As you have already heard from our colleagues, the whole Squirrly team has been at the Techsylvania event. We had lots of fun there by playing with gadgets, but most of all, by getting to hear the speeches of great entrepreneurs and people involved in the IT and start-up world. One particular speech I loved was the one that Lisa Lang, from Twilio, held.
What can we learn from marketing failure ?
After a long day of memorable, engaging presentations and interesting Q&A, our hopes that the second part of the day would be as interesting as before dropped considerably. People were getting tired, but that did not change the effect of Lisa’s speech. She had an amusing and motivating presentation, which impressed all of us, who were present at the event. One benefit that Twilio had was that previous to her speech, Josef Dunne from Babelverse mentioned them several times in his own speech. His every mention came together with a loud shout from Lisa in the conference room. We were quite wondering what was their strategy of getting people to mention them so often. But once Lisa got on stage we all understood.
She talked to us about many products from big companies that had been extraordinary failures. From Colgate’s frozen foods to Earring Magic’s Ken, she stated, in an amusing way, what had been bad about these products or what had gone wrong in the way they’d been marketed. She went even further, explaining what we can learn from their mistakes and how to make better decisions in our own start-ups. At the end of the presentation, she told us all that due to her taking care of the European Marketing Strategy for Twilio, she’d love to see some offices of start-ups settled in Cluj. She has such great personality that I couldn’t wait until the end of the event to invite her to our office.
What is Twilio ?
Now, before I go on with the story, I first need to tell you all that this company I’ve mentioned over and over again does. Twilio is a cloud communication company from the United States of America, which is particularly interesting for developers . Why? Because through their products you can use standard web languages to create voice, VoIP and SMS applications through APIs. 
Basically what that means is that Twilio makes it much easier to create apps that communicate through sms or voice on mobile devices. They have numerous products that help cloud communication. You can check out the stories of their clients, to see diverse ways in which their products can be used for the success of other companies and start-ups.
Good food and interesting talks
The next day, after Techsylvania, Lisa organized a brunch at which she invited us as well (Thanks Lisa!). It was a great opportunity to get together with all the people who hadn’t departed from the event. Afterwards we took Lisa, from Twilio, to our office to get to know the team and see the army of squirrels all around the office. In a normal start-up fashion, we stood on bean bags and had a great chat about what our products do and what are the directions in which we want to expand the new services.
As Twilio had invested in start-ups and is always looking to find a way to help them, we talked about how our new services can be a helping hand for new or funded start-ups. Moreover, about how we could get closer to them in order to offer them help. As the whole discussion turned to how we relate to our clients we showed Lisa the “collectible” cards with our fans of the week. Some of you have already received some of them, as she felt an instant need to tweet a picture with them. We all started to get Squirrly with Twilio and began taking pictures.
Turning back
As our talk was at a closing point, we found out that Lisa is on a tour and she always tries to pass through the same point twice. So, when she comes back we will have another get together, where she will get to meet even more entrepreneurs from Cluj-Napoca. Can’t wait to see her again! I’m already working on a plan to see if we can complete the challenge we received from her.
Have you heard of Twilio before ? Have you seen one of Lisa’s speeches at an event ? Let us know in the comment section below.
