If you’re on the fence about which SaaS conference to attend this quarter, look no further than SaaStock West Coast. This two-day gathering features a pre-event accelerator with bootcamps across the city; a start-up day with an exhibition; a full day conference and a premium invite-only retreat for founders of businesses over $3M ARR.
In short, you’ll experience 20 hours filled with interactive sessions to help your business grow. And it all happens in San Francisco, California, starting on September 10, 2019.
The SaaStock West Coast conference will showcase more than 15 exhibitors and well-known speakers from ProfitWell, Gainsight, WalkMe, Storm Ventures, SurveyMonkey and many more. These speakers will discuss the most relevant topics for SaaS companies, including revenue models, leadership, sales, scaling SaaS and growth marketing.
Interested to see even more reasons why SaaStock West Coast is one of the most useful conferences of the year? Keep reading!
1 – Learn from Pioneering Speakers
One of the best ways to learn from a SaaS conference is to hear from leaders in the space. Of SaaStock’s 20 speakers, you’ll get a chance to soak up knowledge from some of the best, including:
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Tae Hea Nahm
Co-Founder & Managing Director of Storm Ventures. Nahm has co-authored a book called “Survival to Thrival,” which demystifies building enterprise startups. And he certainly speaks from experience since he sold his company Airespace to Cisco for $450M. He will deliver a talk called the ‘No-Nonsense Guide to Growing an Enterprise Startup,’ along with Bob Tinker of MobileIron.
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Tiffany Luck
Investor with GGV Capital, a VC firm investing in the US, China and other emerging economies. Prior to GGV, Luck worked with Morgan Stanley’s Technology Investment Banking Group in Menlo Park where she worked on several major transactions, including GitHub’s sale to Microsoft for $7.5 billion. Luck will be one of three panelists sharing tips and tricks for scaling a Valley-based SaaS company.
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David Adika
Founder of WalkMe, the world’s first digital adoption platform (DAP) that enables online businesses and service providers to increase conversion and improve service. Before co-founding WalkMe, Adika was a software engineer at HP and prior to that, he completed a six-year tenure in the Army’s elite computing unit with honors.
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Leela Srinivasan
CMO of SurveyMonkey. Srinivasan is the marketing wiz who also sits on the board of Upwork, in addition to advising other startups. She joined Survey Monkey a little over a year ago, and has been successfully balancing brand awareness and perception, with educating the market about Survey Monkey’s enterprise capabilities and demonstrating traction with crucial customers. She will be talking about driving disruptive growth by listening to customers.
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Dan Martell
Chief Instigator of SaaS Academy. In the past year, Martell has partnered with and helped over 65 founders to raise capital, scale or exit their SaaS businesses.
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Sophia Eng
VP Marketing at Trade The Fifth and Founder of Women In Growth as well as former growth marketer at Workday, Autodesk and InVision. Eng is passionate about taking active steps to drive true diversity and inclusion.
With all these real-world superstars, sit back and get ready to cull the best strategies for maximizing your resources and building best-in-class products.
2 – It Happens in the Fall
With six more weeks until the conference, there’s plenty of time to pencil it into your calendar.
3 – Massive Networking Potential
The SaaS community is well developed and nurtured on the West Coast but the time to engage with the people who are important to you is minimal. That is why it’s great that the organizers of SaaStock are putting the most significant and valuable founders, investors and other stakeholders in the same room, allowing everyone to have more productive conversations. You’ll look forward to the various coffee breaks, drink receptions and targeted matchmaking (networking) opportunities.
4 – Gain Actionable Insights from the Sessions
An event built with growth in mind and all the challenges that come with it, SaaStock West Coast will focus on the holy trinity of successful SaaS growth: actionable advice, targeted networking, and proactive problem-solving. The sessions will feature themes that are very important to SaaS businesses such as:
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Hiring & Culture:
Hiring a team, reducing churn and increasing staff retention in light of big tech competitors that offer insane salaries and benefits.
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Operations & Scalability/Product:
Managing friction between the product and commercial team to deliver a product that your customer needs and wants.
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Product Marketing & Growth:
Establishing a product and moving it upstream, particularly when acquiring the first batch of customers.
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Pricing/Product:
Optimizing and adjusting your service model to make it financially viable for SMBs, resolving pricing strategy when working with smaller contracts, offering the right service support and onboarding, reducing inefficiencies by creating a self-sufficient product and experience.
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Internationalization:
Strategies to scale up from West to East Coast to wherever your heart desires – Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
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Internationalization of Sales:
Upselling your platform to enterprise organizations on a local and international scale, identifying the right customers and prospects for the sales team to spend time on, applying AI and automation techniques/software to integrate product usage data to prioritize leads and eliminate manual processes.
All of these and more will be jam-packed in 20 hours of interactive and relatable sessions designed to inspire growth, create better value for your customers, scale up your company and raise your business metrics to elite levels. The innovators changing the face of SaaS will present these in a variety of content formats:
- Industry best practices will be offered through case studies from SaaS startups that have successfully scaled-up from west->east coast ->the EU. This will give founders and CEOs the proven strategies needed to tackle product-market fit in a crowded and competitive market.
- Interactive workshops will deep dive into the practical steps necessary to retain and engage top-tier talent as early to growth stage SaaS startup, from tackling how to source talent from unconventional talent pools, looking outside of the Bay Area, to looking at the role of each employee in shaping the culture needed to fuel sustainable expansion.
- Questions and solutions focused roundtable sessions on tackling friction between the product and commercial team – the difference between what you can sell vs. what you are delivering, how to apply cutting edge tech and communicate this value to the end customer.
5 – Benefit from Experienced SaaS Leadership
When facing the challenges inherent to the growth stage of a company in a hypercompetitive environment, hearing aspirational stories of reaching Unicorndom, provides a little comfort. There is a general shortage of real straight talk of the day-to-day struggles that is growing a SaaS company. But SaaStock West Coast thankfully provides the antidote. Tailored for founders of companies in the growth stages, everything about this event is created to allow for receiving advice by founders just a few steps ahead of the journey, rather than someone many months – or years – ahead of you.
6 – Leverage the Event’s Partners
Another major benefit of attending SaaStock West Coast is meeting the teams behind useful software tools that can help grow your business. There are representatives of subscription management; business and customer analytics and insight; accounting, billing and revenue software; security and customer service. Beyond support services to help your company scale, there are also financial lenders like Lighter Capital and Timia and representatives of marketplaces for buying and selling businesses, if that’s a direction you are ready to explore.
A core need for all SaaS companies is subscription management and there are many options of service providers who will attend SaaStock. The Spotlight Partner for this year’s event is SaaSOptics and they provide subscription management, so you can find out more about their platform that is meant to streamline your day-to-day processes. You can also compare their offering with Chargebee, another subscription management platform; ProfitWell, who provide free subscription metrics; Gainsight PX, a product experience platform that drives subscription growth; Brightback, customer retention and churn management software and Churn Zero, which also helps fight customer churn.
Other technology partners include Intercom, a customizable messaging suite; Looker, business intelligence analytics; Fullstory, digital experience analytics; Pendo, user insight for product teams; Sage Intacct accounting software; Chargify subscription billing software; Go Nimbly, revenue operations software; WalkMe, a digital adoption platform to enhance users experience; Templar Bit, app security; and Zendesk, customer service software. Bay Leaf Digital is a community and media partner, too!
7 – Accelerate with Hands-On Bootcamps
SaaS.City is a series of focused workshops structured to facilitate learning and networking. Roll up your sleeves and join one of the pre-event bootcamps, which offer advanced-level mentoring in intimate hands-on workshops that deep-dive into specific business challenges. You’ll take part in a structured, peer-driven learning environment and leave equipped with practical solutions, frameworks, and methodologies to overcome any obstacle. It takes place across a variety of venues throughout San Francisco and is an upgraded experience open to SaaStock West Coast ticket holders only. There will be a choice of three bootcamps:
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Growth Marketing Bootcamp
Transform your marketing initiatives in an interactive workshop led by global growth experts. You’ll learn how to nail your niche and find your product-market fit with practical advice on how to maximize brand awareness, drive traffic, generate qualified leads and increase conversion rates throughout your funnel. Identify how to structure your team as well as hire, retain and incentivize outstanding candidates. Get the framework for success in product-led growth and examine how to apply effective growth levers to your SaaS marketing strategy.
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CEO Bootcamp
Do you really need to get up at 4 a.m. and work an 18-hour day to be a great CEO? Join the interactive, peer-driven bootcamp to gain insight from second-time CEOs on how to strike a work-life balance, maintain strong physical and mental health, hire leading executive teams and build market-dominating products. You’ll be joined by seasoned SaaS veterans to explore practical strategies to negotiate with key stakeholders, investors and board members and debate if, when and how to exit.
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Sales Leadership Bootcamp
Uncover the actionable techniques that will transform your sales processes. Understand which models will help you build a lean, mean sales machine. Discover which channels will supercharge your revenue, and uncover tried-and-tested methodologies and get hands-on mentorship in a series of interactive workshops hosted by Winning By Design, some of the world’s top experts in selling SaaS.
8 – Get Visibility for Your Startup
A day of practical workshops and insightful content sessions tailored to marketing- and sales-focused team members. The Startup Program Day is only open to 20 participating startups. If you’re accepted, you get access to focused networking, rock star speakers including Jacco Van Der Kooj and Dan Martell, master classes and one-on-one mentoring.
You can apply in one of two packages: Traction and Growth, depending on what stage you are currently at. Specific criteria for each kind of application is listed on the SaaStock website.
9 – Access an Exclusive Retreat with Other Scaling SaaS Founders
SaaSociety brings scaling SaaS founders together to escape the daily grind, unwind in beautiful settings, and forge meaningful connections. The retreat is crafted for an elite audience, and seeks to facilitate an open, honest dialog on unique issues and challenges faced by founders. To ensure an impactful, quality experience, SaaSociety offers a tailored schedule of fine-dining, drinks receptions, various outdoor activities, and focused content. The retreat will be taking place at Calistoga Ranch, a rusticly luxurious venue.
10 – Best of All, It’s a Good Deal!
While some conferences charge up to $2000 or take place overseas, SaaStock West Coast is more accessible. Tickets for founders and executives are only $699 for a full conference day plus access to the networking platform and Happy Hour. For those who want to attend the one-day and pre-event bootcamps, tickets are $899. Whether you’re looking for a full SaaStock experience or just a taste of it, grab the ticket you need.
If you are looking for group rates, instead, contact community@saastock.com for more details and rates.
Want to attend SaaStock for even less?
Use our special promo code BAYLEAF-30 and get 30% off the price of your ticket.
We look forward to seeing you in September!
