After the convention, make sure to follow-up with the people you met if you managed to get their contact info. This can be a quick letter thanking them for their time and the information they shared. Then see if they’d like to schedule a short chat on Zoom, Skype, or whatever’s convenient for them. Try to have a couple of questions at the intersection of what they do and what you do. This may require some thought, but odds are if they’re in tech, they’ve interacted with other startups.
Of course, your discussion could immediately jump into the details of your startup or finalizing a deal that you already discussed. That’s likely to be with a minority of your contacts – but you never know when other contacts you made can be useful. If you had a meaningful conversation and they were friendly, take that as a win and try to touch base with them every so often. If your contacts seemed particularly keen on social media – like, share, retweet them on those channels, too.
Again, the more you network – the easier it is to network more. We might have to discuss that in a lot more depth one of these days!
There are a lot of other things you can do to get the most out of the conferences and summits you attend – here are thirty conference tips to help you cover everything down to the hand sanitizer.