All The Small Things I Learned at SaaStock 2019

SaaStock Dublin 2019

When people go to conferences, most likely they need to "justify" the input (cost, time) to someone else (the boss) or to themselves.

Is it worth spending a couple of days in a different city, "not working", spending money on travel, accommodation, and so on?

Therefore, the question: "Is it worth it?" is justified with things like "I will learn this eye-opening new thing".

Or: This one session is changing the entire way our team works.

Or: We will meet this person who will help us with XYZ.

If that's the outcome. Congratulations!

To be honest: For me, it's not the case. I haven't gotten this eye-opening, this-changes-everything-like thing out of SaaStock.

And that's totally fine. Because I got a lot of small things from SaaStock.

So let me share some with you.

The small learnings

  • I got a pretty solid understanding of the Voice of Customer framework and how to utilize it together with a Jobs-to-be-done framework. Thanks, Georgiana Laudi and Tara Robertson for that.

  • I learned that I need to re-focus on the growth process and implement weekly growth meetings in the companies I work with.

  • I learned that winning-back tactics for churned users don't work because they never got activated. Rather apply activation tactics to churned users.

  • I learned that having a North Star metric is key to doing the right things to grow your business (I already knew about the North Star idea, but it was still great to hear it from someone else, too.)

  • I learned that I should invest more time in getting a deeper understanding of product-led growth.

  • I learned that companies I knew (such as WebEngage or BrowserStack) have its origin in India.

  • Statistics and data that resonated with me:

    • 90% of your results come from 10% of your work

    • 40 to 60% of trial users log in once and never come back to your product.

    • Remote teams grow slower than non-remote companies

    • Founders with hobbies have slower-growing companies than the ones "without a life outside work".

    • 85% of customers with positive experiences are likely to give feedback.

    • 81% of customers with negative experiences are likely to give feedback

  • I learned that Des Traynor is still a great speaker with some great input, such as:

    • If your customers aren't happy, engaged, profitable, and sticking around for a long term, then the last thing you want to do is get more of them.

    • What companies think they build does not necessarily correlate with what companies actually build. The same goes for customers and their beliefs on what they have.

    • The 9x effect in product development

  • I learned that value metrics are super important for pricing (well, kind of obvious right), but that's the key for expansion MRR.

  • According to various sources, cold emails do not work. Especially if you send mass emails. It will also harm your brand.

  • I put down a to-do item to reverse engineer the marketing funnel (thanks to Kieran for the input).

  • Kieran Flanagan also recommended Lenny's newsletter which I will definitely check out (see link here)

  • I also put down a to-do item to check old blog posts that get less and less traffic. Kieran recommended deleting the ones that get less traffic as Google is rewarding this effort.

Book(marks)

Last but not least, a few books and bookmarks from various SaaStock sessions:

The SaaS Sales Method: Sales As a Science
By Jacco von Van Der Kooij

Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer-Centric Sales Organization
By Jacco von Van Der Kooij

Predictable Revenue
By Aaron Ross

I bookmarked a few new sites I should check out, such as:

Summary

Quite a few small things, right? Is there a pattern? I don't know. But still, all those small learnings are worth for me going to SaaStock.

What was your small learning at SaaStock19?
Tweet me at @tompeham or via email.

PS: I also wrote this other SaaStock Dublin 2019 article here. Feel free to check it out.