[gavinbaker]

I’m a marketer and we help our clients with a few trade shows a year.

If you are going to have a booth, table cloth, marketing materials (flyers, brochure, etc) you cost will be more than then the $1,500 for the space. Depending on the type of show many will also charge you for WiFi and power. Even on the low spend side, I’d anticipate spending $3k plus your food, lodging and travel costs.

Upside is many shows will provide you with the whole list of attendees which while aren’t leads - can be useful for future outreach without hunting down names/emails on your own.

Like others mentioned if it’s not a lot of money, then go and get feedback about the pain your product is solving. In addition to that, you can meet other vendors who can be good referral and industry connections if you don’t have that yet.

My experience: I have built a failed product that no one needed before and it was an expensive (couple million) and long exercise (2 yrs) in futility that would have been helped by getting face to face with our target audience earlier, not later.

[paulkon]

Would you be comfortable sharing the product you worked on and a postmortem on why it didn't succeed?

I'd find it helpful to learn from as I'm in the process of getting early feedback from businesses to validate or tweak my own tiny saas idea.