulder, CO, USA for years. It was called the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (BDNT). First place I ever presented (my presentation was on Google Web Toolkit). It was magical, lots of great questions, a mix of entrepreneurs, technologists and community members. BDNT was partially sponsored by the university. I remember going to one in the late 2000s and thinking "feels like the go-go days of the late 1990s are back" as the beer and apps flowed and the schmoozing happened.

Here's an interview from 2013 with the BDNT founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb4HJQCtRYQ

As I recall, it wasn't sustainable. The organizers tried so many different ways of getting it to monetary sustainability (charging, sponsors, events, ads) and they just couldn't do it. So once the labor of love became just labor, it petered out. I think it had a run of over a decade, though.

Here's my blog with reports from the BDNT (I took detailed notes a few times): https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/category/new-tech...

I think someone else restarted it recently, but haven't attended: https://www.meetup.com/bdnewtech/