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...