How SaaStock CEO Alex Theuma grew SaaStock to $5.6M revenue with a 38 person team in 2024.

2022 big success SAS stock he invested over 2 million bucks of his own Capital to bring 3 700 folks in the SAS world together 1500 founder 17-18 side events he's building his own team now 22 people getting ready for SAS stock 2020 through October 16th in Dublin go get tickets now ticket prices are increasing at a regular Pace every 7 to 14 days so the longer you wait the more expensive it is you want to go grab a ticket great speakers you're gonna learn from aircon Jonathan his go to market motion 10 years of lessons from growing air called over 130 million bucks of Revenue also Greg and muckrack why did he bootstrap to 50 million revenue and then decide to take 180 million dollars sort of secondary uh round from Susquehanna including partially a secondary and then lastly again something sasak just does 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 guess is Alex Sumo recent galaxy has come on every year as he's built SAS stock I think launched back in what was it 2017 Alex 2016. yeah um yeah it's been a while your 10-year anniversary coming up that's pretty crazy seven years in which is amazing including covet but guys he's doing much more than Samsung he's got his own funds now he's launched a Founder membership he's got SAS aside he's got a software play with Venture news 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 uh obviously sasdstock.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 are going to try here in 2023 yeah good question uh I I think like uh the great thing about 2022 was it was just a return to in person right sassed up was back after well almost a three-year Hiatus because the last one was in 2019 uh and then we had two years of covid of doing you know a shitload of virtual conferences and and webinars right so um it really benefited from that um you know feel good feeling of everybody coming back to to sasdoc and there's a real like family uh and special entrepreneurial Vibe uh at sasdoc and a lot of people that have been to three four five six SAS dot conferences uh and the fact that everybody could get back to Dublin and and celebrate and be at that event and connect with each other uh that really that really worked because again it you just kind of felt that Vibe and energy in the show floor right I think it's it's not something that you get at every conference and I was speaking with somebody yesterday about uh another SAS conference that was in the US and they just said it was kind of like there's a real lack of vibe uh there according to them right I I wasn't there but you know something that you get with SAS stock is that is that Vibe and you know you you look left you look right you've got an entrepreneur uh you know founder sitting uh next to you or standing next to you um and and I think with that uh just that hype and the excitement and sort of the pre-event uh was higher than ever right and and just like online we were blowing up online uh 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 Crosby from web Summit was like what's going on like SAS stock is kind of everywhere you know online and so he had to come down and you know see it for himself uh and and he really enjoyed the events and you know we'll be coming back uh this year but I think um uh so that was kind of one thing prevention like during the event so we did the bootstrap stage for the first time uh and and that was I think long overdue right because SAS stock is really well known I think you know for being this event where you've got a ton of uh SAS investors and you go there you're gonna an investor whether it's sort of precede through to you know growth stage and and now obviously we've got you know alternative uh um you know uh funding uh as well sort of you know Revenue based uh uh funding providers uh as well right but um you've got a ton of VCS and we're known for getting connected and just doing meetings learn about how you can fund your tasks but we also have always had this sort of small uh small ish I would say you know bootstrap contingent that's probably not that big been that well served through the content because if you look at the scale stage and the growth stage almost everybody is is venture-backed so that's on those on those stages right so we decided that the bootstrap stage last year for the first time you guys uh you know found a path that we're heavily involved uh in that um and it was great and we've got people like you know Stefan smolders uh was up there sort of speaking uh excuse me million in Revenue now he's killing eight million in Revenue now yeah and we had we had Mohamed from hot jar you know they were well I don't know 40 50 50 million or whatever and obviously sold to content Square so that was really good and really resonated and we saw that actually there was a large bootstrap Community uh there and obviously that's returning because that worked really well uh you know for us right um so I think that that was good and also something that um you know I I would say it's a bit like in an inadvertent uh that's going to work quite well it's just that there's just an ecosystem aside events that are just building around SAS stock oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview how many side events last year were you able to count those up anyway like there was about 17 18 uh that we knew so these are these are events that we're we're not running right uh and so it's like uh North Zone you know who are a Venture Capital Partner um you know one of leading VCS in Europe uh they did like a paddle boarding event for Founders down the river Liffey in in Dublin and I was a little bit like where are all these Founders going I saw Ivan from uh whereby you know leaving the conference at like 11 A.M on the first day 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 but they're all these things that are happening and like even I know the other VCS they do like little um you know content sessions kind of in hotels and venues you know around the RDS so they're pulling a little bit uh 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 Gonna Leave you're not going to feel how many hours how many books did you have live last year what was the final count live last year was uh it was around I want to say like 3700 something like that yeah and how many of those would you say were founders oh how many of those were Founders but maybe like 1500 something like 1500 so pretty good density I mean to call it 50 little south of 15 are our Founders and then all B2B SAS focused walk me into sort of we want to we want we're gonna focus on three things on the interview today here the first is 2022 performance the next is why we're excited about 2023 and then lastly is just I think you're one of the world is sort of best in the world at building Community right you're doing this in a variety of different ways um but when you think about I mean a lot of people think Community just stick up a Facebook group when 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 um so what did we spend all in uh I mean overall I would say it was probably about two million something like that um what's the most expensive the most expensive thing um I mean obviously apart from our own overheads uh from the team I think you just over like production right um so we're we're spending uh between you know 500k to you know a million on on production so it's certainly less what is that what does that mean does that mean like AV or like lights yeah it's stay it's stage design it's building out the conference so like we we hire out a venue and it's effectively an empty shell right and then you know three days before the event that that venue is empty right and then when the event opens and and literally people are working like 24 hours a day you're building the stands you're building the stages and the uh and you know as the door opens they might be still like you know turning a few screws and finishing bits off that you know kind of here and there but literally within three days the whole thing the whole sort of like SAS stock Festival uh it is built right and uh and we use you know one company which then uses you know a number of like different like suppliers to kind of help all 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 it's our start uh 22 today you know wow and what were you last year last year by the time of the event I think we were like 17 or 18. so like at the beginning of 2022 we were nine no we were nine we were yeah we were about nine because like post uh pre-covered we were 24 when we scaled down to nine during covert kind of keep it lean you know our costs and uh went uh down I had to go down so our Revenue uh went down by two-thirds uh and then we uh we we started to hire slowly and build back so it was about 17 by the time of Dublin last year yeah okay and 22 now that's great I like these the reason I'm asking these questions is if someone you know if you're a fast man are listening today and you want to build your own Community you sort of understand what kind of hiring what it costs to put on your own event like this sort of thing so what you've done Alex just to communicate back your full-time employees are really focused on Marketing sales and Ops and then you have a bunch of vendors you pay for sort of event specific items AV location Etc 100 yeah yeah all right let's fast forward to 2023 because South stock is coming up it's October 16th you should really land on October 15th hopefully in Dublin you've got a great group of speakers I pulled out a couple I'm excited about it I'm hoping you can maybe give us a tease on what we can expect from them I think aircall is potentially a great IPO candidate in 2024 over 130 million dollars of Revenue you've landed Jonathan one of the co-founders to speak what can we expect from him and what state is he on do you know yeah I I really like uh Jonathan's on the scale stage um uh it's the biggest stage yeah and really that's for the companies like air cool uh obviously the air cools uh I think you know classified as a centaur you know a company that's doing 100 million in Revenue I think you said now it's like 130 uh I've had echo on you know our podcasts when they were probably I think series a uh and obviously you know we've kind of followed their Journey over the years uh you know as SAS stock and uh themselves has has grown right but they've obviously grown a lot a lot faster I had to check Jonathan was still coming because he's left their call he's still the co-founder of course but he's left air cool and now he's he's set up like uh an investment fund for property so he's now into hotels and car parks and and things like that and I was like is he still going to be interested in speaking in a SAS conference uh but he is obviously he's got 10 years of lessons right from building out air called being the co-founder I think he was the CEO at one point but he was also really kind of responsible for building out their you know initial go-to-market kind of motion right um and he's actually going to be sharing how you know the Playbook of how they built their sales go to market motion to 100 million in Revenue uh interesting things that I you know I've learned from conversations with Jonathan is that uh in the early days you know they they hired interns uh to kind of come in and be their sales team and they were paying them like a thousand Euros a month I think uh and uh and getting them on the phones and like they really built he built out an outbound sales motion on the phones doing cold calling and that was really how they scan failed uh you know certainly in the early days their sales so we're going to hear from Jonathan the things that they did you know getting to that first million 10 and then to to 100 and obviously these are broad ranges um but uh he's got the insights there and he's a fantastic speaker uh and is now building a property Empire so he probably won't talk to you about that uh but he's definitely wants to watch so he's going to be really good uh one to watch for sure what I also love is that when you really get deep into this our stock community and we'll talk about that in a second you actually get sort of breaking news really before it happens and a good example of this was last year you know I always go to society it's one of the highlights I think of the event which is a curated group of 25 50 Founders going to a castle after the event and really going deep there's very little recording happening so conversations are really open and candid and you always have Susquehanna at least last year at Susquehanna speak and they talked about backing Founders and he put up this big circle chart out their business Cadence they expect people to do in a year and literally the week like the day or the week after I left Society I was reading that Susquehanna gave uh Greg but muckrack they did 180 million series a investment of which a big chunk of that was secondary for Greg so great story for Greg you have him speaking what should folks expect to learn from him at sasdoc this year yeah yeah no exactly I'm really looking forward to that Greg's going to be a first-time speaker he's obviously you know flying into to to Dublin for this event you know he bootstrapped to 50 million ARR um which uh you know again was such an impressive feat uh to to do that right I don't know what the percentages are of Founders that have done that but I'm sure it's less than one percent um so uh that's gonna be super exciting he's going to share the why you know after boots are having to 50 million you know and and that's a great business right why he took Venture Capital why he did a secondary you know and really kind of share openly and honestly uh his thought process about doing that of course I mean look you know somebody's going to be investing 180 million and there's a big secondary there it's going to be tempting but if you've got a 50 million ARR business right there perhaps isn't is no need to we we know uh some bootstrap Founders that are at like 100 million ARR and you know with great profit margins that will never sell their business right because there is really no need to so it's going to be really interesting to understand why why Greg has done that and I think perhaps you you know part of it is around like faster growth there is the secondary part but faster growth of the business because you're seeing the potential for muckrack to to maybe just you know get to where he he wants it to be a lot quicker than that bootstrapping route um so yeah I think it's called The Journey of bootstrapping to 50 million ARR before bringing on an investor why things have changed right and uh it will be open and honest conversation on the bootstrap stage I'm sure you'll be there um you know in the in the front seats and uh watching that one I will I'm very I'm very much looking forward to that guys if you're hearing this going man I want to learn it's sasstock.com then click in the upper right nav events and click sasdaq 2023 it's in Dublin starts October 16th many stages called how am I going to have this here Alex I think three thousand four thousand five thousand yeah I think it'd be around to like five thousand I think it's where we're sort of pacing at the moment yeah guys five thousand and ten isn't what I like is a very high concentration of Founders they also do have world-class VCS they're like Bessemer Christians obviously is a go-to with this napkin but Excel will be there as well but also a lot of really great Founders the bootstrap stage will be packed so again check out sasdoc.com to jump in there Alex with our last five minutes I want to focus on something I think you're just uniquely good at which is community building uh you have the community memberships you just told me you got back from Amsterdam last night at 14 course meal 1am you do these smaller events and you do the big ones for people listening right now running their own software companies maybe with you know three four five six million in Revenue thinking about doing their own sort of community building where do you recommend they start yeah it's uh it's a good question right I I do get asked this um you know often I think like you know I I initially built out an audience from from doing content right first of it started with the content the blog then the podcast uh I think we you know we followed a similar path to to that perspective so you capture sort of the audience those that are you know let's say you you focus on a particular ICP the founder SAS founder or a bootstrap founder create relevant content for them the way that I did that because I'm not a SAS founder myself was getting those that you know have been in the trenches to create content uh and it effectively put on that kind of like editor role for them and then I took that content and the email list and the newsletter to to start doing local meetups right which I guess we're kind of still doing the Grassroots stuff through sas.local but you know enabling that a little bit more at scale on the locals or is the purpose there really is it's more of a marketing thing like there is some Revenue there um uh but but effectively like we you know it it's not significant uh like for us right so like I see Christian and Tech Pawn you convince very smart people all around the world to be your local SAS stock reps how do you do that how do you recruit people worldwide uh it's a good question I don't know I just kind of like I meet these people I seem to get on with them and they they seem to I don't we just seem to like get on there kind of it's like our tribe our people and I mean I find it like incredible sometimes it's like people like Alex and Tech Bond he's running his own business but then he's gonna like you know all in on SAS stock even yesterday he posted he's got his car uh and he's he's put a big sticker on his car like SAS not local Bucharest and he's driving around for the next month with sastok's logo on it I'm like what's going on here but uh yeah like somehow you know I don't know maybe it's my secret sauce to like you know get people to like are bought into what we're doing but I think it's like maybe that's it right people are buying into the Y they're getting value from it they're enjoying the SAS stock events right the sasdot founder membership event so like Alex is part of the sasdot founder membership you know we've taken him to a mouthful people that don't know what Panorama ship is what is it so but like if I'm sure the audience is familiar with like an EO or a YPO or you know basically support networks and organizations for Founders what we're doing is that for SAS uh and effectively looking to build the world's leading support Organization for B2B SAS Founders through Mastermind groups through networks through events right and we we take people out great events they have a great time they meet their peers they get unblocked from things that are you know have been blocking them for a while they get out of their plateaus they get inspired uh and I think it just kind of resonates and it's been helpful for people and like Alex and for Stefan smolders for instance that are part of sfm uh you know and then from that because of because of that they get really bought into the value that it can help others like them right and so I think they're just that of of that mind they've got that pay it forward mindset mm-hmm that's a great group and and um these are like if people join they get access to a dashboard and then there's basically a list of events coming up and they can pick which ones they want to attend or how does it actually work once you're inside but like yeah it's it's more than that I would almost like take the tech out of it right the the the the tech that no nobody like the tech isn't isn't that important like they they join because they want to be a part of a group of founders of like themselves who are scaling to 10 million in Revenue right uh and and with that we then put them into uh smaller groups of like five six seven people that uh that are either let's say they're going from five to ten million in revenue or one to five million in Revenue we put them in that group uh and then they meet on a monthly basis and go through a an agenda that we've kind of curated for them uh and to help them you know progress their their business and you know unstick them uh and then we do like regular like online workshops for them and we get great people because we've got a great Network that we've built out through our uh event side of the business and and so they get access to you know we had maorette from soy sense kind of come in and do a you know Chatham House Rules kind of session and and just really just answer questions and people are like well this is great you know like that you can bring people like this in and help us and then we do these annual Retreats so we went to a mouthy that you joined us on that one in 2022 we did Mykonos this year which uh you probably it was amazing but you're lucky that you missed that one because uh I felt terrible for about three days afterwards because we didn't get much sleep um and then next year we're going to Morocco right we're going to the desert Morocco so it'll be the the opposite of uh of Mykonos we've got this whole Camp uh in the Moroccan desert uh there's no nightclubs anywhere near us and we won't be able to escape and uh it's gonna be great and really authentic and just having like 40 Founders like together for two days like it sometimes it's as simple as just you know you know picking a a date a location and getting the right people together the magic happens right and you know if I dump it down to that sometimes that's all I do right and it just works guys on that note again uh 2022 big success SAS stock he invested over 2 million bucks of his own Capital to bring 3 700 folks in the SAS world together 1500 founder 17-18 side events he's building his own team now 22 people getting ready for SAS stock 2020 through October 16th in Dublin go get tickets now ticket prices are increasing at a regular Pace every 7 to 14 days so the longer you wait the more expensive it is you want to go grab a ticket great speakers you're gonna learn from aircon Jonathan his go to market motion 10 years of lessons from growing air called over 130 million bucks of Revenue also Greg and muckrack why did he bootstrap to 50 million revenue and then decide to take 180 million dollars sort of secondary uh round from Susquehanna including partially a secondary and then lastly again something sasak just does 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 great group great Community founder path will be at the bootstrap stage I'll be presenting the state of SAS 2024 on the main stage as well Alex thank you so much for having me if people want to grab tickets where's the best place to go check it out .com uh and then go to sas.dublin just click on that in the menu and you'll find the event you get tickets and we're two weeks away so yeah you know make sure you get there it's going to be the place to be uh I think it's certainly the biggest SAS conference that's happening now between the end of the year and you're going to be with great people uh with an entrepreneurial spirit and you get to hopefully see me and you there and have a point of Guinness and uh it's gonna be fun it's gonna be fun guys we'll see October 16th guys in Dublin southstock.com Alex thanks for taking us to the top thanks Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to count on 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hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is alex limo usually i read off a thing and i go okay what bio do they give me but i can just speak from the heart with alex man this thing started like i met this guy it's gotta be over four years ago at this point and i learned i've learned a couple things about alex number one uh guy was an incredible sas conference called sas stock which is coming up here shortly october 17th and 19th in dublin that you want to check out but never challenge this guy to any sort of beer drinking he will not only drink you off the stage he will dance you off the stage he will sing you off the stage he will take over the stage alex are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready nathan i'm ready all right so give us the quick background obviously you've got the big event coming up here in about three or four weeks but how did what year did you put on the first sas stock yeah it was 2016 september 2016 was the first sas stock we pretty much worked on it for uh for a whole year 12 months period i had no prior conference uh experience um but having set up a like a sas blog and podcast the the sas revolution show then done some local sas meetups and looking for that entrepreneurial thing to do uh the community in the audience that i built sort of back then was saying like why don't you do a sas conference and i was looking for that entrepreneurial thing to do and it kind of all came together obviously the the the limiting factor was zero experience in conferences um which obviously was a big challenge but uh you know i had that uh uh as i say blind entrepreneur optimism that kind of said well look it's not gonna be rocket science and i'll be able to do it but obviously i i learned a lot of hard things uh along the way but you know given 12 months to work on a single event you know we spent a lot of time you know doing there and like grafting to get 700 founders from uh i think like 34 countries to the first conference and uh i'd say the rest was history but you know there's a there's a lot of history you know in between that time but that was the first one 2016. we were joking before this you know we were talking about like it's hard to run a vc fun it's hard to run a sas company i mean i will tell you i've had a sas company founder path is sort of it's not vc right it's debt we don't take equity but like it's kind of the same there's a fund we manage there and then also like we now have like a mini event dude events are maybe the hardest because of just the like the nature of the pressure for example in 2016 do you remember the initial check you had to write to reserve the space you know what it was super small initially and know but i kind of got um i said like hoodwinked er into it in terms of the strategy from uh the particular venue um but you know when i was looking in london uh you know as a bootstrap founder i was being asked you know like looking at venues they were like 80 000 pounds uh i didn't have that sort of money and you had to put you know a good deposit down for that so i ended up looking in dublin ireland um and we looked at the venue which is the rds which is the same venue that web summit um you know used to run at and the last web summit was in 2015 2016 they had 40 000 people there so this venue has like real capacity to scale uh and when i looked at this beautiful concert hall which was the first sort of space that we were kind of like booking and all three i got a quote 10 000 euros and i only had to put 1 000 down right and i was like i can do that and then you know with the rest of it you obviously i'll just you know sell tickets and i'll sell sponsorship and it'll cover my costs i think that 10 000 ended up being nearer to 40 000 by the time of the conference because you've got to pay for certain things that you just didn't really realize that we're kind of there and if you want to use you know any square inch of their property you'll get charged for it so there were a lot of things that i i just wasn't aware of and it ended up becoming quite expensive certainly for the first time for me oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview wait so so again a lot guys i think a lot of you guys are satisfiers listening thinking about launching your own user conferences there's a lot to learn here from alex so alex what what were those 30k and surprise costs you didn't anticipate uh oh oh my god the the the list is as long as my arm like one big surprise cost actually was so i started studying selling sponsorships and my my first two sponsorships was the first one was to chart mogul uh the second one and i kind of pre-sold that one before the conference because nick franklin said look you know if you do this conference we'll sponsor it uh and so as soon as i had a venue and uh as soon as i i think i had the the date uh before i had the website i went to nick and said you said you would sponsor it and and he did he kind of put his money whereas uh it was like 15 000 euros i think something like that which is pretty good right and this is you're placing a bet on somebody that's never done anything like before this before so it's a good bet when we went live um you know surprise surprise the the first person that kind of contacted me uh then was patrick campbell from profitwell chart mogul's competitor um and we ended up doing the deal on christmas eve with uh uh with pc but um i think they paid a little bit less a little bit of a discount but patrick was a hard negotiator yeah and even doing the deal on christmas eve i was like come on man it's christmas i need the day off but i i was grateful to get the deal done because obviously that gave me extra runway um however getting to the point um i sold all these packages and silver and gold and etc what i didn't realize was i was selling these booths and i didn't had no idea what the the cost of the booth was going to be until like six months later so actually on some of them i'd lost money uh on some of the sponsorship deals that i made so that was kind of a big real you know uh kind of kick in the teeth and i tried in some cases to pass the cost on to the the vendor but in some cases they they weren't you know amenable to that so that was a a bit of a learning uh certainly maybe the biggest kind of like f up uh uh i i would say um how many total sponsors did you end up with in 2016 do you remember you know it was it was pretty good amount i want to say it was like over 30 um and yeah we and and the revenue was 50 50 with ticket sales for the first year i think i had a good advantage in that um i had 11 year sales experience so and like given that i was let's say a solopreneur you know back back at that time and very hungry and driven you you know i was every day doing outbound and uh you know we didn't get much inbound even though pc was an inbound but i was just contacting everybody and you know managing and get some meetings and going out to meetings and closing deals and uh yeah so that you know that kind of really helped so i was the first sales guy in the business um until we got over a million in revenue and then we made our first hire interesting so yeah yeah um so going back to 2016 real quick what was total revenue this is like 350 000 euros roughly okay so like one one 175 from ticket sales 700 tickets another 175 from 30 sponsors pretty much yeah pretty much interesting um and do you remember the la this must have been a celebration do you remember the largest sponsorship you sold in the first year oh i remember the the largest one we didn't sell um but um but i mean the the quick story there was obviously you've got these you know the different tiers right and you've got your top tiers which is often like a diamond or i think back then it was platinum we started at 5k and i think we went up to 60k for the first year um and we had no takers for the 60k but at one point workable kind of you know had a look around uh at this and they were thinking about being the lead sponsor but i think they offered me uh uh like 30k for the 60k uh package and i said no uh i said well i'm not doing 50 discount etc and um and then a couple of months later i went back to them and i said oh look you know it doesn't i didn't say it doesn't look like i'm going to shift this package but you know how do you feel like could we make it happen and you know they thought about it but then at that point they didn't have enough time to really execute uh against the biggest kind of like package because you know the resources and the planning they needed so i kind of like i should have taken the money but back then uh obviously i didn't uh because i discovered too much incredible okay so let's build this story outside 2017 do you remember uh total attendees total 70's 2017 so we pretty much doubled it was it it was just under 1500 so it's like four hundred and something yeah yep and sponsors sponsors we probably doubles again um and revenue we tripled uh i wouldn't say actually maybe more than tripled um second year over a million yeah for the second year yeah yeah and still 50 50 split yeah it's like uh almost probably like 60 40 but in in favor of partnerships but uh yeah yeah revenue was uh the split was fairly even did you learn did you learn anything about those i mean the sponsor sales are what's key it's basically your seed investment like right at any event company your sponsor paying upfront is a seed investment do you learn anything going from 30 to 60 in your first year just about selling sponsorships in general uh i did i did learn um you know certainly it was a new sale for me so i had to kind of really understand you know the value proposition what what it was that you know the customers were after and obviously it was it was very good you know from a cash flow perspective because we could you know sign up a partner like we did with chart mogul 12 months ahead of the event you know and get the cash in the bank you know 11 months uh ahead of the event and that kind of really kind of helps you build the business on on customer revenue right so uh definitely a strong model just trying to think like in terms of like the the biggest learnings um i mean i think maybe it's just kind of let me be more specific what's something that um you you threw in your sponsor media pack in 2017 that you didn't think sponsors would care about and it ended up being the thing a lot of them cared about um yeah good question um they didn't really care about tickets i tell you that uh that sort of one thing right so you keep you keep adding in it's like okay to i remember having a conversation with intercom and to try and make the deal more sweet with them and they ended up not doing it this was in 2016 and in principle because they don't sponsor or they at the time first-time conferences but they did sponsor in 2017 but i tried to to get this deal and i was chucking them like 25 tickets 30 tickets etc and they're like look we don't really care we don't want 25 people out of the office you know not being productive uh you know you could argue that they could be productive right but um but certainly that that was a big learning like tickets was really not something that um that really kind of you know adds uh that much value speed speaking is what everybody kind of really wants right um and and and that was a also sort of like big learning and we uh and definitely you know for the first time to the conference i was like look we we're not paid to play and we don't want to be full of sponsors uh you know on stage and you know you're wary about the you know the editorial side of things uh and our discerning customers you know being pitched to or kind of seeing like another sponsor up on stage um but i think it's one of these tricky things that i think every conference organizer needs to to balance and manage right because some of your sponsors are really adamant that hey they need to be speaking but you've also got to be pretty like firm and fair that well look these are our you know editorial guidelines and you're going to need to stick to them and if we are going to give you a speaking spot because you've got the credibility and you know great content but you just can't go in and start pitching your products and they should know that anyway because the product pitch will just like not go down well but you still get those ones that kind of sneak through even if you do the vetting and you know things like that and some people just don't care and the bigger companies in some instances just like you know don't really care and don't really don't invite them back you know yeah yeah exactly so and then okay so over a million in revenue in 2017 do you remember expenses uh in 2017 i don't fully sort of remember expenses but like we you know we were just above break even you know we um yeah cool so like call it like 800 900 expenses like one point two and a half we over again another another lesson 20 maybe maybe across all the years but certainly maybe not a lesson learned but 2016 2017 arguably we over-invested for a young you know for even first-time conference right so the the first event we we lost money and actually and the feedback you know in real time from most people was like this is better than what we expected uh you you know and maybe you and people were saying have you you've probably over invested in stage production you know in sponsor booths and so on and so forth and and we had and i'd be you know we work with a great production partner that we still work with but they perhaps also like oversold me and i kind of went for the best you know you can have you can have like this you could have that in the middle or you could have the best and i was like i want the best for my event and and that was the most expensive and you know and then i was just confident that we'd be able to sell more and make a profit and you know that kind of came back to bite me a little bit in the beginning well you've certainly grown it again guys if you're listening now going wow what a great origin story you can see now the final product this year coming up in three or four weeks uh october official starting october 16th right dublin yeah october 17th so uh yeah probably uh what is that five six weeks time um and yeah like it's going to be our biggest one yet we've had a three-year hiatus because of covid so that's a weird thing so saslock is seven years old now but for three years we've actually not been able to run our flagship conference and our our main you know primary driver of revenue so it's kind of a weird thing so like i kind of say well are we actually four years old uh you know in a seven year kind of time frame but um um but yeah so sweetie we be weird and we're going like 2019 we have 3 000 attendees and we're going for 5 000 uh this year oh you had live 3 000 in 2019 2019 3000 yeah wow okay do you remember revenue then it was 2.9 million uh and this is like in in sterling pound sterling right okay 50 50 sponsors tickets still no no it it it started to shift the bigger you get uh and certainly in our experience and we've seen this in the market the bigger you get the more the revenue tends to shift towards sponsorships uh versus tickets because as you kind of scale there's got to be there's a blend of like tickets coming in through paid tickets through partners through some you know complimentary for scholarships and things like that and media and so on and so forth and so you start to see uh that that shift towards more like a 70 30 split towards partnerships and in that when you did your last full year when you did in 2019 2.9 million revenue remember total expenses that year uh it was quite a bit maybe like 2.2 something like that so still profitable which was the biggest expense is it just venue or booth construction or something else uh venue is a big one um we're talking about six figures um and then just overall production so you know we work with a production company catapult they're great um you know them and each year we've actually signed up a three-year partnership with catapult worth over 1.5 million um uh with them uh and two them uh at a minimum um and yeah that's kind of always our biggest expense and maybe in 2019 we spent about 750 800k with them something yeah yeah and the venue is six figures i'm actually surprised i'm sure i'm surprised the venue isn't uh seven figures you got you got that whole venue for under a million yeah yeah it's because i i guess it's also like this the the space we definitely did uh uh get it for uh uh under a million and um yeah i guess kind of like good pricing in in dublin but um yeah like we we we buy the the space in various like blocks and so that we could scale this to 40 000 you know in in the future but um but in terms of the rooms that we book um you know it's been i'd say fairly good value for money even though it's a big expense but uh comparative to let's say you know what folks are paying in the u.s and you know it's pretty good value for money silly what we pay to do an event in new york compared to what you can get at rds yeah 2022 again you're expecting 5 000 this year now look one thing you've always wondered is hey how many of these are sort of tickets to minorities scholarships partners to get your versus sort of paid what is that usually like what do you anticipate that being this year yeah so uh this year we're probably looking at something like you know 10 to 15 percent um which would be you know scholarships complementary tickets you know we're looking at you know diversity uh and inclusion tickets we're we're looking at um you know founders with zero revenue uh you know founders that uh are less than i think sort of like k you know in arr and so on and so we we get a number through that um and uh yeah then we kind of like look at like media passes and you know other uh other kind of avenues you'll think you'll do about 4 000 and paid tickets well yeah but there's also like partners so if you look at so we've got a huge um from a partner side of things in the main hall we're going to have about 75 80 partners which are let's say other kind of the the a b kind of tier partners bigger bigger company names right we're talking um you know companies like uh intercom and charge b and founder path and uh and so on right uh and then we've got our startup program which will be another 150 companies in the startup program um and through that through partners you're probably doing you know a thousand plus tickets uh as well so from a sales side you know i would say that we're looking at probably about two and a half thousand or maybe two thousand eight hundred paid plus the you know the thousand plus partners plus speakers plus your your your media passes plus your comps etc and it all kind of adds up to you know just over five thousand now you're diversifying before we wrap up here talk to me a little bit more about this membership concept you guys have launched what do people get if they buy that yeah yeah good question so what we're building with the sass.founder membership is we're trying to build you know the world's leading support uh organization would be to be sas founders so it's a bit like a ypo or an eo for for sas but very it's purely focused on b2b sas founders that are on their journey from zero to ten million so if you get peer groups support groups you know like monthly mastermind you get to build out a global network of sas founders and some networking events and you get specific education so beyond the usual sas.content whether that's through our podcast or conferences we bring in experts like we've got dave kellogg coming up in a couple of weeks he's coming in to do a workshop on skating into the u.s uh and so we we leverage our network of these great people to come in and run these sessions additionally um you know we get things like the the sasser founder member uh annual retreat uh which you came to uh you know in amalfi and we bring it was incredible yeah to to come together for a couple of days to kind of network do round tables learn from each other uh and learn from mentors and those that are a few steps ahead so it's um you know it founders can't go it alone right and and some some do right you do have solo founders so we're looking at really you know whether you're bootstrapped solo founder or vc backed to kind of get you that support from other founders to to really kind of help you you know make better decisions you know get more confidence in terms of what you're doing and help you grow to send me an arr faster very cool last question before we wrap up you always feature up and coming founders you know your startup program if you had to pick i'm gonna ask you to pick a baby pick one of them you know that's speaking this year that you're just like wow these guys in five years they're the next intercom uh yeah good question like off the top of my head um let's go with uh expanding stefan smolders i think he's speaking at your event uh they've got to 7 million are in like two and a half years bootstrapped you know doing something right and uh so yeah the office of my head stefan smalders guys check it out sasdoc.com grab tickets quickly they're almost sold out the events coming up i'll be there if you're there text me 703-431-2709 we'll spend some time together uh obviously alex you're about to go into hunker down mode with all the last minute details associated with events we're rooting for you man and i'll see you soon thanks nathan there's also a code for your users of 30 will give you 30 discount boom l-a-t-k-a-3-0 yeah all right guys go by go go use that bad boy up we appreciate it alex thanks so much see you soon thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click 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