E-handelskonferencen 2025 and why Expos (still) make sense
Last week, I attended E-handelsekonferencen, as I've done 5-6 times before.
Every year, I think to myself: Does it still make sense to attend these expos, and what's the purpose, when I could spend the same money on ads instead? Because the point of going to these events is to get new customers, right?
Honestly, I'm not so sure. Well, yes, ultimately it's about growing the business, but the chance of walking away from these expos with lots of new customers is slim to none...
Instead, I go to maintain and grow my network, to stay top-of-mind and to keep myself updated.
And this year, I also went with a clear mission: To tell everyone about our new AI Agents, which we launched only one week before the event (but at the time, more than 1/4 of our customers had already created their first agents):
Since starting Herodesk, I've been attending as a regular participant.
It simply doesn't make sense to pay €5-10-20.000 for a booth at such an event. Maybe in a few years, and maybe if they manage to get the supplier:customer ratio to 1:10 or something...
But not yet. Right now, I get much more value from walking around like a human booth myself...
I came home with four meetings with potential customers. Three of them were from the day before, when I was invited to a "networking dinner" with about 30 Shopify shops brought together. Which is the other big thing about events like this. One thing is the event itself, but equally important are all the things happening before and after. Side-events, so to speak... So much magic happens here, too!
I have no idea if it's worth it to be at the event in a sweatshirt like this all day, but I believe in "doing all the small things that don't scale" to get traction and start scaling!
But as I said, it's not all about new customers. For me, it's just as much about (re)connecting with old friends, colleagues and partners in the industry.
Carsten Rose Lundberg, Niels Ralund, Pernille Trieb & the rest of the team at Dansk Erhverv - Digital Handel
Thomas Andersen, my friend who just launched API Genie (apig.com) which connects webshop, erp, wms, etc...
Eric Johnson, Karsten Madsen from Morningscore
Kim Eriksen and the team at DTAILS
Brian Holmgård Kristensen and the team at Relewise
Michael Bobach & Tine Pihl Pedersen from Peak Systems, one of our WMS partners.
Emil Stahl and my ol colleagues from Dandomain
Jimmy Vejlemark from Vetnordic
Klaus Stokbro Andersen and Michael Møller Christensen from YouWe ApS
Martin René Mortensen and Mikkel Kvist Foldager from SmartPack, another of our WMS partners.
Lars Hedal from Hesehus, who I look forward to follow up with to see how we can help each other and our customers (thanks for the "brunner" 😉)
Anders Eilersen (what are the chances of that name?!) and the team at Customers 1st
Thor Lindberg 🟣 from SiteSage, one of our AI partners
Jeppe Østergaard Hansen from Returnflows - soon to be a partner with us.
Magnus Bruun Rasmussen and the team at Cernel, who are also doing awesome stuff with AI for e-comm.
Sebastian Petersen and Emil Ravnholt Kaae from Trendhim
Danny Christensen and Jakob Storgaard from pensopay 💳
Emil Nissen from Blandselvfrø.dk, another of our customers.
Bjørn Eyde and the team from Quickpay
Max Riis Christensen and the team from MakesYouLocal
Ken Primby from Pluspige.dk, one of our customers (who had an amazing talk on stage about how they use AI in their business)
... and so many others I met throughout the day.
And from that point of view, it's a no-brainer and definitely worth it!
Next year, I hope to get the chance to speak about customer service on one of the stages.
A whole event about e-commerce with no focus on customer support is crazy, considering how big a part of any e-commerce's daily operation it is.
So, let's try to fix that.
In the meantime, I'll keep building awesome software that actually does the job 😉
