Last week, several members of the VA Partners team were able to attend the Collision 2019 conference in Toronto. It was a massive event with multiple areas for presentations, hundreds of exhibiting startups, and almost 30,000 attendees. Here are a few of the highlights from Collision 2019.
Great presentations
You needed to be organized to make the most of Collision 2019. For me this meant planning out your presentation schedule. I was able to take part in 4 presentations at the SaaS, Start-up University, and Healthcare stages. One of the better presentations I saw was from Des Traynor from Intercom. It was based on the importance of customer retention for SaaS companies. It was a great presentation filled with targets and onboarding tips.
Local Canadian Tech Organizations
There were many of the Tech organizations that had booths and also had some of their tech start-ups displaying their solution. My top three includes York Region, Calgary, and Edmonton. Calgary had extra features including meeting their Mayor and a happy hour with Alberta beer. The Hamilton Economic Development team organized a trip for tech companies to see Hamilton on that Friday. It was great to see different regions of the country supporting their tech community.
New marketing platform
At VA Partners we are always on the look-out for new sales and marketing tools for start-ups. It was interesting to learn more about the new Mailchimp Marketing Platform. Mailchimp is our go to email marketing tool. The new platform includes a simple CRM, ad capabilities, and landing pages. There are future plans for websites as well. We will continue to explore this and the fit for our clients.
Networking
Collision 2019 was a popular event for the start-up community in Southern Ontario. The networking at Collision was excellent. It was great to meet new contacts and old ones that I have not seen in some time. I was able to book a few follow-up meetings directly from the conference.
How did you find Collision 2019?. Please leave a comment about your highlights and experiences.
