It has been a surreal experience watching our company grow, since its inception nearly 4 years ago. When I joined in the early days, Traitify (or Woofound as we were known at that time), was a startup in its most pure form. We were a small group of like-minded individuals led by our passionate founders.
Our office was literally a garage, complete with an empty mechanics bay. Located in the Baltimore County town of Middle River, we all had the natural dreams of changing the world, hoping we'd be amongst the lucky ones to survive the rollercoaster ride of startups.
Enter Traitify in 2015, and what an incredible ride we've had, a ride still barely beginning. Thanks to our irreplaceable investors, and extended Traitify family, we've grown more than we thought possible. Our products are utilized around the U.S., we've grown to a team of around 20 people, and even have a "real" office in downtown Baltimore. We also have a small office in Jacksonville, Florida, and people working remotely in a handful of other locations—having originally moved from Los Angeles to work in Baltimore, I'm now holding down the fort in the technology monstrosity that is the Bay Area.
All that to say, the methods we've used to reach out to potential customers has drastically shifted over the years. Utilizing professional and personal connections, our products were embraced by those we could get in front of. We had team members attend events like TechCrunch Disrupt, but always on a smaller scale, knowing we'd have to hit up some larger conferences in the near future.
That future came mid-last year, when we embarked on a heavy schedule of conferences, mostly developer and technology related, to get our Personality API in front of as many engaged eyes as possible. For many of us, we had some reservations about it all — should we really invest capital into designing and build a booth? Is it worth paying that extra little bit to get a few minutes on stage? How much, and what kind of, swag do we need? We rolled with it, under guidance of our newly appointed CEO Derek Mercer, and quickly found success. From small developer events in Chicago and Colorado, to larger scale events like API World in downtown San Francisco.
Yet none of them really prepared us for the king of all events known as CES. CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, is an international showcase of everything incredible being created by various companies around the world. All of Las Vegas gets completely taken over by the event, as you thousands upon thousands of industry professionals are in attendance.
We were apart of a niche section of the expo, called App Nation. While the area we were set up in wasn't the largest we've been in, it still had the largest foot traffic of any previous event. 2,000 people were registered for App Nation exclusively, and any of the near 200k attendees of CES were free to come explore what was on offer.
My throat was near raw after 48hrs of non-stop visitors to our booth, and all of us regretted not wearing more comfortable shoes.
