This September the Boomerang team packed up a booth and headed to Growth Hacking Live in San Diego, September 24–26.
We had gone back and forth on whether a booth was worth it. Three days out of the office, a stand to build, a team to send. We decided to find out rather than keep guessing — and it turned out to be one of the better calls we made this year.
Why we went
Boomerang sells through agencies. Marketing agencies, digital agencies, freelancers who run campaigns for local businesses — they are the people who put loyalty programs in front of restaurants, salons, and coffee shops. Growth Hacking Live is full of exactly those people.
So the booth was built around the agency question, not the product tour. Three things on the banners:
- A foot-in-the-door offer for marketing agencies — loyalty as the easy first sale that gets an agency into a local business, before the bigger retainer conversation.
- The partner program — white label, payment gateway, sub-accounts: the whole stack an agency needs to resell Boomerang as its own product.
- The numbers — what our clients actually earn. Not a feature list, a before-and-after chart.
What happened at the booth
We demoed the product to dozens of agency partners, founders, and marketers over the three days. Some had never considered loyalty as a service line. Some had tried to build it themselves and given up. A few were already selling retention and wanted to see whether our numbers held up.
The best conversations were the sceptical ones. When someone has already burned a quarter trying to make a loyalty offer stick, they ask sharp questions — about churn, about what happens after month three, about who does the setup work. Those questions are worth more than a hundred badge scans.
What we took away
A few things we are carrying into the next quarter:
Agencies do not want another product to learn. They want an offer they can put in an email tomorrow. The closer we get to handing them a ready-made pitch, the faster it moves.
The first sale is the hard part, not the retention. Once a local business sees repeat customers on a dashboard, it stays. Getting the owner to say yes the first time is where agencies need the most help.
In-person still converts differently. A five-minute demo standing at a booth does something a webinar does not. We are rethinking how much of our year goes into events.
Thank you
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth — the conversations were the whole point of the trip.
Special thanks to Matt Deseno for a genuinely great conversation, and to Perry Belcher for organizing the event and pulling together so many strong people in one room.
If we met in San Diego, let's keep the conversation going. If we did not — book a demo and we will walk you through what we showed at the booth.
