Last week the GitButler team descended in force on the We Are Developers World Congress in our home town of Berlin.

We were lucky enough to get a nice speaking spot on the main stage, where I got to talk about version control and first principles. It was a packed room, even for the huge main stage.

We decided it would be a good time to open up our initial alpha phase (more on "keynote driven development" later) and invite in some people in person.

However, thinking from a first principles mindset, what is the point of a booth at a conference?

We've been to a few exhibition halls lately and we didn't want to be one of those booths waiting for people to come to us, sitting there on our phones. We wanted to engage, to talk to people, to have people open up to us and have a good time.

So, we decided that something that might be unique, that people would enjoy and that we wouldn't be competing with a lot of other booths at would be serving cocktails. If we gave people a margarita and then talked about our new alpha, maybe that would be a relatively unique approach to getting people's attention.

Now, we could have just set up a table with some stuff to make drinks, but Anne thought "how cool would it be to have a drinks bike?".

So enter the beginning of a journey to get our own portable marketing machine that can end up anywhere in Berlin ready to serve margaritas and talk about GitButler.

After setting it all up in our office, Kiril rode this bike for nearly 90 minutes from our space to the event venue and Anne, Kiril and Lisa set the whole booth up over the course of 12 hours! Even hand stamping hundreds of cups.

Best thing is, Tipsy is now part of our team. We may do some ad-hoc weekend Berlin park GitButler grill parties soon. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or our Meetup group if you are interested in joining.

Also, if you have an event or meetup in Berlin and want GitButler to come to you with some free refreshments and stickers, just email us!

So how did our booth perform?

I have to say that I don't think I've enjoyed working a booth more in the 20+ years that I've been doing this. We met thousands of people over the two days, gave out hundreds of branded stickers and bottle openers and got hundreds of new signups and alpha users.

We went through nearly 2500 cups (presumably filled with cocktails), had a point where people brought their own cups, served over 350 beers, went through everything we brought and had to go to the store multiple times.

More importantly, I talked to so many people for so long, I fully lost my voice. That's the sign of a great conference.

Thanks to everyone who came out and met with us, and even more thanks to all the brave souls who signed up to help us test our alpha.

Also special thanks to our ad-hoc volunteers, Janina and Eamon, who saw that we were a bit overwhelmed at times and stepped behind the bar to tend with us for hours! How often do you get people coming and helping you at your booth at a conference?

Special shout out here to Eamon from Broadstone, one of GitButler's investors, who stepped behind the bar to serve for hours, in a truly value-adding investor moment.

We hope that was a fun behind the scenes featurette. Please visit us soon at any of our many upcoming events!