AutoRef + Startup America
This post was written by Michael Bailey and was originally posted here.
In all fairness, the fun our team had at CES 2012 this year wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Startup America, a program designed to help startups grow. I only received a text message Thursday afternoon the week before letting me know that AutoRef would be coming to Vegas. I was in class and almost had a freakout as I realized our team would have the opportunity to storm Las Vegas at CES 2012 and get our message out to the world. And get our message out we did.
In preparation for CES we designed fresh business cards, flyers and that beautiful background you’ve seen in our Facebook photos. Props to Dillon and Julie for pulling everything together in such a short amount of time. I prepared a press release, the copy you’ve been reading and prepped our marketing strategy for CES: to take over every booth possible (just kidding, sort of). Meanwhile Todd and Mike our founder were preparing all the logistics for the show including how we’d eat and where we’d sleep. And quietly in the background Craig and Scott were making sure the website wouldn’t crash while preparing a few unique web features just for CES. And suddenly it came to me, we’re seven people strong.
What started off as an idea just a year ago is now a full fledged operation, with programmers, designers and business people all moving us forward. And a huge component of that was Startup America. They got us to CES, have been connecting us with partners that have helped us grow and even introduced us to the future President of Dell, Steve Felice. And speaking of connections at CES, here is a list of paraphrased quotes from people we talked to at CES:
“I can tell from your booth that you guys know how to sell the brand. Everything looks sharp.”
“My friend just bought a car and hated the process. It took her forever to finally make a deal. I’ll recommend this to people I know looking for a car.”
“What does your startup do?” Me:“We’re with AutoRef, we annexed this booth.”
In addition to explaining our annexing of some booths, we got great feedback from people from all over the industry. We saw a noticeable bump in our web and social media traffic, and we’re still following up with some of the great connections we made at our booth, around the show and even at the airport. We’re one year in, seven people strong and can’t wait to grow in 2012. Another huge thanks to Startup America. If you haven’t already, get on over to their page and check it out!
Michael Bailey is involved in AutoRef's Prouct Marketing. While leading marketing efforts at Autoref, Mike enjoys writing for our blog and watching Top Gear. He loves sushi and manual transmissions but fears he'll experience an alien encounter that will be made into a terrible film.
