OSD 258: How to do SHOT Show

How to be effective at the gun industry's biggest trade show.

We just got back from a week in Las Vegas for SHOT Show 2024.

For next year, we’ve got some tips for navigating your week at SHOT. Back in 2008, Travis Kalanick wrote “The Ultimate Guide to Hacking CES”. Think of this as the same thing, but for SHOT. (Fun side note, Travis spent a lot of time in the guide talking about how much taxis in Vegas suck, and then he founded Uber the following year.)

Pre-show prep

• Text or email everyone you know who’s going to be there. And also send cold emails to people you don’t yet know but who you want to meet. (Cold emails are shockingly effective, and weirdly the best people are often the easiest to reach. They became good by acting quickly.)

• It’s fine to schedule meetings if you can, but many meetings will not be possible to schedule before the day-of. Everyone has too many balls to juggle to know what their schedule is going to be like. So when you’re talking to people before the show, don’t try to pick a time to meet up. Just connect and get it on the table that you’re both going to be at the show. Then during the show you can send a day-of text along the lines of, “Will you be on the floor at <specific time>? I can come over to you.” If they actually do want to meet up, they’ll either say yes or respond with an alternative.

• Get your show badge at the office the NSSF sets up at the airport next to the baggage claim. Even if the line is long. However long it is, the line is going to be longer at the show. And the line at the airport moves quickly even if it’s long.

Transportation

• Uber/Lyft are great for getting to the convention center in the morning. But if you are leaving the convention center at the same time as everyone else (around 5pm), you’re going to spend 30+ minutes waiting for a car. There are two ways around that:

  • Miss the crowd by leaving at 7 p.m. or later. Fill that time socially or by pinging people about meetups.

  • Leave through the Caesars Forum entrance rather than through the Venetian Convention Center. Tell the Uber to pick you up at the Linq Line rideshare pickup, which is about 50 yards outside the door to Caesars Forum, just inside the parking garage that’s right across the street.

• Most of the casinos in town put their rideshare pickup locations in Siberia, with a 5-10 minute walk through the bowels of the hotel. (They make it easy to arrive but hard to leave.) There isn’t a great way around that, because rideshare still beats self-parking if you’re spending time at the casinos/hotels. But if you’re spending significant time at other venues (e.g. Airbnbs), it’s a good idea to rent a car. If you are willing to deal with self-parking at hotels, renting a car will also save you a ton of money over doing rideshares all week.

Hotels

• Vegas is not walkable. Even getting between neighboring casinos is a 15+ minute walk, let alone getting to a different section of the Strip. So the smart move here is to either go for extreme convenience (i.e. stay at the Venetian or the Palazzo, both of which are attached to SHOT’s convention center) or optimize for price. Don’t stretch for a nice hotel room near the Venetian. If you’re not in the Venetian, you won’t feel the difference between being in a hotel that’s 0.5 miles away versus one that’s 5 miles away.

• If you have 3+ people, you should get an Airbnb unless you are willing to splash out on rooms at the Venetian for everyone. Airbnbs in Vegas are plentiful and very reasonably priced. You can get a great one that sleeps 4-8 people for under $150 per person per night.

Parties

• Go to parties. This is where the best networking happens. It’s best to go to parties early in the week, make+deepen relationships, and then later in the week those are new friends whose booths you can go by or who can introduce you to more people. You don’t get the benefit of this iterative cycle with later-in-the-week parties.

• Talk to friends (and people at booths when you hit it off) about what they’re doing after the show each night. Some parties have badges or invites, but for all of them the actual access control is “do you know someone who’s going”. If you do, then can either get you in officially or do the ol’ “send someone out of the party with two passes, then they give you one and you both walk back in”.

Walking the floor

• Before the show, download the SHOT app and star all the booths you have even a remote interest in visiting. That way if you ever have downtime during the show, you can pull up the map and see which starred booths happen to be nearby. Do this once an hour or so. This will help you hit all the “worth checking out if I’m right next to it, but not if I’m 15 minutes away” booths.

• Have a plan. When you’re talking to people staffing a booth, it’s helpful if they know why you’re interested and also how you can help them. Try different intros at different booths and hone in on the ones that work better.

• Be conscious of booth traffic. You can take your time if things are quiet, but don’t spend too long with people when they have a ton of other people waiting to talk to them.

• The booths are quieter in the mid afternoon as people start to tire out. That can be a good thing if you want more time and space to explore. It can also be a bad thing if you want to talk to someone specific, because they’ll often start to go to other meetings in the afternoon. Rule of thumb: the more important the business, the earlier in the day you should do it.

• Bring a small backpack or sling. Emphasis on small — the floor is crowded and you want something purse-sized that sticks close to your body and doesn’t bump into people. Carry some water, a phone charger, and business cards.

• Most of the bathrooms are rough. The best bathrooms are up the escalators on the 4th floor, near the media room. Clean, well-appointed, and deserted.

Post-show followup

• People will be too swamped to respond to emails during the week of the show. Follow up with everyone the week after. For each person, be specific about what one action you want them to take and how it will help them. And remember to give them a little refresher on your discussion at the show, because it might be blurry for them.

Conclusion

The first SHOT after COVID was in 2022, and at the time there was a real question about whether trade shows were dead. That’s no longer an open question — the show was vibrant this year. Huge and tiring, yes. And like at any show there are some crufty companies. But the level of innovation we see on the show floor keeps getting better every year. It’s cool to see the industry leveling up.

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