Conferences are rapid-fire customer research labs

Bad coffee, sore feet, and repetitive conversations where you collect business cards from people who will ignore your follow-up email on Monday. Why would anyone, especially a cash-strapped startup, spend money on an expensive conference booth when you could be comfortable back in the office, doing real work?

Trying to get someone on a Zoom call can take weeks of emails and calendar juggling. At a conference, you can kill or confirm ten before lunch.

Treat conferences as compressed discovery cycles where you run experiments that would normally take months. Whether you’re leading product or sales, booth conversations give you raw, real-time market data: unfiltered objections, live reactions to framing, and fast validation of customer-problem fit. The constraints of three days, fifty conversations, and no second chances forces a clarity you will not get from a gentle call with a marginally disinterested potential customer who is too polite to tell you the positioning makes no sense.

Traditional user research reaches saturation around 7-14 interviews, according to Nielsen Norman Group. At a conference, you can easily have 30-50 meaningful conversations in three days, each one letting you explore variations on language, customer fit, and product positioning.

There are three areas worth exploring: the language that makes the problem understandable, the customers who actually feel it, and the product shape that might fix it. Your product’s maturity will influence how you prioritize them, but if you do it right, you’ll end up touching all three.

Speak the right language

Booth conversations are onboarding role-play, the kind where you are still figuring out which story to tell and in what order, and where a raised eyebrow or a polite nod tells you more than the words themselves. You try one frame after another, check how the conversation energy rises or fades, trying to get to the pitch that others can repeat back to you later without your help. Lists of features might get you part of the way, but outcomes definitely will, and once the outcome resonates you can gently map back to capabilities without losing the thread.

This is also where product managers tend to excel. The job is to sit in ambiguity, listen for how people describe the problem, mirror back their words, and keep adapting the frame until the value lands. It’s that “middler” muscle: not pure selling, but translating between what exists today and what could exist soon, being honest about gaps and trade‑offs while keeping the outcome legible. Jason Lemkin points to a similar early go‑to‑market skill; the same instincts make PMs unusually effective in these conversations.

Validate the right customer

You can triangulate the buyer landscape faster than you expect. Who actually feels the pain today, who quietly owns the budget, and who will smile supportively right up until they block you. It becomes obvious which company profiles lean in and which politely drift away, and the simple question “what would this replace?” surfaces the real competition, which admittedly is often the status quo with all its inertia. When you meet multiple people from the same company, circling back with a slightly different framing becomes its own experiment. You learn who lights up, who grows cautious, and who ultimately engages with your proposition.

Iterate toward the right product

The lack of structure is the feature. You can start with the problem, go round and round on the outcome, and keep the implementation soft around the edges until there is clear interest. Hypotheticals work when they are treated as hypotheses—“we’re considering…”—rather than as quiet commitments you will regret later (promise debt). The discipline is in translating their own words back to them, letting them correct you in real time, and noticing how your outline reshapes itself after each conversation.

Prepare real hypotheses

Go in with a few honest hypotheses you want to test: the pains you expect to hear (and how urgent they really are), the positioning you believe will matter against the alternatives, and the features you suspect will carry the weight of the value proposition. For each hypothesis, have one or two questions that would nudge the conversation toward a clear yes or a useful no, and be willing to throw out your list on a really good tangent. Write them down before you go—“we believe [customer segment] experiences [problem] when [context], and will adopt [solution] if it delivers [outcome]“—so you know what you’re actually testing.

Take useful notes

Details blur after the tenth conversation, and then the eleventh sounds like the third with a different logo, so capture the things you cannot reconstruct later: the exact phrases people use when they explain what breaks today, the triggers that set the pain off, the workaround they are slightly embarrassed to admit, and the small org details that will matter when you try to follow up. If you promised a deck, a demo, or an intro, write it down while the promise is still warm.

What success looks like

You are not trying to close on the floor; you are trying to come back with language that people echoed without prompting, a narrower ICP and a couple of clean disqualifiers you can use early, and a short list of product bets that now have just enough evidence to order sensibly without pretending certainty.

You’ll leave with validated insights about your market that would take months to gather through traditional research methods. For early-stage companies, that insight is often worth far more than the booth fee.

Turn it into a backlog

The things you learnt only matter if they change what you build next. Block a few hours within a week while the conversations are still fresh and turn the notes into real choices. If several people used the same phrase, it belongs in your messaging. If multiple companies described the same workaround, that’s your real competition and you need to understand it better than they do. If a feature you thought was important never came up, it quietly moves down the list.

You went in with a few bets and now you know which ones held and which didn’t. Update the backlog, share the new language with the team, and keep a record of what no longer fits. The goal isn’t to act on every idea but to let the learning shape what you do next. Better positioning leads to better conversations, better conversations lead to better product choices, and the next event becomes more valuable because of it.