SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaStock Starts Oct 16th in Dublin, 5000 SaaS Founders and Big Bootstrap Stage
02 Oct 2023
Chapter 1: What is SaaStock and when does it take place in Dublin?
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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. 2022, big success, SaaS stock.
He invested over $2 million of his own capital to bring 3,700 folks in the SaaS world together, 1,500 founders, 17 to 18 side events. He's building his own team, now 22 people getting ready for SaaS stock 2023, October 16th in Dublin. Go get tickets now. Ticket prices are increasing at a regular pace every 7 to 14 days.
Chapter 2: How did the SaaStock 2022 event perform after the pandemic?
So the longer you wait, the more expensive it is. You want to go grab a ticket, great speakers. You're going to learn from Eric Hall and Jonathan, his go-to-market motion, 10 years of lessons. from growing air called over 130 million bucks of revenue.
Also, Greg and muck rack, why did he bootstrap to 50 million revenue and then decide to take $180 million sort of secondary round from Susquehanna, including partially a secondary and then lastly, again, something sounds like just as so well as the community, you're going to meet folks that are going to these Mykonos retreats that are doing 10 million of revenue.
Hey folks, my guest is Alex Suma, a recent guest. He's come on every year as he's built SaaS stock. I think launched back in, what was it, 2017, Alex? 2016, almost there, but yeah, it's been a while. Dude, 10-year anniversary coming up.
Chapter 3: What are the new features and changes for SaaStock 2023?
That's pretty crazy. Seven years in, which is amazing, including COVID. But guys, he's doing much more than SaaS stock. He's got his own fund now. He's launched a founder membership. He's got SaaS to side. He's got a software play with VentureDues. We're going to jump into all of it today. Alex, you ready to take us to the top?
I am, and great to be back.
All right. Let's talk about 2022 first. Your flagship event is in Dublin, obviously, sasdoc.com. Looking back at 2022, sort of from your perspective as a conference organizer, what worked well, what didn't work well, and what changes are you testing or going to try here in 2023?
Yeah, good question.
Chapter 4: Who are the notable speakers at SaaStock 2023?
I think the great thing about 2022 was it was just our return to in-person, right? SASDoc was back after, well, almost a three-year hiatus because the last one was in 2019. And then we had two years of COVID of doing a shitload of virtual conferences and webinars, right? So it really benefited from that feel-good feeling of everybody coming back to SASTOC.
And there's a real family and special entrepreneurial vibe at SASTOC. And a lot of people that have been to three, four, five, six SASTOC conferences, and the fact that everybody could get back to Dublin and celebrate and be at that event and connect with each other, that really worked because, again, we just kind of felt that vibe and energy in the show floor, right?
I think it's not something that you get at every conference. And I was speaking with somebody yesterday about another SaaS conference that was in the US, and they just said it was kind of like there's a real lack of vibe there, according to them, right? I wasn't there. But, you know, something that you get with SaaS, Doc, is that vibe.
And, you know, you look left, you look right, you've got an entrepreneur, you know, founder sitting next to you or standing next to you. And I think with that, just that hype and the excitement and certainly pre-event was higher than ever, right? And just like online, we were blowing up online.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of the bootstrap stage at SaaStock?
And, you know, it was really kind of like getting interest of like everybody within and without and outside of the community. So people like Paddy Crosbury from Web Summit was like... what's going on? Like SaaS stock is kind of everywhere, you know, online. And so he had to come down and, you know, see it for himself. And he really enjoyed the events and, you know, we'll be coming back this year.
But I think, so that was kind of one thing pre-event, like during the event. So we did the bootstrap stage for the first time. And that was, I think, long overdue, right? Because SaaS stock is really well known, I think, you know, for being this event where you've got a ton of SaaS investors and you go there and
You're going to meet an investor, whether it's sort of pre-seed through to growth stage. And now, obviously, we've got alternative funding as well, sort of revenue-based funding providers as well, right? But you've got a ton of VCs, and we're known for getting connected and just doing meetings to learn about how you can fund your SaaS.
But we also have always had this sort of small-ish, I would say, bootstrap contingent that's probably not been that well served through the content. Because if you look at the scale stage and the growth stage, almost everybody is venture-backed. So that's on those stages, right?
So we decided at the bootstrap stage last year for the first time, you guys found a path that we're heavily involved in that. And it was great. And we got people like, you know, Stefan Smulders was up there sort of speaking.
Expanding, $8 million in revenue now.
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Chapter 6: How much did it cost to host SaaStock and what were the expenses?
He's killing it.
$8 million in revenue now. Yeah. And we had Mahanad from Hotjar. You know, they were, well, I don't know, $40, $50 million or whatever. And obviously sold to ContentSquare. So that was really good and really resonated. And we saw that actually there was a large bootstrap community there. And obviously that's returning because that worked really well for us. So I think that was good.
And also something that I would say is a bit inadvertent that's kind of worked quite well is just that there's just an ecosystem of side events that are just building around SaaS docket.
How many side events last year? Were you able to count those up anyway?
There was about 17, 18 that we knew. So these are events that we're not running, right? And so it's like Northstone, who are a venture capital partner, one of the leading VCs in Europe. They did like a paddle boarding event for founders down the River Liffey in Dublin. And I was a little bit like, where are all these founders going? I saw Oivin from Whereby leaving the conference at like 11 a.m.
on the first day.
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Chapter 7: What is the SaaS founders' membership program and how does it work?
And I'm like, where are you going? It's like, oh, I'm off to a paddle boarding event. But I'm like, well, we're trying to keep everybody in the venue. There are all these things that are happening. And like, even I know the other VCs, they do like little, you know, content sessions kind of in hotels and venues, you know, around the RDS.
So they're pulling a little bit, you know, people out of the conference venue, which, you know, to some partners, you know, might not be the best thing, but I guess we're at that volume now that it doesn't really affect too much. If 30, 40 people kind of leave, you're not going to feel that.
How many folks did you have live last year? What was the final count?
Live last year, it was around, I want to say, like 3,700, something like that.
And how many of those would you say were founders?
Oh, how many of those were founders? But maybe like 1,500, something like that.
1,500. So pretty good density. I mean, call it 50%, a little south of 15% are founders. And again, all B2B SaaS focused. Walk me into sort of, we're going to focus on three things on the interview today here. The first is 2022 performance. The next is why we're excited about 2023.
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Chapter 8: What insights can we gain from Greg's journey of bootstrapping to $50 million ARR?
And then lastly is just, I think you're one of the world, sort of best in the world at building community, right? And you're doing this in a variety of different ways. But when you think about, I mean, a lot of people think community, you just stick up a Facebook group and you invite some people. This building a community that requires very real time, money, and energy investment.
I mean, are you comfortable sharing and sort of talking about 2022, what you guys spent all in to get 1500 founders in one spot?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So what did we spend all in? I mean, overall, I would say it was probably about $2 million, something like that. What's the most expensive thing? The most expensive thing, I mean, obviously, apart from our own overheads from the team, I think it's just like production, right? So we're spending... between 500K to a million on production.
So it's certainly less than a million. What does that mean?
Does that mean like AV or like lights?
Yeah, it's stage design. It's building out the conference. So we hire out a venue and it's effectively an empty shell. And then three days before the event, that venue is empty. And then when the event opens and literally people are working like 24 hours a day, you're building the stands, you're building the stages.
And as the door opens, they might be still turning a few screws and finishing bits off here and there. But literally within three days, the whole thing, the whole sort of like SaaS.festival is built, right? And we use one company, which then uses a number of different suppliers to kind of help pull that all together. So it's a big operation.
And obviously, our team is mostly sales and marketing kind of focused, right? We've got two ops people. How many folks are full-time today at SaaS.stock? 22 today.
Wow. And what were you last year?
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