Real estate is the second oldest profession on Earth.

Real estate is the second oldest profession on Earth. For that reason, when you’re building a new concept in an old space that is both mobile first and enterprise saas, you have to be patient. Sales pipelines are long, exposure is short-lived, and stakeholder meetings can take weeks to marinate. Our accelerator program set us up with a unique opportunity to have a booth at an event, CRE Tech Intersect, featuring more than five hundred of the movers and shakers in commercial real estate in New York City. We were excited to meet so many key people and to forge some new connections with investors and potential customers. There was, however, one key misunderstanding. We initially understood that Skyrise would share a booth with two other companies at the trade-show-esque event. The accelerator would be the umbrella and the three of us, seven people in all, would share a table and do a meet-and-greet kind of event alongside our peers.

When we arrived in NYC, we found out we’d have an eight-foot long booth to ourselves in a room full of influencers. We had no swag to give away, no posters, no standups, no projectors, no demo monitors, and, quite frankly, we had no budget.

Our goals were to attract positive attention, get the media interested, spark questions from our peers, and to potentially find both investors and potential clients.

A day before the event in our modest (read shit-hole) AirBnB in Queens we discussed lots of ideas. Chief among these ideas was trying to quickly get some branded swag. I have a love/hate relationship with swag. I’ve spoken at twelve conferences in ten countries in two years and I have a collection of pens, Field Notes, lanyards, business cards, tote bags, water bottles, koozies, cell phone accessories, t-shirts, and stickers so deep that I need hip-boots to wade through them. I’ve even had some really interesting swag like the seed ball that would grow flowers I got from Content Strategy Forum 2014. That said, I can’t name one company that gave me the swag. There is swag on my desk right now and I can’t even be bothered to turn my head twenty degrees left to figure out what company gave it to me.

Maya Angelou’s quote that, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” has never been so true than it is in the conference and trade show swag game.

With that in mind, my co-founder and I ruled out swag as a possibility. It was too expensive, too last minute, and too blah to matter to us. Our second idea was to include food or beverages at our table, but the event was catered and lots of booths were giving away Halloween candy (because nothing says commercial real estate like an Almond Joy!). We briefly considered purchasing a monitor or TV only to return it later.

In the end we settled on what was, in hindsight as well as at the time, a stroke of genius.

We would take cash money out of our bank account, spread it all over the eight foot long table, and have one message — Stop leaving money on the table!

We went to a Wells Fargo and took out $300 dollars in singles. We giggled as we stuck these giant wads of bills into our backpacks.

Our hypothesis was that laying the money all over the table would attract eyeballs. In the heart of Manhattan few things stop people in their tracks like cash and we knew that the CRE industry is about as capitalistic as it gets. The money, we thought, could be easily taken from the bank and easily returned to the bank, which would effectively cost us nothing while offering us the positive attention we were after.

The idea was crazy…and it worked!

The event was a great success. It was well organized and well attended. We met with press, colleagues, and interested people from all over North America and Europe. By the end of the event, we’d scheduled a meeting with a potential client the next day! That meeting took place and we scheduled a follow up. As a side note, that meeting took place where they filmed the infamous yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. It was nice to think about Leonardo DiCaprio making it rain while we discussed our product considering the confidence it took to successfully pull off what we pulled off.

A few days later when we’d returned home I received a LinkedIn inMail from a guy I’d never met saying he’d heard from an investor that an image of our “marketing stunt” was circulating on Twitter and that he’d like to talk with us and also intro us to the investor.

We put all the money back in the bank. No one took any money from us although many people asked if others had stolen and if we were either on our way to or coming from a strip club (we weren’t and aren’t). I’d never really felt like I had a great handle on guerilla marketing or growth hacking until that conference and now I’m actively considering new ways to capture the attention of our target market. It was an eye-opening experience that we’ll laugh about for years to come and hopefully we’ll laugh all the way to the bank with new investors and new customers.