Running a booth for Zulip at a convention
It is incredibly better to have two people staffing a booth than to have just one person staffing it. It makes restroom breaks possible, it doubles how many people you can engage with simultaneously (and at burst times, like in between sessions, that's really useful so you don't waste traffic), and it means that you learn from each other about what's working. And if you have enough room to have multiple monitors, get two different laptops hooked up (one to each monitor), so if one staffer is midway through a demo, the other staffer can start a new one for a new conference attendee without having to wait/interrupt.

Digital:
  • The con might provide a big monitor - if they don’t, bring one. Bring at least one laptop to connect to it.
  • Create a guest account on the laptop with limited privileges and used that to connect to the big screen monitor for demo purposes. This is good because then if some stranger accidentally opens other applications, etc., the privacy and security implications are limited.
  • If you are co-staffing a booth with someone, check ahead of time to see whether they are using a different keymapping from yours, and figure out how to deal with that. (QWERTY vs. Dvorak.)
  • Log in as the guest chat.zulip.org account called @Booth Demo so people can see a live instance but not our real private messages/streams. On a different computer or on your phone, log in as your and say things that @-mention the demo account, so we can show what @-mentions of your user look like.
  • Good tabs to have open so you can easily show them off:
  • If you are co-staffing a booth with someone, make an explicit plan for what needs to happen if you both have to be away from the booth at once. For instance, is it ok to leave the other person's laptop there? Does it need to be logged out/lid shut, or is it ok to leave it up so the demo screen still displays?
  • Have a mobile device ready so you can demo the mobile experience in case someone asks. It might even be worth bringing a cheap tablet to the con solely for that purpose.

Supplies:
  • Make sure you have a notebook or notepad plus a pen available and ready to use at your booth, or some other paper-and-pen method of taking down people's names and emails. Not everyone brings business cards and you'll want to take down their information, and it's best if you don't use up your own business cards and flyers to do so.
  • It worked well to have stickers, quarter-sheet or half-sheet flyers (see below) with more details, and business cards with Rishi's direct email address on them. You’ll probably give out about 20 flyers per hour and maybe 10 business cards per hour. (Wild estimate based on OSCON numbers.) It’s far better to have extras on hand than to run out!
  • Have a banner with the Zulip logo or other big visual indication of what booth it is.
  • Have a bottle of water for each person staffing the booth. You’ll be talking a lot.
  • Each staffer should wear a Zulip t-shirt.

Technique:
  • Stand slightly in the flow of traffic and ask people who didn't look super-hurried, "would you like to talk about group chat?" or a similar question. This works well to engage people and get them to watch our demo and find out more -- many of those people would not stop and look at our booth if we don’t do that.
  • Figure out a lightweight script that feels comfortable for you, demonstrates a few aspects of the product, and focuses on things you feel enthusiastic about. Try practicing it on your other booth attendant for practice. https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/publicity/topic/OSCON has Sumana’s & Rishi’s basic scripts. If the attendee has questions, focus on those and answer them before going on with the other stuff you want to cover.
  • If you can, try out Slack, IRC, Mattermost, and Google Hangouts chat before your booth shift, so you can speak more knowledgably about how Zulip compares.