Don’t use the WIFI When Running Technical Demos
Background
Last week, Truewind made its debut as an exhibitor at the AICPA conference in Las Vegas. Up until now, we have been diligently working behind the scenes, iterating on our core products in collaboration with our accounting firm partners.
Our presence at the event was driven by two primary business objectives. Firstly, we aimed to increase brand awareness of Truewind in the accounting industry, particularly for our core SaaS product designed to assist bookkeepers by automating the month-end close process. Secondly, we sought to generate hot leads to fill our sales funnel, as a significant portion of our ideal customer profiles would be attending the conference.
Our Exhibit
Our booth was an impressive setup, standing roughly 13 feet (4 metres) tall and occupying a 20 feet by 20 feet (6 metres by 6 metres) square space. The area was divided into four quadrants. In the first quadrant, we had a photo wall next to a coffee cart, designed to draw attendees in with free coffee. Adjacent to this, in the second quadrant, was the swag stand where we handed out snacks and Truewind-branded merchandise. These high-quality items were chosen to ensure that attendees would keep and use them, providing us with ongoing marketing and brand exposure.
The third quadrant featured a large TV display highlighting the key value propositions of our core product, along with a double-sided TV stand showcasing the Truewind financial assistant product. Finally, in the fourth quadrant, we set up a customer demo area where our engineers performed product demonstrations for prospective clients.
Game Plan
Our plan was straightforward: engage potential prospects in quadrants 1-3, have some light chit chat and preliminary qualification, and then guide them to a technical demo. We anticipated three possible outcomes: minimal traffic with few demo requests, moderate traffic with a reasonable number of demos, or a scenario where we were overwhelmed with both traffic and demo requests.
Disaster
On game day at the exhibition, we were overwhelmed with foot traffic, leading to a surge in demo requests. To meet the demand, one of our engineers conducted a group demo session. However, we encountered a significant problem: the core platform wouldn't load or took over 30 seconds to load, causing a complete disaster.
Investigation
As traffic increased, load times gradually worsened. As part of the engineering team, I began investigating the issue. First, I checked the speed of the ARIA convention's WiFi, which reported a healthy 300 megabits per second. Next, I reviewed our core infrastructure status for any outages or service degradation, but found none.
To pinpoint the issue, I added telemetry to log performance API metrics to determine if the slowness was affecting everyone or just those at the conference: MDN Performance API. The results showed that load times at the conference were significantly higher than for clients elsewhere.
As a last-ditch effort, I switched to my mobile hotspot and saw the core app load immediately. This led me to hypothesise that the large amount of foot traffic at the conference resulted in the degradation of the WiFi service, causing the slow load times.
TL;DR: If your demos are mission-critical, rely on mobile data instead of the convention’s WiFi, especially in high-traffic environments.
