I hate to admit it, but I hadn’t heard of Slush until I moved to Finland.
That changed almost immediately when I moved to Helsinki in February of 2021. Having entered the tech scene in Helsinki by starting at Supermetrics, I quickly learned that the community was still reeling from a COVID-induced hiatus from what had grown to become Europe’s premier tech gathering. To add to my surprise, the fact that this massive event was hosted in Helsinki really demonstrated my ignorance of Finland’s reputation as a hub for technological innovation within the European tech community.
I knew that this is was an event that I wanted to attend, but didn’t know how best to approach it. Supermetrics was unlikely to continue sponsoring booths at the event since we had recently graduated from the “startup” camp to the “scale-up” circles. Individual passes to the event are eye-wateringly expensive if you aren’t actively raising or investing and I certainly didn’t qualify for student pricing. I let the 2021 event pass without giving it too much thought, although I won’t deny that I felt a pang of FOMO for not going.
In 2022, I got my shot. Supermetrics has a well-established partnership with Google that has been developing since the early days of our products on Google Sheets and Looker Studio. The development of our BigQuery product took the market by storm and really got Google excited about the potential for our collaboration. With Google Cloud prominently featured in the Slush lineup, they had invested in their own stage right next to the main stage. They featured a rotating cast of industry leaders and experts speaking to the CEOs, CTOs and VPs of engineering they were trying to lure into building their next product on GCP. Luckily, through this partnership, I was invited to join this cast.
The event was everything I expected. The expo center where I had received my governmentally administered COVID-19 shots just a year earlier had transformed into a laser light-filled tech extravaganza. I’ve been to conference halls that are a mile long and smell of shoe leather, so the radical departure from this dreary expectation overwhelmed my subdued expectations.
Innovation was in the air. Through the Slush app, I had the opportunity to book meetings with attendees in advance based on shared interests. I even had a Norwegian cycle fitting company reach out to me to ask about how I might use their AR iPhone app to dial in my bike fit. The names of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, the likes of which I’m not used to seeing in Europe, adorned the name badges of the scores of Americans trolling the corridors. The big audience talks were engaging and insightful rather than dry vendor-led pitches. Needless to say I was impressed by the curation of audience and content.
Luckily, despite the high standards set by the conference, my presentation was well received. My key message to founders was that, no matter how exciting your tech is, customer acquisition cannot be an afterthought for your digital product. I highlighted the key challenges associated with building and growing a product: finding product market fit and building a successful customer acquisition engine. Headwinds associated with digital privacy and the deprecation of third-party cookies will continue to make the latter far more difficult for emerging companies looking to establish a foothold against incumbents.
My conclusion was simple: GCP has the set of tools that allow you to innovate rapidly to maximize your chances of finding product market fit while simultaneously being the best-positioned cloud-provider in the ecosystem for customer acquisition given Google’s dominance in advertising. The message was well-received by the audience which gradually filled up through the course of my presentation. I was pretty happy that each audience member had a set of headphones to have my voice piped directly into their ears, as the rock concert-like laser light show from the main stage would have made communication impossible otherwise.
The Google team was thrilled with my message and delivery. Members from both the Google Ads and Google Cloud team loved the fact that I was able to link Google’s core competencies from different business areas together so cleanly. Little did I know that this would pave the way for my invitation to the biggest presentation of my career in the not-too-distant future.
After that, it was time to enjoy the rest of Slush and, of course, the (in)famous afterparties. There are some things that just aren’t fit for publishing, but let’s just say that myself and the Supermetrics Slush team had a great time that evening.
