We're Back From ECHC!
Hi friends. We made it home.
East Coast Haunters Convention was last weekend, and I am writing this from my couch with a cup of tea and a voice that still sounds like I gargled gravel. The whole team is wiped out in the best possible way. If you stopped by booth 514 to say hi, ran one of the new controllers through its paces, asked us a hard question, or just gave us a hug after the long quiet; thank you. Truly.
What a weekend
I don't think any of us were fully prepared for the energy at the show. After a year of heads-down work and a very deliberate stretch of saying very little, walking onto that floor and finally getting to put the new controllers in front of people was honestly emotional. We had folks who have been with us since Midwest Haunters in 2023 swing by, alongside operators who had never heard of us before Saturday morning. Both groups walked away excited, and that meant the world to me and the team.
We had three controllers running live demos on the booth, and Mike was doing personal "build-a-show" walk through demos with people and I think every single one of our controllers got picked up, poked at, and grilled. That's exactly what we wanted. The "can it do this?" questions were better than I could have hoped for, and a few of them were good enough that I scribbled them down in my notebook and discussed at length on the 15 hour drive home.
The connections
This is the part I keep coming back to.
Tradeshows are a lot of work. The booth, the travel, the standing on concrete for days, the talking until your throat gives out. But the reason we do it, the only reason we do it, is the people. And this show delivered on that in a way I will be thinking about for a long time.
We got to meet pro haunt operators that are building some of the coolest new things in the industry. We had real, in-the-flesh conversations with escape room owners who are doing some of the most creative things. We caught up with vendors and friends and competitors-who-are-really-friends, and I left every single one of those conversations with something to chew on.
A few of them have already turned into "let's get on a call next week" follow-ups. A few of them turned into ideas I cannot stop thinking about and bugging Mike about.
So what's next?
Here's where I have to do the thing where we share without sharing, but I promise I won't make you wait a year this time.
The conversations we had at ECHC, and the feedback we collected from people running our controllers in real spaces, are already shaping the next round of work. Some of it is software. Some of it is hardware. Some of it is stuff I genuinely did not expect to be working on a week ago, and now I can't imagine us not doing.
I'm not ready to put names on any of it yet. The team needs a minute to come up for air, and then we need to sit down and figure out the order of operations. But I will say this: a few of the things we're lining up are the kind of "oh, that's the missing piece" features that I think are going to make a lot of you very happy.
We'll start sharing more in the coming weeks and months. Mike will probably get into the technical side of some of it on his own, because he cannot help himself, and honestly I love that about him.
Thank you
To everyone who came by the booth, who told us what's working and what isn't, who introduced us to a friend, who put a sticker on our trash can... thank you! To the haunt and escape room partners who let us run their feedback through this whole launch... your fingerprints are all over what we showed at the booth, and they're going to be all over what comes next too.
We're tired. We're a little hoarse. And we are so, so energized.
Onward.
Talk soon.