The Floor
Interview Play

The idea is to skip the booth and walk the floor with a camera instead. Every exhibitor there paid five figures to stand at a table and talk about their product, and for most of the day nobody's talking to them. I come by with a camera and get them talking.

Each interview runs five to seven minutes. What they make, what they're launching this year, then two or three questions from the list further down. Tariffs, Amazon fees, agencies, AI, whatever's current. Then a handshake and a badge scan, and I tell them their clips will be in their inbox next week.

This is the same format behind some of the fastest-growing accounts of the last few years. A few examples:

It's moved into B2B. Chili Piper filmed hot-take interviews on the floor at INBOUND, SaaStr, and Dreamforce, part of an event plan they say booked about 100 meetings in three days. GaryVee's team films everything at VeeCon and cuts it into weeks of clips. Cognism wrote attendee interviews into their media playbook.

Here's what the format actually looks like. Tap any of these to play:

Salary Transparent Street

The two-question street interview. This is the operation NowThis bought in January.

Watch on YouTube ↗

Caleb Simpson × Barbara Corcoran

His rent question, on Barbara Corcoran's $12M penthouse. The collab did 100M+ views across platforms.

Watch on YouTube ↗

School of Hard Knocks

Asking wealthy Texans how they got rich. Nobody in these videos is getting paid to talk.

Watch on YouTube ↗

SubwayTakes · Cate Blanchett

One mic, one hot take per ride. Google, Microsoft, and UPS have all sponsored this show.

Watch on YouTube ↗

Storyblok at SaaStr Annual

A B2B software company doing this on a conference floor. Same move we'd be running.

Watch on YouTube ↗

Sweets & Snacks Expo 2026

A creator walking a CPG floor, interviewing brands at their booths. Proof it works at our kind of show.

Watch on YouTube ↗

If the players don't load wherever you're reading this, the YouTube links under each one work.

Some context numbers first:

So the standard playbook is: pay five figures, scan badges at $112 apiece, then call almost none of them, including the half who asked to be called. The bar is low.

One more that matters: buyers decide earlier than we'd like. 6sense surveyed 4,000+ B2B buyers in 2025. 94% had a vendor shortlist before they ever contacted anyone, and the day-one favorite won the deal 77% of the time. Getting on that shortlist happens through content and reputation, months before any sales call. Edelman and LinkedIn found 73% of decision-makers say a company's thought leadership tells them more about its capabilities than its marketing materials do.

On distribution: LinkedIn's own numbers have video viewership up 36% year over year, growing about twice as fast as every other post format. Engagement peaks on 90–120 second videos, which is our clip length. And content shared by a person gets roughly double the click-through of the same content on a company page. Every founder who posts their clip and tags RivrHub is putting us in front of an audience of other founders, for free.

Even if no clip breaks a thousand views, we still get all six of these:

“If your agency can't tell you how their fee ties directly to your margin, they're not a partner. They're a tax.”

Josh made this argument in March in “Expo West So Far: Brands Don't Need More Vendors.” This series turns that argument into a repeatable program. Everyone on that floor is trying to sell these people something, which is why free clips with no strings attached will stand out.

The agency questions do extra work for us. When a founder describes on camera what their agency fees actually bought them last year, they're making our case for us, and we keep the footage.

The timing helps too. Cartograph sold to Harvest in April, Momentum sold to PMG, and Podean bought four agencies in ten months, with the same private equity firm behind two of the buyers. Founders are wondering whether their agency will exist next year and whether it'll still care about a brand their size. They'll want to talk about it, and we get to be the ones asking.

And the interviews feed everything we're already building: Josh's LinkedIn, the re-engagement sequences, the newsletter.

Plus the question-by-question supercuts (twenty founders on the tariff question, twenty on agency fees), a show recap, quote graphics, and one gated State of the Floor report. That's around three months of content from two days at a show we were going to anyway.

First draft, and it'll change per show. Two filters for every question: will a founder enjoy answering it, and do we care about the answer.

On floor quality: CEIR's long-running research puts 81% of trade show attendees at buying authority. And for us the exhibitors themselves are the prospect pool, not just the badge holders.

If the fall works, the spring calendar is deep: Expo West (where we already exhibit), Sweets & Snacks, Fancy Food, Prosper. That decision can wait for fall results.

• Get me to the show with a badge.Groceryshop and NACS are both Vegas, three weeks apart.
• Put me in a branded shirt.The shirt and the mic flag are the only branding on screen.
• Maybe pair me with someone from sales.Optional but useful. They work the conversation after I stop recording.

I'll handle the rest: questions, gear, releases, shooting, editing, delivery, and the follow-up.

1. Name the series. My vote is “Booth to Buy Box.” Alternates: “Shelf Talk,” “On the Floor.”
2. Say yes to Groceryshop (Sept 22–24) and NACS (Oct 6–9). Make the Accelerate call by mid-August, since it's the same week as Groceryshop.
3. Badge, shirt, maybe a sales partner. I own everything else.
4. After NACS we look at the numbers below and decide the spring calendar.

What I'd call a successful fall: