But equally as fun was BEING interviewed by the super fine folks at The Download Squad. Grant Robertson and Christina Warren treated us like celebrities and I think it shows!

SXSWi 2008: Freshbooks talks to Download Squad from Download Squad on Vimeo.

Going to conferences are a fun way to learn things and make friends, but they are still very much work… and when you are in marketing that means leaving people with a positive impression so they will remember you well after the event.

Normally, we would just smile and be friendly; however, there were 7500 people at SXSW Interactive! That’s a lot of hands to shake. So, we had a different plan of attack for SXSW Interactive. We opted to do some crazy stuff in order to get some positive attention. After all, SXSW is kind of like Burning Man, but with pants.

Please note, we thought it was so cool that others liked what we did enough to post photos on Flickr, all the photos come from other people’s Flickr accounts.

The ten fingers of FreshBooks

1. FreshBooks RoadBurn

We didn’t just fly down to Austin like some half-weights. Mike, Sunir, our film producer Eamonn O’Connor, and I rolled into Austin in style all the way from from Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Miami in our FreshBooks RV, at the tail end of our epic RoadBurn road trip to meet and eat with customers.

2. Schwag Bags

Every person attending the conference receives one of the famous SXSWi “Big Bags” just chock full of magazines, postcards, fortune cookies, stickers, etc. We dropped a postcard in the bag to tell everyone that Ben and Mike were speaking on panels and gave them the wheres and the whens.

3. Panels

We spoke on not one but two big panels during the festival. Ben teamed up with some folks from Pownce, Defensio, Dabble DB, and some little company called Facebook to present on the topic of Developer-Friendly API’s and Mike (with me as a last minute addition) spoke about Stories of Failure: Surviving Common Start Up Mistakes. Both panels were very well received and was a great final touch for a lot of people.

4. Street Team

A large number of lucky people were welcomed to the convention center by the FreshBooks Street Team. All week long doors were held open for people coming in with the line “This door was held open by your friends at FreshBooks” and other fun good deeds were performed by the street team. The street team then handed them a phony invoice asking them to pay $1 or to just check out FreshBooks.com, just to prove that no good deed goes unbilled.

5. FreshForce Ones

We had custom Nike Air Force Ones made that we are calling the FreshForce Ones. These shoes are not only in the FreshBooks colors, but they also have FreshBooks written on the heel and the FreshBooks leaf on the bottom of the laces.

6. Hangover Kits

This is one of the things I am most proud of since it is a fun cool item that is so targeted to the spirit of SXSWi. Like ninjas we silently hung a hangover kit on every hotel room door in a few of the “official” hotels associated with SXSWi. This was the only way to get one… unless you bumped into Sunir or myself at one of the parties we attended on the last few nights. Inside these kits were common hangover relief stuff such as Advil, Blistex, Life Savers, Jolt Caffeine Gum, Band Aids, and antacid.

7. Canadian Pancake Breakfast

Growing up I was always told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We teamed up with Microsoft Canada, Praized, Uni, and the Canadian Consulate Generals in Dallas and Los Angeles to host a pretty amazing pancake breakfast. We had the RV on hand and pancakes for a few hundred. People left full and fulfilled!

8. The FreshBooks RoadBurn RV

The RoadBurn RV was pretty important during that trip but also had an important roll once we reached our destination. For one the RV was an incredible rolling billboard but also acted as a cool way for us to shuttle some of the cool kids from one party to another.

9. Customer dinners

One of the main goals of our RoadBurn trip was to meet as many customers as possible. This goal didn’t end once we got to Austin so we hosted two amazingly fun customer dinners (one big one with 30+ at our table and one smaller one) where we got to chat, eat and drink all in the name of invoicing!

10. Parties

There are so many parties going on at the same time during SXSWi that there is no way to say what are the best ones, so you try to go to all of them. Sunir and I attended as many as 5 parties a night. Going to all these parties may sound like a lot of fun, but you have to remember it was still work. Incredibly fun work that involved trying to talk with every person in the room and getting them to know all about FreshBooks but it was still work

11. Interweb Idols

I never did learn how to count. We have a new supersekret project called Interweb Idols we started working on at FOWA and SXSW.

Next year

If you want to borrow any of these ideas for yourself, feel free since we are already dreaming up new ideas for next year. After this post, we are certainly going to have to outdo ourselves at SXSW2009. We are thinking ice house!

We hope you guys (and gals) enjoyed our reports and videos from ROADBURN. Sure our trip took us 1800 miles across the southern US and sure it was fun and exciting and magical and sure we have been home for a week or so but that doesn’t mean this site is going away. We have hours and hours of interviews and other video footage that we will slowly be adding here so please bookmark this site or add us to your RSS feed.

I promise it will be worth it!

Walking through a Katrina ravaged abandoned grocery store.

These are just a couple examples of the amazing experiences we have had on our trip and just because we have at SXSW doesn’t mean the experiences are going to stop!

We all decided that our authentic Texas event should be to go shoot guns at a range. Being from Canada we don’t have the same access to guns and hot brass as our cowboy wearing friends to the south so from a curiosity standpoint we were all kinda excited.

Well that excitement faded when we were denied, er removed, ummmm it might just be easier to watch the video.

I love this video and the more I watch it I think that it would be so cool if at the end there was a freeze frame of us running and all of a sudden you hear Waylon Jennings say something clever like “Them there Duke boys are always getting themselves in all sorts of trouble.

I won’t tell you what we found, but it was definitely not a pot of gold. After channeling David Caruso, and I think I solved a murder mystery. I think Tallahassee should give me the key to the city for this. Or at least better shades.

Who the heck is David Caruso?

What, are you living under a rock? David Caruso is our saviour. He plays Lt. Horatio Caine on CSI Miami. He’s the unofficial mascot for RoadBurn.

Because before there was Tom Cruise or Will Smith, there was Mr. Reynolds, Burt to his friends….and yes, he has a museum.

On our way up to Orlando we visited this shrine to Southern Florida’s favorite mustache and we have the video to prove it…..and if I may be so bold, this is my favorite FreshBooks RoadBurn video so far.

Following in the wake of the Knight Rider remake, we decided to remake RoadBurn into our very own 1980s car drama. Get ready for our totally awesome new opening credits!

Normally I would say Cuban people first and then Cuban Food but I was hungry from dancing all night so the food comes first. We met Tere (from tere-tere.blogspot.com ,and foodtastic.blogspot.com, ) and two friends at Versailles in Miami, considered by many as the unofficial “Cuban Embassy” in America.

Entering the restaurant I was struck by the decor. It was similar to many Greek Restaurants that I had been in and made me wonder if this was really “the” Cuban place to go. Went he waiter came over I knew we were in for something cool since he didn’t speak English. Luckily, Tere, ordered for us and in a blink of an eye we had a full table filled with Cuban Toast (A full loaf of bread buttered and toasted in a sandwich press….and the rumor is it is full of lard) and 6 other dishes I won’t pretend to know how to spell (but enjoyed) and I washed it all down with a refreshing glass of freshly squeezed (pressed?) Watermelon juice.

Now the food is out of the way I have to say the thing that will stay with me (long after the food) was the people and conversations (this is becoming a theme here). because they gave us a really honest firsthand account of being a Cuban-American. When the conversation shifted to the current Cuban political I was struck by their passion and intelligence and when everything was done we all gave reasons to why we think Fidel Castro has given up wearing army fatigues and now only wears Cuban Olympic track suits with his name embroidered on the jacket.

Like everything on this trip we have video and it will be up soon!

If you listen closely you will hear that I have the music in me!

It is true.

One of the cool things about this trip is we are trying to connect with a bunch of local bloggers to say HEY and get a local perspective on the city we are traveling through. To Our first blogger meetup was with the guys from Miami Nights .

Since everything I know about Miami comes from a mix of watching Don Johnson in pink suits, Will Smith bickering with Martin Lawrence and David Caruso taking of his glasses and looking behind me while talking at me I wanted to experience what the people of Miami are really about and what better place than doing it in one of the cooler clubs in town.

Now I didn’t know what to expect since I am not much of a club guy but when we rolled up to PS14 I had a feeling this was going to be awesome. PS14 was a small storefront place in an area surrounded by amazing urban murals (professional graffiti) The decor of the pace was sparse….this was not a $400 bottle service type of place….just a bar, a couple couches and a small stage with a great DJ…..oh ya and a disco ball. I immediately felt at home in this place because it reminded me of two places, my bedroom (cause of the disco ball) and of clubs at home I used to frequent in the halcyon days of my youth.

Our guide for the evening was Bryan. In a word he was awesome, Super nice and welcoming (yes, I know that is more then just one word). When we got there we chatted for a while and he filled us in on the club scene, the difference between Miami and Miami Beach and introduced us to a bunch of people…he then explained to everyone in the place that we were not narcs, and set us loose to do our thing…..basically he was the perfect host.

Brian was definitely a “cool kid” and provided us with a truly authentic Miami nightlife experience, and really, that is what ROADBURN is all about!

BTW this picture is not of Bryan but rather a picture of the club I found online…..Oh ya and we have video of the club that we will be adding to the site soon!