The NY Tech Meetup (NYTM) is the world’s largest meetup. Once a month, 800 people come to NYU’s Skirball Center to watch demos from a dozen new startups and hear announcements from people like NYC’s Mayor and other organizations about the growth of the ecosystem. I’ve been attending the NY Tech Meetup since 2009 and it’s a beacon of light in the NY Tech industry.

Last September, my colleague Grace Ng and I (well, mainly Grace) had the opportunity to present QuickMVP in front of 800 members of the NY Tech community. Here’s our story.

How to Get a Spot to Present at NYTM

You need to apply online to present at the NY Tech Meetup. Before you apply, I recommend hustling and networking to get feedback and see if you are a good fit for the show. Grace and I are pretty connected in NYC so we even asked the organizing team for feedback directly. Most events are based on “Themes” so we when we applied the organizers had been wanting to do a “Tools for Startups” theme for a while. We just happened to apply at the right time.

How to Prepare Your Demo for NYTM

For me, the best approach to giving a new talk or presentation is always to practice in front of others, ideally a live audience. A few weeks before the NYTM, Product Hunt was having a meetup at Alley NYC (where we work) and my friend Harry Raymond (the organizer) asked me to demo. The event was packed and it just so happened Nate Westheimer, the host of the NY Tech Meetup, was attending. Nate basically has a PhD in tech demo presentations, so I lucked out that he was there and gave me some amazing context-specific feedback. Nate also directed me to his blog post on how to demo. Much of it boils down to making your app look like magic and involving the audience directly if you can. One of the best NYTM demos of all time was when Jon Britton presented Twilio and live-coded an app on stage that made everyone’s phone ring in the audience. Finally, I watched whatever NYTM demos I could find on YouTube to get an idea for how to design our presentation.

Deciding Who Should Present

As CEO, I would be the default for this presentation, but I decided I wanted Grace (co-founder and creative director) to present the demo instead. My stage persona is intense and authoritative, like a wrestling coach who doesn’t want to hear you whine about doing five more laps around the track :). Grace on the other hand has a more empathetic and friendly personality, a much better fit for this event. It was also natural for us to divide and conquer with her focusing on nailing each word of the script while I researched past demos and decided how to show the product.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Grace and I practiced the 5 minute presentation around 100 times. The week before we were on Skype several nights going through it 20 to 30 times. The night of the NYTM, we showed up at the venue an hour early and practiced another 30 times. My friend Jason Saltzman was at the event to support us and also to coach us on some final touches. In all of my speaking experience, practicing in the actual setting where you will give a talk is an essential part of memorization.

Our Demo

Watch this video of our demo, I think it came out pretty flawless.

The Impact You Can Expect From NYTM

Our sign-ups spiked for about three days after our demo from Sept 10th to Sept 12th. Before hand our organic signups were around 7-8 signups a day for our $30 / month plan. NYTM helped us get an extra 25 signups meaning a quick $750 in MRR. This is almost as much as a blast we did to 70,000 people the week before and doesn’t take into account people who waited to sign-up. At the end of the day it probably added $1-2k to our Monthly Recurring Revenue.

NYTM also helped us get noticed by key influencers and press in the NY Tech community. Mayor DeBlasio was at the event watching the demos and Grace was interviewed by PBS and Entrepreneur Magazine. We’ve also used the video from our demo to send to our investors and potential customers and any time we want to do a demo event we have an awesome presentation ready to go.