SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How much revenue do Jason and SaaStr make?
25 Aug 2022
Chapter 1: What is the budget for turning on the lights at SaaStr?
The total turn on the lights budget will be just north of 10 million to turn on the lights.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Jason Lemkin.
Many of you already know it. You've been to his events. What we're going to try and dive into today is twofold. One, many of you guys at your SaaS companies are trying to build moats around your technology, right? Your actual SaaS business and community is a big play there. This guy's, I would say, top of the world at this. And the second is, maybe you want a user conference.
Like, what do the economics on an event actually look like? That's a whole other animal we're just chatting about before this. But without further ado, number one SaaS community on the planet, the OG, Jason Lemkin. Jason Lemkin
Thanks, Nathan. But I'm always inspired by your work and your community and founder path as well. So it's good. Always good to be with you.
I appreciate that. We were just joking before this, you know, we have a very small event coming up and I'm going, man, there's so many fires and you're going, yeah, well, at least you can do yours in a hotel. I've got to build, you know, I don't know if you're able to share the number. We've got to build X, X millions of dollars worth of tents outside.
I'll share all the numbers. This is, this is the show where you have to share the numbers. How much are you spending on tents?
So ask your annual tent budget. What's the Sastra annual tent budget?
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Chapter 2: What are the two main focuses of Jason Lemkin in this episode?
Like, why wouldn't you use turnkey software? You would. Build versus buy. You always want to buy. You never want to build, right? Unless you're forced to.
Well, and what did you tell me before this? I mean, you said if... I mean, I guess I'll just ask the question. If you knew what goes into putting on an event like Sastra Annual coming here September 13th, 14th, 15th, right? Yeah. Would you do it again?
No. And look, it is... you know, it is a work of passion at this point. We know what we're doing. We're passionate about it.
Chapter 3: What is the economics behind hosting a user conference?
These are the things you want to do in life once you've been doing things for a while is find things that you're, even if they're quirky that you're passionate about, right? Because it keeps you going. But no, no one told me there's no book. I mean, at this scale, you know, the overall enterprise is like 25 million.
You start to reach this weird air where there's not a lot of comps and people to talk about. And so after the second year, the first year was, 800 people during the day, one day event, 1,400 organized in 90 days. You get that because you're doing that now. It was great. And what year was that again? That was way back in 2015. I just put up a tweet, like, come disaster annual.
There was no other annual. But we had Aaron Levy and Stuart Butterfield and David Sachs really early on. And people's jaw dropped, right? And so it was tiring. I was the only moderator. You get that because you do this yourself. I was burnt out. But it was one day. We broke even. So the next year, 2,800 people showed up. Wait, wait, wait.
Jason, what'd you spend first year all in?
We spent about 200 grand to produce a one-day low-end event in the Regency Ballroom on SF. We spent about 200 grand. Wow.
And what was the breakdown in terms of revenue between ticket sales and sponsors?
You know, the beauty was the first two years I took, I outsourced it. Here was another life learning. I outsourced it to our good friend, Max Altshuler, who runs Sales Hacker and just stepped down as VP of Marketing and Outreach. And he had run a sales event. And I said, Max, you can keep all the money. Like, I don't want the money. You know how to do this crazy thing. You do it.
You keep all the money and just help me. I'll do the speakers and the content and the marketing. And so I didn't even know this actually. The second year, we ended up doing 3.6 million the second year, and the breakdown was about 50-50. But everything broke, and we actually lost money that year.
Even though we went from 400K in revenue on 200K in cost, we lost money the next year on 3.6 because it just got too big too quickly, right?
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Chapter 4: How much does it cost to turn on the lights for an event?
With no employees, right. It's called product market fit.
Yeah. But how do you, I mean, for those people listening right now going, okay, we're going to do user conferences. You're going to try it. Okay. I'm listening to Jason talk on Nathan's show in 2015 with his first thing. You know, we want to go from 500 to 1500. I mean, was it more ad spend in the second year? Was it just word of mouth? Was it not only second year?
We didn't even, I didn't even have a list. like we have today, like you and I have today. It was just word of mouth. It was just blog posts and tweets and it wouldn't work today. We could not, I mean, we'll have over 10,000 this year. If I just waited on word of mouth, it'd probably be smaller than it was in 2016 because the world has changed, right?
But back then there was no content in SaaS and cloud. You're an innovator too. Like people, there was such a, no one had ever heard a VP of sales talk. Like, Or a CEO talk. Now you can fire up YouTube and there's a thousand talks from Aaron Levy, who I love. He's done Sastra six times, right? But people's jaw dropped when Aaron Levy came to the first Sastra a week after Box IPO.
No one had ever seen this. No one had ever. And our... Closed speaker was this guy, Stuart Butterfield, who people had started to use this app Slack, but no one had ever heard a guy like this talk from gaming to SaaS. But now the world has changed. We're much more sophisticated, right? And so the world is, but back then it was the world. It's interesting when sometimes when the world is smaller,
You can actually get more, and it relates to community, your second point, you can get more mindshare because the world's smaller, right? And as the world gets bigger, actually, community is more challenging when the world gets bigger, right? Because people already have things. They already have places to go, places to hang out, and why would I join your community, right?
But if you start something early, like Pulse did with Gainsight and Customer Success, or SaaS did just for SaaS founders, there wasn't another one. So the bar actually was shockingly low in many ways, right? Because there wasn't one. And so that's one way to build, not to jump around, but that's one way to build a community is focus on white space, right?
Or do what you did, which is add extreme value in a space that already has some community, right? But you added so much value in the early days, getting real metrics and data on these companies, right? That no one was doing that. I think that's, I'm flipping it around a little bit. I think that's the secret to some of your success, right? As you found this niche,
that yeah there are there is some goofy stuff there was great stuff at sasser telling you how to scale and there was some goofy vendor stuff but i want numbers like i want to know how how how greenhouse is doing or i remember because that was one of my first investments i remember daniel talking about or how whoever is doing or pendo's doing and this data was it was your jaw would drop the early stuff you did right um some of it was a little edgy but um it's another way those are like two ways to build a community is what i've learned but but for events it's like crazy and
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Chapter 5: What were the revenue breakdowns for the first two years of SaaStr?
I'm still struggling with that meta question.
Oh, that's interesting. That's a tweet. That's a LinkedIn post. Yeah. It really is. Name the agencies real quick. So core agencies embedded. You have the content, you have event production. What are the other ones?
Yeah, well, there's a firm called CredPR, which I would recommend anyway. Mostly they do SaaS companies that want to get their CEOs in events or on podcasts. They may have reached out to you over the years. That's all they do is get, they don't want to do the other stuff. They don't want to get you on TechCrunch or anything. They want to get folks speaking.
And what would happen was all these folks, I'm sure they do with you too, you get these terrible PR pitches, right?
Horrible copy and paste bullshit, yeah.
Of course. But the cred ones, and this is always fun, those were the ones that really got it. Hey, I've been to Sastr. I remember the first one. I've got Orin Hoffman, CEO of wherever Orin was before. I already knew Orin. Here's what Orin did. Here's why he'd be a great speaker. And I'm like, yeah, I would take Orin anyway. I've known him since we were CEOs together. But they knew the product.
They knew the pitch. They knew that you had to have value for like the shtick with Saster is you have to add value. Right. So they got it. So, you know, then it took me two years to convince them to help me. They were too busy. But the great ones stand out. And that's the beauty to email. Like an inbound model is the great ones.
I'm sure even when folks, I know you get data from Stripe and others, but I think, I bet even at FounderPath, you can tell the really good ones just from the application or the email. They just jump out, right? The founders get it. They get what they want to do with the money. They get why they're doing it. They get their business.
And probably 90% of them, like the applications are terrible too, right? Just like to be on the show.
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Chapter 6: How did the number of attendees change from the first to the second year?
okay so we promote sasser everywhere on linkedin on we have newsletters we're like we'll embed an image and before like it's 28 days like if there's six things in the email like people will i'm convinced it helps because they see it like a billboard but the direct correlation ticket sales is zero all those like multi cdas the the the urls embedded in a tweet with the the
the direct conversion is zero and the direct conversion, 90% is email. It doesn't mean the other step. It must help, right? Because you see it. But if you're all about like last step conversion and you're not, don't have great multi-touch like us, it seems like nothing works, but two emails a month to the base with one CTA prices going up. That's the only CTA that works too. Nothing else works.
Prices discounts don't work. Um, Great speakers, nothing works, but prices, that just creates this urgency in your mind to buy, right? We get panicked.
That's wild. Okay, so how many people on your list today?
It's too small and we're terrible. We only have 120,000 people on our list.
Okay, but that's what you say, email the base. That's what you mean, you say email the base, yeah.
We prune it super aggressively, right? People have different strategies here, whether to let the mediocre names or the expired folks. We don't want... Names on our list, if they used to work at one company and went to the other, we don't, we aggressively, because it's for a whole bunch of reasons, right? But it's pretty bad.
Our list should be about twice as big, but a lot of learnings, but not having a full-time owner of your list, right? It's very ironic that this crown jewel, which I suspect it is for you too, we don't have a full-time owner. And if someone's listening and wants to make a lot of money to own our list, I mean, a lot of money, like find me. Don't wait for me to find you. Find me.
And if you're really good at it, I will double your current comp because for a magician, it's a great role, right? Because email is magical.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of scaling events in the current environment?
What would you value SaaSter at today?
As a business? As a business. I don't know. I mean, if ShopTalk was sold for 150, what would Saster be worth?
What was ShopTalk doing in revenue? What was the multiple?
25, pretty crappy multiple, but no community, but no community around it. What's the community worth? Zero on top of the revenue? It's got to be worth more than zero.
Sounds like you could make an argument than using ShopTalk as a comp of something north of 120, 130 million.
Well, the question it would be if it's like, okay, so you have two parallel businesses, similar size of similar revenue. One is just a trade show, but one of the best there's ever been, right? For e-commerce. The other is a community of a hundred thousand something folks with dramatic engagement.
So not that there's any desire to sell faster, but does that community have zero value on top of the revenue? Like it must have, if we're talking about community, it must have some value, right? So what's that incremental value on top of the 150? Like, I don't know. You could, you could guess, is it zero? Yeah. Is it another 150? Is it $10? I have no clue. I have no clue.
In this new world, you're about what's the value of community, right? Both in your classic way of what's it worth to buy or what's it worth to a vendor. And I think marketers are learning. Community is the hottest thing for CMOs, right? But I think unlike you and me, a lot of them don't really know what it means.
Yeah.
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