Last night I gave at talk at the July meetup for Food Tech Australia. I met the organiser of the group – Liz from YouChews – at a Girl Geeks event a few months ago and ended up volunteering to speak. My first pitch was really geeky: I proposed to talk about the Recipe microdata schema and how it enables you to do some pretty cool stuff with recipe syndication. But then I realised the group skewed more “startup entrepreneur” than “techie geek,” so I scrapped it and came up with “Leveraging Content and Design to Grow Your Food Startup”. Much better!

Writing the talk was a great excuse to really research content marketing and learn from some of my colleagues at Canva. I talked about what content marketing is and what benefits it has for a growing startup. I drew heavily upon this blog post about how our Growth team tripled the traffic to our Design School blog, as well as a recent webinar we did with Buzzsumo about the importance of images in your content. I also mentioned a few tools that I recommend for making all this easier, like Canva (of course!), Buffer, and IFTTT. The slides are here if you’re interested.

The talk was held at Fishburners, and there were actually more people there than I’d expected. The other organiser Kevin told me that normally they get 20-25 RSVPs for their events, but this time they’d had 60! I was really floored. I reckon there were maybe 30-40 people actually there on the night. The talk was only 15 minutes or so, and it went really smoothly. (I remembered my Damian Conway training and was suitably attired in dark clothing with my very own clicker.) They had a lot of questions afterwards, and I fumbled and did my best to answer. I also give out Canva credits to the first three people who asked, which was fun.

Overall it was a really positive event. It was my first official talk representing Canva! I learned some new things in the course of putting it together, and I think I could spin it out into a longer presentation with a little more work. I could even pitch it at a more techie crowd by emphasising the automation part more. Several of my colleagues gave me feedback, which was really helpful. And it’s always fun to get to speak in front of a group of passionate, friendly geeks. Thank you to Liz and Kevin again for inviting me! (And thank you to my friend Maria for the photograph.)

(And if you’re a wine drinker, check out The Wine Gallery. The founder gave a short pitch for this new startup, and I was really impressed with the idea and the website.)

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