Since moving to Austin, TX in late November, my tiny web startup So Fetch started looking at doing something for SXSW. We didn’t have the budget to compete with the Spotify or the Youtube’s of the world. They came into town buying all the attention in the form of free booze and a giant party. We had to be creative.

We could pass out stickers like everyone else but straight up peddling our stuff to strangers didn’t seem like the best use of our resources.

What if there was a way that we could get people to come to us, and be willing to start a conversation?

At that point a sticker would be a much easier push.

Sitting around in my apartment one night watching an episode of The Walking Dead I had a tiny idea. What if there was a kissing booth, but for dogs.

Austin is a very pet friendly city. A lot of places like NYC, where a lot of SXSW atteendees would be flying in from are not. I have a 120lb Redbone Coonhound named Albus. Everywhere we go he gets noticed and people love on him. I thought this might be the perfect need/opportunity situation to start the aforementioned conversation.

The #puppykissing booth was born. I enlisted the help of my friend Kevin Kelly from Run Beacon. He has another large dog named Bita and he agreed to co-sponsor and help me build it. Best of all, he had the idea to collect donations for Austin Pet’s Alive. We figured if it didn’t do anything marketing wise for us, we could at least make some money for a good cause. After a solid weekend of building (I’ll be releasing a step by step guide on the build in the future) and a couple days painting we had this!

We had a great couple of days meeting people from all over who came to love on our dogs. I’ll be doing a retrospective on how well we think this performed soon. For now on National Puppy day enjoy some of our favorite pictures from our days at SXSW.

For about 75$ worth of materials, I’d say we had an extremely cost effective way to do some fun marketing. Everyone that stopped by was happy and intersted in talking with us. We gave out about 250 stickers in the few hours we were out there and raised over 300$ to donate to Austin Pet’s Alive!