Seta Workshop is a boutique nearshore software studio based in Uruguay. Their team of around a dozen engineers works as a long-term tech partner for startups, product companies and agencies across the US and Canada, with growing experience building for ecommerce brands, including on Shopify.
The Challenge
We work with Seta as their fractional growth team, and while planning a business trip to San Francisco Tech Week, we pitched that José, Seta’s CEO, host an event instead of only attending. With more than 1,500 events running across the city that week, being the host is one of the few ways to stand out rather than compete for attention as one more attendee.
The timing also fit a positioning question we were working on with Seta. Most software development shops have a hard time telling themselves apart, so part of our work was finding where Seta’s experience tells a different story. One of the verticals we explored was Shopify migration, where Seta is the team brought in when a store is rebuilding or replatforming and needs custom engineering that holds up at scale.
The Solution
When considering a topic for the event, we carried the same positioning angle through and chose ecommerce for two reasons. It was underrepresented in the Tech Week agenda even though plenty of people care about it, so a focused event could stand out and draw an audience that was already looking for it. It also gave José room to bring a fresh technical take, grounded in the custom work Seta has done on Shopify rather than the usual setup advice.
We shaped the talk around a question every growing ecommerce brand ends up asking, whether to grow broader, with new channels and audiences, or deeper, into infrastructure, personalization and migrations. José answered it with honest stories from real projects instead of a pitch. We brought in Temidayo Odusolu from Amplio as co-host, adding a commercial perspective and her own Bay Area network.
We took care of the logistics, ran the promotion, and reviewed every sign-up so the room was built around the founders and operators Seta most wanted to meet. José walked in knowing who would be there and why each conversation mattered.
The Outcome
Nearly 200 registrations for Seta's first event
Around 30 attendees on the night
19 highly relevant conversations continued after the event (with 45% reply rate)
5 confirmed meetings and counting
2 leads sourced from the event
Across Tech Week and Disrupt, this was the event that produced most of José's post-trip calls. One attendee told José that the event was the highlight of the Tech Week for him. He also felt the guest list was well curated, with the right people in the room.
The event gave Seta an early read on how its ecommerce experience lands with people who work in the space.
