In the lead-up to NECA 2026, Tubender's biggest trade show appearance, we needed our machine at the Las Vegas convention center, but shipping it would have cost $10,000 and required dropping it off two weeks early. That timeline didn't work. We were still making changes to the machine up until the morning we had to leave, and we didn't want to hand it off to a third-party freight company we didn't trust to handle it carefully.
So my co-founder Josh and I decided to drive it there ourselves. We loaded the machine onto a trailer hitched to our pickup truck and drove straight from Boston to Las Vegas, trading off behind the wheel to cover the roughly 2,600 miles in about 40 hours. We got it set up in time for the show, ran it for three days at NECA from October 5-7, and then turned around and drove the same 40 hours back to Boston right after the show closed.
The trip let us bring the actual, current version of our machine instead of an older unit or a video demo, which mattered for a hardware company trying to prove the product works. We came out of NECA with about 40 leads from the show floor, which we're now working to convert into customers.
Tubender