Business Networking Success - Alex @ SaaStock - Escape Velocity Show #39
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Summary
Alex Fuma is the founder and CEO of SaaS Stock, one of the most popular conferences for Saa s founders around the world. He's been running it for 3 years, and in that time, he's built a community of over 6,000 people from all over the world to attend his events. In this episode, we talk to Alex about how he got started with the conference, how he built it, and what it takes to run such a successful event.
Transcript
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A friend of mine, he was looking for this entrepreneurial thing
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So I'm going to do, I've seen the early kind of success
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I've got this great idea for a conference around, yeah,
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or something like that, and I had no idea what it was.
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And I said to him, look, I think what you need to do
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is you've got to do some of the groundwork, right?
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but he just wanted to just cut all of that out and go straight for the conference.
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I mean, in the end, he just realized that that just wasn't really viable.
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then that's kind of the best platform to really do that
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You run one of the best SaaS events in the world,
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And international, we were just talking about the fact
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Last year, I flew to Australia because we did it last year, December.
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I was there for four days, and it was brutal afterwards when I go back to the UK.
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Actually, Thomas Smale from FE International flew for just 24 hours from Boston to Sydney and then back.
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I actually went to Australia once, and I met a guy.
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I was there backpacking when I was like 23, and the guy's like, yeah, I flew here for a week.
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I'm like, dude, if you come for a week, you might as well stay a while.
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How many people go to your, like this year, how many people
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In total, it should be around sort of 6,000 plus.
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seeing where we've come from in the last few years.
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The first SaaS stock, we had just under 700 people there.
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I thought it was just going to be a European SaaS conference.
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And people bought tickets from Brazil, from Australia.
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They flew in, and it just kind of showed the need that people really kind of wanted to
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come and learn and hang with their peers and bring everyone together.
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We just brought all the SaaS founders together.
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And now this year with the six conferences, it'll be 6,000 plus.
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So the big one is the one in Dublin, which you will be speaking at again this year, October
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So last year was just under 3,000, 4,000 this year,
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and folks coming in from Mexico, Colombia, Singapore,
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What do you feel like the markets, like three years ago,
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The fact that you've created that in three years is awesome.
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What I saw three years ago when we were starting out,
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there was this whole thing, OK, like, oh, there's
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And as soon as you get to 1 million in ARR or Series A,
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you need to move to San Francisco and do the Silicon Valley
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And a lot of the European companies were doing that.
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probably because of technologies like Slack and Zoom
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to actually say, well, we can have better communication
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But I've seen so many companies that just stay in.
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if you can get your cost structure a lot cheaper.
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I mean, it's not cheap in San Francisco anymore.
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People are getting their engineers in Buenos Aires
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And so now we're just seeing that this Silicon Valley
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like how to move to San Francisco or the Silicon Valley.
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Yeah, that's what the VCs were talking about specifically.
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You have to move to the US to kind of crack it.
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And now people are saying, you don't have to, right?
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Is there more content around managing remote teams
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These tools have just transformed the way people are.
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Yeah, and you've got companies like InVision app, right?
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I mean, they're the unicorn, probably 1,000 people,
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he's SVP of sales, building up their international business.
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had him on my podcast, the SAS Revolution show,
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he was saying, yeah, we're like 400 people and we're all remote.
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they wouldn't back remote companies and saying,
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You have to have an office, and they're all now
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and again, just because it's more cost effective.
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We do have somebody in Portugal, and we have a contractor
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But apart from that, everybody's in the London office.
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And as we're saying, the costs of having an office in London,
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Who is the most popular YouTube SaaS stock talk ever given?
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He's like, guess who has the most popular talk ever?
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to beat him just by running Google YouTube ads.
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There's some sort of viral thing going on there.
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I've been pumped for it for the last few months.
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But this year, it's great to see speakers like Girish
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And again, he's based in, I think, Chennai or somewhere
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whilst they are international, you know, being, uh, remaining in the HQ, uh, in India, we actually
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had him booked in 2017, um, before they had reached kind of unit unicorn status and he had a bad back
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so he couldn't come. So this year, you know, he's coming back. But, um, again, it's nice to just not
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have like either us or European, you know, kind of well-known founders. I mean, I think he's pretty
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well known within the industry. Uh, but you know, we're, SAS stock is a very global conference.
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you know we're trying to have that uh the representation of the audience you know also
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on stage as well so we have people like gearish coming in from india with people like eric santos
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from uh rd uh rd station which is like a big sas company in in brazil so i think they've also just
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reached uh unicorn status sort of recently as well with their latest round of funding um claire
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hughes johnson coming over from stripe uh rory o driscoll from scale venture partners he's a
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It's kind of probably why you created the event.
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But it's like the developer CEO that gives up coding
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I was the CEO that had to kind of give up recruiting speakers,
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which is kind of our product, a big part of our product.
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They're like, OK, well, if Dez Train is speaking,
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I wasn't naive enough to think that having never run a SaaS
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business, and I'm not a VC either, I'm not in the trenches.
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So I don't know 100%, you know, how tough it is to run a SaaS business or actually, you know, everything about sales, marketing, customer success.
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So I got some experts in with a steering committee, a couple of, you know, a couple of VCs, a couple of operators as well.
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And then they would look at the agenda that I was putting together and give advice.
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Then I just found, obviously, the more tasks, I was also doing sales.
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I'm doing marketing and, you know, everything else.
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And the agenda was just kind of one of those things where I'd do a little sprint in January
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and I'd maybe get like 20, 30 speakers confirmed and I'd do nothing on it for the next few months.
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Because once you get those, you feel like I've got a base.
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So I'd do a sprint in January and by February I'd have like 30 speakers confirmed
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and, you know, maybe put like 20 up there and then add a few in kind of afterwards.
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uh but then yeah i just found like the then we would have the maybe may was the kind of point
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where we wanted to do the first draft of the agenda and you know put that kind of live and
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show you uh people you know what's happening because people like seeing who's speaking but
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they also want to know a lot of people like you know what are they what are they going to learn
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about right what are the particular specific topics that um and i was just becoming a bottleneck in
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that i was like i've got so much to do um i wouldn't give it as much time as it deserves
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And then I just thought, like, when we got into year three or after year two into year three, so I need, you know, somebody kind of professional to do this.
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And that's when I got introduced to Emma, Emma Pierce.
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And when I met her before we hired her and she just explained everything.
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which is like you know the biggest fintech sort of conference uh globally and she explained the
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whole process and i was like i don't do any of this yeah you're like wow yeah that's how it's
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supposed to look this is what the professionals do let's let's do that and um and again it was
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like she she hadn't worked in sas before but you know she'd been running content for a fintech
0.99
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conference and like she was super smart and i was like i'm pretty confident that that was the only
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weakness i was pretty confident you know what she's gonna get this and she just picked it up
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She's on the phone every day speaking to loads of founders and VCs, and she's
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It's one of those, over the years, the number of tasks or duties that I've delegated to
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somebody else in terms of I was doing the sales, I was leading marketing, I was doing
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But now, I'm actually probably more comfortable now saying,
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I am, you know, I am a CEO, I'm looking, you know, at the whole company at the dashboard,
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you know, at the numbers. Whereas the first couple of years, you know, you're a founder,
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yeah, you're doing it all when I wasn't comfortable with the term CEO, you know,
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back then, but I'm kind of growing into it a little bit.
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What have you learned? I mean, what's interesting about events is back in the day,
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I think my first tech event was like future web apps. Like Ryan Carson. And it was interesting
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watching their, you know, build something small into big, like what was the motivation for you
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to start SaaStock? Yeah. Um, motivation. I mean, I've always been entrepreneurial.
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Was that your first, first event ever in your whole life? Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really?
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Yeah. I didn't organize dinners or I mean, okay. So I, I, I did some meetups, but as part of the
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But I'd never, I think for one company, when I was a sales guy,
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we organized a small event for like 50 of our customers
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And actually, that was when I kind of stumbled into SassDoc
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I was doing the podcast to then supplement the blog.
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I didn't want to be a sales guy all of my career.
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And, yeah, and then, like, I soon supplemented that with the podcast.
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And I think just, again, like, the timing, like, the podcast,
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it was pretty much the first sort of B2B SaaS podcast back then in 2015.
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I remember Aaron Levy was doing founder calls with,
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and he had, like, Mikkel Sveni and, you know, Jeff Lawson from Twilio on.
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But I think he sort of realized running a public company
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and doing a podcast was, like, it was a lot of his time.
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And he, like, you know, had a podcast with no audience.
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But for two years, that was the most listened to
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episode because people just knew who he was. And that kind of gave us that, that boost, that spike,
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because we were getting people like Mark Roberge, Joey McCabe, you know, Byron Dieter, et cetera,
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were coming on. And, um, you know, as, as, and I was just doing this in my bedroom,
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anchor interviewer, the anchor speaker, once you got that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So then I
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could reference them. And, uh, so we, we, I was doing the, the blog, the podcast started doing
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SAS meetups because nobody else was doing them, um, at the time in the UK. And then I did, I did
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a couple in the uk like 120 people came to the first one uh it was a really good community
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like people like hannah chaplin from receptive which got acquired by by pendo and um so a lot
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of people that came to that first one you know still like i'm now like friends with or they come
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to sastock or you know they're sastock local city leaders um uh and uh i did some in dublin did some
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in berlin and i was like this is great but i'm trying to get this community together and there
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isn't a community like that's being pulled together in Berlin, but there's enough, you
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know, entrepreneurs there. And there is, there wasn't really a SAS community in Dublin and
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there wasn't really a SAS community in London. So I'm doing it all on somebody, it doesn't
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really scale. So it's pretty difficult to keep doing these meetups, uh, even, you know,
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doing like a couple of months. Um, and then I was just, everybody that I met though, this
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was all the great customer development sort of work where they're saying, look, you know,
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why don't you do a conference, you know, in, in Europe, we bring everybody together. You're
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the person to do it um because you're taking the initiative and i was like well yeah i i really
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like the idea and i'm looking for i you know i was really i wanted i wanted to do it right
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but then i said well i don't have a i don't have an experience in in conferences or events so
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eventually i kind of thought well do you know what so many people like are asking for this
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like surely it can't be rocket science if i get the right people around me um and that was kind
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What was the first one was, it turned into three days.
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In fact, it was just three workshops the first year.
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And then in SaaS Doc, it was just one day, two track.
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came over and he spoke because he confirmed really late he spoke on the second stage like right at
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the end and he was like oh you put me in the in the small room on the small room but i was like
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well you know if you confirm right at the end i did ask you you know for a whole year yeah but um
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but he he was fine with that and then we um then we had society the first iteration of it you had
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that all year one yeah i had that all year like crazy vision yeah yeah those are all like still
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pillars yeah yeah exactly and so yeah so so we had that and we've kind of you know they they've
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evolved um but that was kind of the idea from the beginning was like well how do we you know really
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cater for for everybody and differentiate ourselves and um so yeah so had that from from
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the beginning and those are all part of the the sas stock experience really what would you say
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to somebody that's trying to kind of build a network and use events as a way to do it like
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Like, what would you tell them to do if somebody's like,
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Like, I just want to, you know, because you always hear,
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Yeah, I think you've got to put in the groundwork, right?
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I was doing audience and community building for.
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So it could be like a Facebook group, could be whatever.
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So I'm going to do, I've seen the early kind of success
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I've got this great idea for a conference around, yeah,
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or something like that, and I had no idea what it was.
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And I said to him, look, I think what you need to do
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is you've got to do some of the groundwork, right?
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then that's kind of the best platform to really do that
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You know, they've got some good conferences behind them.
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I read a book by, I think it's Joe Palluzzi, it's called
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He just built this audience and then had this conference,
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and then it got acquired for like $17 million or something
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I feel like there's such this massive opportunity
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we're still quite early in SaaS, even though you've
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had Salesforce around for 20 years, or whatever it is.
00:21:02.520
So each year, there are just thousands and thousands
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And that's why tomorrow, we've got 500 here at SaaStock West
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So I think we've been riding this wave with SaaStock,
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you see the trajectory from 700 to, you know, well, 6,000 across the globe this year.
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And I think that's just going to continue to go like that.
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So from the conference point of view, we're just at a really good, I think, you know,
00:21:33.580
point in time where we launched, you know, very early to market in respect that there
00:21:38.920
wasn't, you know, a SaaS conference in Europe, you know, at the time.
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In fact, there were only, you know, two in the world, you know, at the time.
00:21:45.180
Now it's actually good to see that there's a SaaS conference that's happening in Prague tomorrow.
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There's one that's happening in Paris tomorrow.
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There's conferences in the US, et cetera, all over.
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So from a conference perspective, I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
00:22:09.360
Then there's discussions that we kind of have internally
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about the network that we have and the business that we have
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and supplementing that with perhaps sort of different products,
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whether it's accelerators or funds or this sort of thing.
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And what we said sort of right now is that we just need to kind of focus
00:22:31.560
on the conference business and just ensure that we're like a well-oiled machine.
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And once we're, you know, and again, like, you know, we're into year four, we probably should be a well-oiled machine and we're getting there, but it's just each year it's changed.
00:22:46.800
And now as we've got six conferences, you know, it means that you need to be super good at, you know, having internal processes and just being able to kind of, you know, run all of these kind of, you know, at a similar time from a marketing perspective and sales perspective.
00:23:02.320
So once we've got that kind of down, then I think you can say, OK, well, let's look at, you know, what is the next thing?
00:23:09.400
We did launch SaaS.local this year, which is effectively a similar easy way to kind of describe it, a bit like startup grind type model.
00:23:20.560
So actually looking at the grassroots where we came from and, you know, the SaaS meetups, which kind of stopped after I went, you know, well, full time on SaaS stock because that was where the revenue was.
00:23:34.160
And, yeah, we probably did a couple of meetups after the first SaaS stock.
00:23:39.220
But then we just focused on on the main conference.
00:23:41.560
But actually, you know, the important thing is that you should continue, I think, to do the community building and the grassroots stuff.
00:23:53.720
we realized, you know, we've got this big conference in Dublin.
00:23:56.860
And between conferences, whether it was 2017, 2018,
00:24:00.700
we actually hadn't done anything in the community in Ireland,
00:24:06.280
And we're like, we probably should have, right?
00:24:12.680
we have the, I think, the ability to do this at scale.
00:24:16.580
We've got the resources, Gabriel's like behind, you know, behind this and able to kind of recruit and support, you know, local kind of city leaders and empower that.
00:24:31.900
We had like 10 happening this month alone in Helsinki, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, you know, so it's really great to see.
00:24:43.260
And again, it's showing that there is such this hunger and demand
00:24:46.140
and getting about like close to 100 people per event.
00:24:53.820
And so like, you know, what if we can have 150 chapters, you know,
00:25:02.060
How do you mess things up as an event organizer?
00:25:06.220
Because I mean, you've seen all these events come and go.
00:25:09.180
Like when you talk to the team about like, hey, there's these certain things
00:25:13.100
we need to get right because this is how do you mess things up yeah yeah multiple ways i mean like
00:25:19.980
the first year for instance like we we almost run out of money a number of times right and again
00:25:25.820
i think a large part was inexperienced and we had a 12 mark uh 12 month kind of uh i was yeah
00:25:32.620
it was 12 months between launching the website and signing our first sponsor and starting the speaker
00:25:39.020
recruitment to the actual conference right so september september 2015 to october uh sorry
00:25:46.300
september 2016. so managing the cash flow it's like okay i can put a thousand dollars or a thousand
00:25:52.540
euros deposit down and then you know get a a sponsor in for like 15 grand or whatever uh and
00:25:59.740
then you have like a bad month and you're like okay then you know what what do i do now um so
00:26:05.260
So there were a lot of times where I was like, oh,
00:26:14.620
And again, that probably extends outside of the events
00:26:18.760
Just a cash flow in year one for many startups.
00:26:22.880
There were a lot of costs because of my experience
00:26:25.780
I bought into a lot of things because I wanted our event.
00:26:30.380
When you're this founder and you want your event to be the best
00:26:33.140
and look the best and you've got all these great ideas,
00:26:35.260
Sometimes I think I got a little bit carried away and maybe even-
00:26:39.140
Yeah, just like probably didn't have to spend as much on the staging as I did.
00:26:44.100
I would think I like the, you know, I have a lot of respect for the partners that we work with.
00:26:49.620
But, you know, perhaps sometimes they necessarily didn't view me as here is a, you know, a solo entrepreneur in the first year of business that probably doesn't have as deep pockets as Facebook.
00:27:02.900
But we'll still try and sell them an expensive solution.
00:27:04.940
And often they go, here's an expensive solution.
00:27:19.580
or actually bought physical things to think about next event.
00:27:23.260
So the booths that we have, and I think you've seen the booths
00:27:27.800
And I'm still probably making the same mistake.
00:27:30.160
But they're like handmade, kind of like wooden booths.
00:27:39.580
And you can have a much kind of cheaper, cost-effective offering
00:27:50.540
But I think ultimately, had I had somebody experienced
00:27:54.520
like with me, they would have advised and said,
00:27:57.040
you know, you don't need to spend that much there.
00:28:02.380
And that would have been the difference between, you know,
00:28:05.480
And we did actually make a loss, you know, in the first year.
00:28:09.560
Which, again, is pretty typical, but it's like, can you, yeah.
00:28:13.280
I mean, the events business is not known as like crazy profitable.
00:28:18.620
The thing is, to get it to the point where it can be,
00:28:25.440
There's already cash flow issues, and then you go at it again.
00:28:34.580
Well, self-funded and obviously driven by revenue, right?
00:28:50.260
and then selling sponsorship was actually a little bit
00:28:56.380
I think the first year we had about like 25 partners.
00:29:02.060
Some people don't even know they should have sponsors.
00:29:21.100
Second year, then I took the partnerships from 25 to 55.
00:29:26.080
And then it was kind of at that point where I was like, well,
00:29:28.860
if I can do this in two days of the week when I'm not fully
00:29:38.000
But back to your point in terms of how do you survive.
00:29:55.700
Then there was some money kind of like owing after the conference.
00:30:17.360
within a couple of days with a lot of the happy partners,
00:30:25.060
continue just selling, selling, selling, selling, selling.
00:30:26.980
Was there a pushback from early partners on first-year events?
00:30:36.880
One, where no pushback, and thank God, because again,
00:30:42.520
I think because of Sascribe, so the story like with Nick Franklin
00:30:48.160
from ChartMogul, I started Sascribe in February 2015.
00:30:53.240
I reached out to him in February 2015 for an interview,
00:30:58.640
Initially, he pushed back on that, but then he did it,
00:31:01.400
because his business is a dashboard for SaaS companies.
00:31:10.760
then started doing some display ads on the Sascribe,
00:31:14.300
which our traffic was very focused, but it wasn't huge.
00:31:21.800
but we realized, you know, advertising wasn't the, the, the model. Um, and then I bumped into him
00:31:26.900
again in, well, he came to like the, the Berlin SAS meetup. And then I saw him at web summit.
00:31:32.560
I said, Nick, I'm going to do this conference. And he said, what if you do, I'll sponsor it.
00:31:36.820
And then I, a few weeks later, I was like, Nick, I've got the websites already. I've got the venue.
00:31:41.020
And he wrote the first check, right. For it to be our, our gold partner, you know, and this was
00:31:45.740
money upfront 12 months ahead of a conference for a first time event. Right. And somebody with no
00:31:51.680
experience and you know he's a vc backs and so he's taking a big risk here but so uh he said he
00:31:58.220
did it because he kind of you know he bought into into me he believed that i would do it right and
00:32:04.100
obviously that you know people like nick as well like a lot of people that you know um attended
00:32:08.980
sasdoc they wanted to see something like this succeed they needed it you know for the ecosystem
00:32:13.720
for their businesses so they you know they they've got to be involved if they want something like
00:32:19.100
that right um in in the ecosystem so nick was a like a early evangelist took a risk um and again
00:32:26.620
maybe because he was a a seed stage sas business it was easier for him to take that risk yeah but
00:32:33.020
then we had partners like salesforce wouldn't partner with us in the first year intercom
00:32:36.860
wouldn't partner you know with the first year which is fair yeah which is fair yeah it's
00:32:41.420
absolutely yeah it's like yeah you guys are smart yeah yeah um but but yeah so the uh they missed
00:32:48.300
out but you know the ones that they would have been cheaper yeah yeah exactly and and you know
00:32:52.860
nick has a great deal uh for life but uh but yeah like a lot of those partners that that did um you
00:32:59.020
you know partner with us in the first year and i say there was like 24 of them um you know loved it
00:33:04.220
and uh most of them are still with us you know today kind of you know so you know the chart mogul
00:33:09.500
have been with us for four years, ProfitWell been with us
00:33:32.320
We're having accounts that spent 10 grand with us,
00:33:35.180
now spent 50 grand with us, and this kind of growth.
00:33:40.740
Um, like when do you, would you like set a limit or do you just like, if you want to
00:33:48.160
Yeah, no, um, you, I mean, what they want is brand awareness and lead generation, right?
00:33:55.800
And, um, within that, you know, they, uh, they, they need a good audience.
00:34:00.860
Um, you know, so you have to deliver that, that audience.
00:34:03.820
Um, they don't really like, I think if you look at actually our partner deck, uh, sort
00:34:08.260
last year there's probably like way too many things in there which were like a lot of that
00:34:11.700
that they get yeah that is probably they don't even want right and we can probably strip a lot
00:34:16.220
of that out and simplify it um but yeah like i guess you know for each year you know the more
00:34:22.320
people that you can bring to them um the the happier they are right do they ever ask for
00:34:27.500
unique things that you're like i don't know if we do that yeah yeah yeah um yeah some people do
00:34:32.740
some people don't like patrick campbell will just come and do stuff and then apologize for it
00:34:36.020
afterwards yeah but again maybe it would be crazy if everybody did that but i quite like the fact
00:34:44.500
that you know he's got a plan and he you know he does stuff so yeah i mean for instance um i think
00:34:49.920
like i think he did it in the first year and he kind of continues to to do it like he just emailed
00:34:54.200
everybody you know that's at the at the conference says hey look i'm doing a you know a talk on
00:34:59.560
pricing at my booth sort of right now and then i see this you know big crowd around their booth
00:35:04.680
And he's like, oh, and I see the email from him.
00:35:10.200
but I'm just going to say sorry now or whatever.
00:35:17.460
We always get like, we tailor stuff a little bit.
00:35:24.080
but everybody kind of wants something sort of unique.
00:35:25.940
So we've done like breakfasts and some special events
00:35:35.640
but we had a big German car manufacturer come to us
00:35:41.220
kind of this year and say, look, we're interested.
00:35:43.180
We want to get 300 CEOs in a room with a car.
0.69
00:35:47.820
Is the sensor kind of stage and how much would that cost?
00:35:55.800
And would they car sponsor Uber and stuff for drivers
00:36:01.620
Yeah, no, I think they're just exposure for their brand.
00:36:04.040
Yeah, so they just want to get in front of, like, you know, CEOs and stuff.
00:36:10.180
But car manufacturers do sponsor, you know, big tech events, right?
00:36:15.600
And we're kind of getting to that stage where, you know, we're getting to a kind of big-ish event.
00:36:21.240
You know, we've got a lot of C-level, you know, attendees there, right?
00:36:24.560
So they want to do that and get in front of them.
00:36:28.000
But mostly, we have SaaS companies that want to sell
00:36:35.120
Like, has anybody ever done something super schemey?
00:36:51.120
I mean, I've snuck into a few green rooms in my time.
00:36:57.760
But no, I mean, generally, I think everybody that comes to Sastoc
00:37:23.180
London, you know, where I'm from and New York and San Francisco, um, you, you know, you bump into
00:37:28.800
people like in, in the morning when they're jogging in, in the park, obviously see everybody at the
00:37:32.980
conference. And then in the evening, you're bumping into them in the streets. And again, you know,
00:37:37.080
in the pubs and at dinner, and it's like at midnight, you know, you're coming out of restaurant
00:37:42.340
and there's, you know, David Darman and there's all these other people. Yeah. And, and, uh, and
00:37:47.300
it's great. Right. So it kind of feels like, yeah, everybody, everybody's here. Right. And,
00:37:50.900
And some of them speakers come and then they leave.
00:37:55.800
I guess what I loved about Sassock is like people are there to be at the event, to experience
00:38:05.480
And that I think you've pulled off really well.
00:38:09.620
I just find like, you know, like, you know, what moments have happened that like you didn't
00:38:17.840
I mean, obviously, you've got 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people showing up.
00:38:22.860
Like, you're essentially responsible for these people.
00:38:35.120
I mean, every year, I always say, you know, I'm going to behave, right?
00:38:41.040
And in terms of, you know, it's really exhausting doing a whole week of events.
00:38:46.840
I mean, because from Monday right to SAS Society,
00:38:53.200
So obviously, not everybody is there for the full week.
00:39:00.880
But we have two speaker dinners on the Monday and Tuesday.
00:39:03.900
And as soon as you get into the speaker dinner.
00:39:09.600
There's 150 speakers this year, so it's over two dinners.
00:39:14.920
And as soon as you go into the speaker's dinner,
00:39:16.460
You get in, and somebody hands you a glass of Prosecco.
00:39:26.540
Last year, I took three speakers out until about 3 in the morning.
00:39:35.180
I mean, I got on stage to do the second day opening remarks.
00:39:43.300
I'm sure he doesn't mind me mentioning his name.
00:39:45.180
he was like just young big Finnish guy who was absolutely fine I was like my god how you how
00:39:50.140
are you you know fine um and then we we had Jack uh who um uh from uh from SIFT who was speaking
00:39:57.920
and he came in with like his uh sunglasses and it's like I feel absolutely terrible and he's
00:40:03.140
got to go on stage and he nearly puked on stage and so uh so we have had that so that's very
00:40:07.640
irresponsible of me to take speakers out and you know uh be entertainment until like you know
00:40:14.180
3 in the morning, but so I'll try and not do that, I think.
00:40:17.300
So it's more self-restraint than any of the attendees.
00:40:29.540
But I think he doesn't do a whole ton of third party events.
00:40:53.920
is very practical, actionable, it's super focused stuff.
00:41:06.060
to do something a bit more kind of like higher level,
00:41:08.760
a bit more inspirational type stuff, which we don't usually
00:41:15.480
But I mean, for instance, he's not speaking this year,
00:41:18.860
but he's got a book out, actually, which launches
00:41:29.100
Like, when it comes to the conference, exactly.
00:41:32.160
But yeah, people like Aaron Levy, he is the funniest dude.
00:41:41.940
and the conference is in October, and I'm not moving it.
00:41:47.900
I mean, they're out there a whole bunch that we do try.
00:41:51.160
And we've had some speakers where I've confirmed them,
00:42:07.320
Because I like the, OK, you've got the big names,
00:42:11.940
But I'd like to get some of the unheralded names.
00:42:19.440
And maybe they're kind of like the next big thing.
00:42:21.700
So for instance, we tried with the founders of Notion.
00:42:33.420
We're not going to come and speak at conferences.
00:42:35.800
And that's great, like Airtable, these sort of type of companies.
00:42:45.820
I fought it because I was like, I don't like tools just
00:42:55.560
So it's nice to actually get them in when they're just
00:42:57.640
that little step ahead of, like, there's a lot of buzz.
00:43:00.760
There's a lot of buzz around those type of things.
00:43:03.820
But again, even the rising stars, maybe because they're
00:43:11.500
So I've reached out in the past and done events.
00:43:14.860
And when founders are like that, I'm like, come on, man.
00:43:18.440
If you're going to say yes, this is the one to say yes to.
00:43:32.940
Speak to your peers, learn, you know, it's good.
00:43:36.020
It's like, you know, I mean, for the first two years, you
00:43:39.440
know, of running SassDoc, like, I didn't have a vacation.
00:43:44.240
But through, it wasn't because we were the next sort of big
00:43:48.620
thing, but it was more out of, you know, survival, right?
00:43:51.080
And you've just got to keep the lights on and make it work.
00:43:55.480
And then after that, I felt like, well, you know,
00:43:59.560
But I was in bad shape in terms of, I was knackered.
00:44:08.660
And I just had two young kids as well in the first two years.
00:44:12.280
They would have been right around that same time.
00:44:23.740
I mean, Gemma, my partner, when I said to her, look,
00:44:28.900
And that was the only income that we had in the household at the time.
00:44:32.180
And I said, I'm going to go full-time on SAS doctors.
00:44:39.120
I was like, well, if I'm going to wait two years, somebody else is going to do it.
00:44:42.260
And I'm not going to want to do it in two years' time, right?
00:44:44.160
Because I'll probably be thinking of something else.
00:44:54.180
And that was the best time, even though I had kids on the way.
00:45:05.980
Alex, you've obviously started to build the team, 20 plus people.
00:45:26.080
I wouldn't necessarily say for like the first two years
00:45:29.060
I was like a leader, you know, I found it sort of like difficult.
00:45:35.140
So I would just kind of focus on the sales thing
00:45:38.040
and say, okay, well, you do, you know, you do the marketing
00:45:42.080
And like when the team was three people, when it's seven people,
00:45:45.540
you don't necessarily, you don't have to do those weekly all hands
00:45:48.920
or, you know, the coaching and this sort of thing.
00:45:52.180
And that wasn't necessarily my arsenal like at the time.
00:45:56.080
And now very much more so, you know, I'm trying to be, you know, a mentor, a coach, you know, on a weekly basis doing, you know, one-to-ones and, you know, like performance reviews, this sort of thing and kind of trying to learn that still, you know, got, I think, you know, a long way to go, but getting much better at being, I think, you know, a boss and a leader of the company and again, the visionary right now, the position where you've, you know, you're the storyteller, right?
00:46:24.780
you've got to be that's got to be in your kit bag as well i think i've probably always had it you
00:46:30.140
know i've always had that um it's just becoming a bit more kind of refined right and so having that
00:46:36.220
kind of vision the clear vision and so everybody knows what the vision is and they work you know
00:46:40.780
towards that within the business so um so yeah i like much more um uh like this year the last sort
00:46:48.460
of two years been focused around being a better kind of leader being a better manager so you know
00:46:53.580
reading a whole ton of business books to try and understand
00:46:59.980
not only how to build a great company and a great team
00:47:05.100
And I think one thing, actually, I still haven't done,
00:47:19.800
I'm trying to be a mentor and stuff to my team.
00:47:22.860
but I don't actually have one and I don't know, you know, who that, that person would be. That's
00:47:28.240
because again, I think it makes sense. Somebody that has done a conference business, somebody
00:47:32.340
that's been in events, right? Uh, a Joe Paluzzi type thing. If Joe, if you're listening, so, uh,
00:47:36.660
yeah. Um, but yeah, like having somebody kind of like that, there's been, that's been there,
00:47:42.180
done that would be, uh, would be, I think pretty, pretty helpful for me.
00:47:45.840
What would you expect from that person? Like, what would you, um, what do you expect you would
00:47:50.200
learn or kind of what areas would they challenge you
00:47:59.080
So I mean, some of the things that I like to learn, again,
00:48:03.560
because we're, funnily enough, I get people who are just
00:48:07.360
starting out in the conference business that kind of reach out
00:48:11.900
And I'm always kind of happy to give up my time
00:48:16.840
So again, somebody that has built, I think, an events
00:48:22.300
company that maybe like 50 to 100 sort of people,
00:48:29.440
are, as you're going global, the different markets
00:48:37.880
So there are only a few really kind of big conferences
00:48:46.420
or kind of still running, where actually they can give us
00:48:49.240
a lot of advice still, because again, a lot of learnings
00:48:55.300
But yeah, just again, if they also have that skill set,
00:49:01.420
how you build an international events business.
00:49:09.200
So it could be two different people, and therapists,
00:49:16.300
So all of that could probably be pretty beneficial.
00:49:20.260
I appreciate you saying that, obviously, self-serving.
00:49:29.540
I'm more probably active on LinkedIn, Alex Thiemer.
00:49:32.820
Sorry, LinkedIn has been slowly just taking more and more
00:49:37.400
Yeah, yeah, I think it's been pretty good for us.
00:49:43.540
Alex Thuma, a little bit, but I'm not the best on that.
00:49:47.960
The SaaS Revolution Show podcast has been going four years now.
00:49:51.980
We're going to do some new things, I think, on that in 2020,
00:50:03.120
and hopefully come to the Dublin one or next year in Latin America,
00:50:14.520
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:50:17.760
Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.