Earlier this year, Stefan Borowicz - one of the first pianoscope customers - suggested that I should attend this year's PTG convention in Anaheim with a small booth and present the app to the American piano tuners. Luckily the date was convenient. So I designed and prepared the fittings for a booth which had to fit completely into a single suitcase: a rollup poster, 500 leaflets and a couple of iPads & iPhones. I was glad that my girlfriend Susanne volunteered to help me there.
At the end of July we flew off to San Francisco. From there we drove down the beautiful California coast to Anaheim and were able to shake off our jet lags.
The convention took place in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Anaheim. Once we had arrived there, we set up our mini booth in a flash. We could tell that the other exhibitors in the hall had all known each other for a long time. But they were all very welcoming to us newcomers, immediately accepted us into the community and were curious what we had to show.
On the first day, it was pretty quiet at our booth as most people were in their classes. I used the time to better come in contact with all the other exhibitors.
Verituner and Reyburn, two of our competitors, were also on the show floor. As they have been in this market for ages I was curious to learn more about them. I had a chat with the folks from Verituner and even made friends with Carl Lieberman from Cybertuner.
Across the aisle was the booth from Gazelle, a great business management software for piano tuners. We had many talks with the founders and learned that they deeply care about educating and training young piano technicians. They told us that finding an apprenticeship or a mentorship in the US is currently hard and many businesses have a problem growing because they cannot find enough technicians. Perhaps in future, pianoscope can even help in education.
During the week we even had time to sneak into some of the classes to learn about using impact tuning hammers or get to know the innards of Cybertuner.
On the last day, the hall became much more crowded and we gave presentations of our software nearly in two minute intervals. We received a lot of positive feedback and could convince many technicians to try out pianoscope.
All in all it was great fun, the American piano tuners are a beautiful community of very passionate people. We will hopefully be there again next year and perhaps even present a class of our own.
