SaaStock Revenue (2024)

[00:00] '20 twenty '2, big success, saastock. He invested over $2,000,000 of his own capital to bring 3,700 folks in the SaaS world together, 1,500 Founder 17 to 18 side events. He's building his own team, now 22 people. Getting ready for saastock twenty twenty three, October sixteenth in Dublin. Go get tickets now. Ticket prices are increasing at a regular pace every seven to fourteen days. So the longer you wait, the more expensive it is. You wanna go grab [00:24] a ticket? Great speakers. You're gonna learn from Aircall and Jonathan, his go to market motion, ten years of lessons from growing Aircall to over a $130,000,000 of revenue. Also, Greg at muck rack, why did he bootstrap to 50,000,000 revenue and then decide to take a $180,000,000 sort of secondary round from Susquehanna, including partially a secondary? And then lastly, again, something saastock just does so well as the community. You're gonna meet folks that are going to these [00:47] Mykonos retreats that are doing 10,000,000 of revenue. Hey, folks. My guess is Alex Suma. Recent guest. He's come on every year as he's built saastock. I think launched back in, what was it, 2017, Alex? [00:58] >> 2016. Almost there. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a while. [01:02] Dude, ten year anniversary coming up. That's pretty crazy. Seven years in, which is amazing, including COVID. But, guys, he's doing much more than saastock. He's got his own fund now. He's launched a Founder membership. He's got SaaS aside. He's got a software play with VentureDuce. We're gonna jump into all of it today. Alex, you ready to take us to the top? [01:17] >> I am, and great to be back. [01:19] Alright. Let's talk about twenty twenty two first. Your flagship event is in Dublin. Obviously, saastock.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 gonna try here in 2023? [01:36] >> Yeah. Good question. I I think, like, the the great thing about 2022 was it was just our return to in person. Right? SaaS ock 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 you know a shitload of virtual conferences and webinars right so it really benefited from that know feel good feeling of everybody coming back to to saastock and there's [02:05] >> a real like family and special entrepreneurial vibe at saast ock and a lot of people that have been to three, four, five, six saastock conferences and the fact that everybody could get back to Dublin and and and celebrate and be at that event and connect with each other. That really that really worked because, again, you just kinda felt that vibe and energy in the the show floor. Right? I think it's it's not something that you get [02:27] >> at every conference. And I was speaking with somebody yesterday about another saast 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 saastock is that is that vibe and you know you look left, look right, you've got an entrepreneur, you know founder sitting next to you or standing next to you [02:49] >> And and and I think with that, just that hype and the excitement and certainly pre event, was higher than ever. Right? And and just like online, we were blowing up online, 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 Crosgory from web web summit was like, what's going on? Like, saastock is kind of everywhere, you know, online, and so he [03:11] >> had to come down and, you know, see it for himself. And and he really enjoyed the events and, you know, will be coming back this year. But I think, so that was kind of one thing pre event. During the event, so we did the bootstrap stage for the first time, and and that was, I think, long overdue. Right? Because saastock is really well known, I think, you know, for being this event where you've got a ton [03:32] >> of, SaaS investors and you go there you're going meet an investor whether it's sort of precede through to, you know, growth stage and and now obviously we've got, you know, alternative, you know, funding, as well sort of, know, 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 [03:58] >> sort of small, small ish, I would say, know, bootstrap contingent. That's probably not that 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 stages. Right? So we decided at the boot Bootstrap stage last year for the first time. You guys were, you know, found a path that were heavily involved in that, and it was great. And we [04:22] >> got people like, you know, Stefan Smolders was was up there sort of speaking. Expanded. [04:26] Gonna be found. He's $78,000,000 in revenue now. He's killing. [04:29] >> 8,000,000 in revenue now. Yeah. And then we had we had Mohammed from Hotjar. You know, they were well, I I don't know. $4,050,000,000 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 there. And obviously, that's returning because that worked really well, you know, for us. Right? So I think that that was good. And also something that, you you know, [04:52] >> I would say it's a bit like in inadvertent, that's kind of worked quite well. It's just that there's just an ecosystem of side events that are just building around Saastock. [05:02] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with saast founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:25] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get [05:49] a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [06:11] built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:37] 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you [06:59] wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. [07:26] How many side events last year? Were you able to count those up anyway? [07:30] >> Like, there was about seventeen, eighteen that we knew. So these are these are events that we're we're not running. Right? And so it's like North Zone, you know, who are a venture capital partner, you know, one of the leading VCs in Europe. They did, like, a paddle boarding event for founders down the River Liffey in in in Dublin. And I was a little bit like, where are all these founders going? I saw Oyvin from, whereby, you [07:54] >> you know, leaving the conference at, like, 11AM on the first day. And I'm like, where are 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 there there are all these things that are happening. And, like, even I know that other VCs, they do, like, little, you know, content sessions kind of in hotels and and venues, you know, around the RDS. So they're [08:14] >> pulling a little bit, you know, people out of the conference venue, which, you know, to some some partners, you you know, might not be the best thing. But I I guess we're at that volume now that it doesn't really affect too much if thirty, forty people kind of leave. You're not gonna feel [08:28] like How many how many folks did you have live last year? What was the final count? [08:31] >> Live last year was it was around, I wanna say, like, 3,700, something like that. [08:36] Yep. And how many of those would you say were founders? [08:39] >> Oh, how many of those were founders? [08:41] But maybe, like, 1,500, something [08:44] like that. 1,500. So pretty good density. I mean, call it 50%, little south of 15% are are founders. And then all b two b SaaS focused. Walk me into sort of we wanna we wanna 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 Yeah. I think you're one of the world sort of best in the world at [09:02] 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 1,500 founders in one spot? [09:22] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So what did we spend all in? I mean, overall, I would say it was probably about 2,000,000, 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 you just over, like, production. Right? So we're we're we're spending between, you know, 500 k to, you know, 1,000,000 on on on production. Production. So it's it's certainly less [09:51] than What does that mean? Does that mean, like, AV or, like, lights and [09:54] >> stage? It's 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, 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, twenty four hours a day, you're building the stands, you're building the stages, and and, you you know, as the door opens, they might be still, like, you [10:19] >> know, turning a few screws and finishing bits off, you know, kinda here and there. But literally within three days, the whole thing, the whole sort of, like, saastock festival, is built. Right? And, and and we use, you know, one company which then uses, you know, a number of, like, different, like, suppliers to kinda 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 [10:42] >> got two ops people. [10:43] How many folks are full time today at saastock? [10:47] >> 22 today. [10:48] Wow. And what were you last year? [10:51] >> 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're yeah. We're about nine because, like, post pre COVID, we were 24. When we scaled down to nine during COVID to kinda keep it lean, you know, our costs and went down or had to go down. So our revenue went down by two thirds. And then we we [11:16] >> we started to hire slowly and build back. So it was about 17 by the time of Dublin last year. [11:21] Yeah. Okay. And 22 now. That's great. I I like these the reason I'm asking these questions is if someone, you know, if you're a fast fan or listening today and you wanna 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, [11:40] and then you have a bunch of vendors you pay for sort of event specific items, AV location, etcetera. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Let's fast forward to 2023 because saastock is coming up. It's October 16. You should really land on October 15, hopefully, in Dublin. You've got a great group of speakers. I pulled out a couple I'm excited about, and I'm hoping you can maybe give us a tease on what we can expect from them. I think [12:01] Aircall is potentially a great IPO candidate in 2024, over a $130,000,000 of revenue. You've landed Jonathan with the cofounders to speak. What can we expect from him, and what stage is he on? Do you know? [12:12] >> Yeah. I I I really like Jonathan's on the scale stage, and I have to double check. It's the biggest stage. Yeah. And, really, that's for the companies like Aircall. Obviously, their Aircall is, I think, you know, classified as a centaur, you know, a company that's doing a 100,000,000 of revenue. I think you said now it's like a 130. I've had Aircall on on, you know, our podcast when they were probably, I think, series a, and obviously, [12:34] >> you you know, we've kind of followed their journey over the years, you know, as as saastock and themselves 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 air cool. He's still the co founder, of course, but he's left air cool, and now he's he's set up, like, an investment fund for property. So he's now into hotels and car parks and and things like [12:58] >> that. And I was like, is he still gonna be interested in speaking at a saast conference? But he is. Obviously, he's got ten years of lessons, right, from building out Aircall, being the co founder. I think he was the COO 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? And he's actually gonna, be sharing how, you know, the playbook of how [13:19] >> they built their sales go to market motion to a 100,000,000 in revenue. Interesting things that I I you know, I've learned from conversations with Jonathan is that in the early days, you know, they they hired interns to kind of come in and and be their sales team, and they were paying them like a thousand euros a month, I think, and and getting them on the phones. And, like, they really built he built out an outbound sales [13:42] >> motion on the phones doing cold calling, and that was really how they scaled, you know, certainly in the early days, their sales. So we're gonna hear from Jonathan the things that they did, you know, getting to that first million 10 and then to to a 100, and obviously, these are broad ranges. But, he's got the insights there, and he's a fantastic speaker, and he's now building a property empire, so he probably won't talk to you about [14:03] >> that. But he's definitely one to watch, so he's he's gonna be really good one to watch for sure. [14:08] What I also love is that when you really get deep into the Saastock community, and we'll talk about that in a second, you 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 the saast society. It's one of the highlights, I think, of the event, which is a curated group of twenty five fifty founders going to a castle after the event [14:26] 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, had Susquehanna speak, and they talked about backing founders. And he put up this big circle chart about their business cadence they expect people to do in a year. And literally, the week like, the day or the week after I left saast society, was reading that Susquehanna gave Greg up at Muckrak. They did [14:47] a 180,000,000 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 SaaS doc this year? [14:57] >> Yeah. Yeah. No. Exact I'm really looking forward to that. Greg's gonna be a first time speaker. He's obviously, you know, flying into to to Dublin for this event. You know, he bootstrapped to 50,000,000 ARR, which, you you know, again, were such an impressive feat, to to to do that. Right? Don't I know what the percentages are of of founders that have done that, but I'm sure it's less than 1%. So, that's gonna be super exciting. He's [15:20] >> gonna share why, you know, after bootstrapping to 50,000,000, 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, his thought process about doing that. Of course, I mean, look, you know, if somebody's gonna be investing 180,000,000 and there's a big secondary there, it's gonna be tempting. But if you've a 50,000,000 ARR business, there perhaps is no need to. [15:43] >> We know there are some Bootstrap founders that are at like 100,000,000 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 gonna be really interesting to understand why why Greg has done that. And I think perhaps, 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 Muck [16:03] >> Rack to to maybe just, you you know, get to where he he wants it to be a a lot quicker than that boot strapping route. So, yeah, I think it's called the journey of bootstrapping to 50,000,000 ARR before bringing on an investor why things have changed. Right? And, it will be open and honest conversation on the bootstrap stage. I'm sure you'll be there, you you know, in the in the front seats and watching [16:24] >> that one. I I will. [16:25] I'm very I'm very much looking forward to that. Guys, if you're hearing this going in, I wanna learn. It's saastock.com, then click in the upper right nav events and click Saastock twenty '23. It's in Dublin. Starts October 16. Many stages called how many are gonna have this year, Alex? You think 3,000, 4,000, 5,000? [16:42] >> I I think it'd be around sort of, like, 5,000, I think, is where we're sort of pacing at the moment. [16:46] Yeah. Guys, 5,000 attendees and what I like is a very high concentration of founders. They also do have world class VCs there like Bessemer, Chris Yance, obviously, is a go to with his 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 saastock.com to jump in there. Alex, with our last five minutes, I wanna focus on something that I think you're [17:06] just uniquely good at, which is community building. You have the community memberships. You just told me you got back from Amsterdam last night at fourteen course meal, 1AM. Yeah. 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, $3.04, $56,000,000 revenue, thinking about doing their own sort of community building. Where do you recommend they start? [17:25] >> Yeah. It's a it's a good question. Right? I I do get asked this, you know, often. I think, like, you know, I I initially built out an audience from from from doing content. Right? First, it started with the content, the blog, then the podcast. I think we, you know, we followed a similar path to to that perspective. So you captured sort of the audience, those that are, you know, let's say you you focus on a particular [17:46] >> ICP, the founder, SaaS founder, or a Bootstrap founder, create relevant content for them. The way that I did that, because I I'm not a SaaS founder myself, was getting those that, you you know, have been in the trenches to create content, and 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 I guess we're [18:10] >> kind of still doing the grassroots stuff through saastock local, but, you know, enabling that a little bit more at scale. So you [18:16] need money out on the locals or is the purpose there really is a funnel? [18:19] >> Not really. It's more of a marketing thing. Like, there there is some revenue there, but but effectively, like, we, you know, it it it's not significant, like, for us. Right? So [18:29] How do you convince these very smart? Like, I see Christian and TechPan. You convince very smart people all around the world to be your local saastock reps. How do you do that? How do you recruit people worldwide? [18:39] >> 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. They're kind of it's like our tribe, our people. And, I mean, I I find it, like, incredible sometimes. It's like people like Alex from tech pond. He's running his own business, but then he's got, like, you know, all in on Saastock. [18:58] >> He I even yesterday, he posted he's got his car, and he's he's he's put a big sticker on his car, like, Saastock local book arrest, and he's driving around for the next month with Saastock's logo on it. I'm like, what's going on here? But, yeah, like, somehow, you you know, I don't know. Maybe it's my secret sauce to, like, you know, get people to, like, abort into what we're doing. But I think it's like, maybe maybe [19:20] >> that's it. Right? People are buying into the why. They're they're getting value from it. They're enjoying the saastock events. Right? The saastock founder membership event. So, like, Alex is part of the saastock founder membership. You know, we've taken him to a mouthy What is that? Out. [19:34] People that don't know what founder membership is, what is it? [19:36] >> So but, like, if if I'm sure the audience is familiar with, an EO or a YPO or, you know, basically support networks and organizations for founders. What we're doing is that for SaaS, and effectively looking to build the world's leading support organization for b to b SaaS founders through mastermind groups, through networks, through events. Right? And we we take people out to great events. They have a great time. They meet their peers. They get unblocked from [20:00] >> things that are you know, have been blocking them for a while. They get out of their plateaus. They get inspired. And I think 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, you 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 [20:21] >> I think they're just the of of that mind. They got that pay it forward mindset. [20:26] Mhmm. Mhmm. No. It's a great group. And and, 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 wanna attend, or how does it actually work once you're inside? [20:37] >> No. Like, yeah. It's it's more than that. I would I would almost, take the tech out of it. Right? The the the the tech no. Nobody like, the tech isn't isn't that important. Like, they they join because they wanna be a part of a group of founders like themselves who are scaling to 10,000,000 in revenue. Right? And and with that, we then put them into, smaller groups of, like, five, six, seven people that, that are either, [20:59] >> let's say, they're going from 5 to 10,000,000 in revenue or 1 to 5,000,000 in revenue. We put them in that group, and then they meet on a monthly basis and go through an agenda that we've kinda curated for them and to help them, you know, progress their their business and, you you know, unstick them. And then we do, like, regular, like, online workshops for them, and we get great people because we've got a great network that [21:20] >> we build out through our events side of the business. And so they get access to you know, we had Amir Ad from Sisense kinda come in and do a, you you know, Chatham House rules kinda session and and and just really just answer questions. And people are like, wow. This is great. You you know, like, that that you can bring people like this in and help us. And then we do these annual retreats. So we went [21:41] >> to Amalfi. I think you joined us on that one in Yep. 2022. We did Mykonos this year, which you probably it was amazing, but you're lucky that you missed that one because I felt terrible for about three days afterwards because we didn't get much sleep. 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 of Mykonos. We've got this whole camp in the Moroccan Desert. [22:04] >> There's no nightclubs anywhere near us. We won't be able to escape, and it's gonna be great and really authentic. And just having, like, 40 founders, like, together for two days. Like, it's 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 dumb it down to that, sometimes that's all I do. Right? And it and it just [22:26] >> works. [22:27] Guys, on that note, again, 2022 big success Saastock. He invested over $2,000,000 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 saastock twenty twenty three, October 16 in Dublin. Go get tickets now. Ticket prices are increasing at a regular pace every seven to fourteen days. So the longer you wait, the more expensive it is. You [22:53] wanna go grab a ticket? Great speakers. You're gonna learn from Aircall and Jonathan, his go to market motion, ten years of lessons from growing Aircon over a $130,000,000 of revenue. Also, Greg at muck rack. Why did he bootstrap to 50,000,000 revenue and then decide to take a $180,000,000 sort of secondary round from Susquehanna, including partially a secondary? And then lastly, again, something saastock just does so well is the community. You're gonna meet folks that are going [23:16] to these Mykonos retreats that are doing 10,000,000 of revenue. Great group. Great community. Founderpath will be at the bootstrap stage. I'll be presenting the state of saast twenty twenty four on the main stage as well. Alex, thank you so much for having me. If people wanna grab tickets, where's the best place to go check it out? [23:30] >> Just go to sas..com, 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 gonna be the place to be. I think it's it's certainly the biggest saast conference that's happening now between the end of the year, and you're gonna be, with great people, with an entrepreneurial spirit. And you get to hopefully see [23:52] >> me and you there and have a pint of Guinness, and it's gonna be fun. It's gonna be fun. Got it. [23:57] We'll see October 16, guys, in Dublin, saastock.com. Alex, thanks [24:01] >> for taking us to the top. [24:02] Thanks, Nathan. [24:03] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [24:28] 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, 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [24:51] 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 SaaS 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 [25:12] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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. [25:32] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

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 the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya