People frequently ask me in the current situation where travel is restricted and in-person engagement is limited: how do you still manage to do sales and generate new leads for your conference?

My answer was: well, mainly via LinkedIn. 

I am a very active user of Linkedin as I believe it is the principal platform helping you grow your professional network while the other social media platforms are more for informal interactions. LinkedIn shows you the awesome new research people are working on, their latest (professional) life updates, exciting job opportunities, inspiring entrepreneurial adventures, but also some thought-provoking failure stories. 

Many times you reach out to people on LinkedIn with various ideas based on their area of work and domain expertise – you invite the HR to recruit, the security engineer to share his research to the community, the junior professional to up their skillset, or the senior manager to do a panel session. 

95% you will not have success. Why? Because people are busy, it’s not the right time for them to engage in a discussion with you, or your idea is simply not their priority at this point. But in the remaining 5% when you DO get success, all feelings of failure will vanish and you will just feel a sense of gratitude and accomplishment. 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Hacker News
  • Gmail
  • LinkedIn

 

At Hardwear.io, we encourage responsible discourse to strengthen the security of smart devices. That’s why we came up with the HardPwn Contest, in which vendors provide us with their devices to be tested by our attendees in a controlled environment. Through this, attendees who find vulnerabilities get recognition and rewards by the OEM, while the OEM is happy as their product is tested & secured by the best hardware security folks out there.

To find such OEMs for USA 2022, we reached out to one of the well-known drone manufacturers who agreed to be part of this contest. After an initial discussion on Linkedin, we got on a call and discussed the format and the flow of the contest, and the opportunities that the company would get: securing products but also hiring essential security talent. We had the confirmation of participation the same week from this OEM.

More recently, I have also reached out to a security consulting & auditing company that has an active presence in Switzerland and Germany. I wanted to explore some opportunities at Nullcon Berlin – recruiting, marketing, and knowledge-sharing. During our initial discussion where we shared the history of Nullcon, they realized that some of their team members have attended Nullcon Goa in the past and had a really positive experience. A few email exchanges later they decided to sponsor the event and to send some of their team members to attend the trainings.

And the learning? Even when physical interaction is limited – see the current situation where we have limited number of in-person events – there are tools out there which can help you launch your product or service in different markets and industries. Perseverance is key and you will most certainly see results.