Business Networking Success - Alex @ SaaStock - Escape Velocity Show #39

About this video

Dan Martell interviews Alex Theuma, founder of SaaStock, about building a SaaS conference by building an audience first. Theuma says he started in 2015 with a SaaS blog, a podcast and meetups while still working in sales, after seeing no SaaS community being gathered in London, Dublin or Berlin. The first meetup drew about 120 people, a Slack group reached roughly 500 founders, and attendees themselves urged him to run a European conference. The first SaaStock in Dublin in 2016 drew just under 700 people, with ticket buyers flying in from Brazil and Australia; by the year of this interview he expected more than 6,000 people across six conferences, including about 4,000 in Dublin from more than 50 countries. He describes year one as self-funded and loss-making, with repeated cash-flow scares during the roughly 12 months between launching and the event, and overspending on staging and custom booths that a more experienced adviser would have rented more cheaply. Sponsorship was essential: about 25 partners in year one, rising to 55 in year two, led by an early sponsor who paid upfront a year ahead despite the event being unproven, while larger firms declined in year one. As the business grew to a team of about 22, mostly in London, he delegated speaker recruiting to a professional content hire from a large fintech conference and used a steering committee of operators and investors. Content themes also shifted away from the old view that European SaaS firms must move to San Francisco, toward building remotely and staying local. He closes by describing SaaStock Local chapters and his own shift from doing every job to coaching, one-to-ones and holding the vision.

Key takeaways

• Build the audience before the event: blog, podcast, online community and meetups created the demand that made a conference viable.
• Do the groundwork instead of skipping straight to a conference; a friend who tried to cut out the content and meetup stage found it was not viable.
• Sponsors, not tickets alone, underwrite a first event — Theuma credits about 25 first-year partners, with the earliest paying upfront on trust in the founder.
• Watch cash flow and staging costs in year one: inexperience led to overspending on booths and staging, and the first event made a loss.
• Delegate your bottleneck job as you scale: handing speaker recruitment to an experienced content professional freed the founder to act as CEO rather than doing sales, marketing and agenda alone.

Episode details: published October 22, 2020 · 50:30 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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