As 2018 winds down (and yes, we are behind too), I thought it might be fun to look at some of our social and vanity metrics — and for content and community marketers out there, some learnings.
What does the “SaaStr Community” look like at the end of 2018?
- 461,348 social followers
- 44,700,000 Quora views
- 3,028 Quora answers
- 28,798 followers to our new Quora Space, SaaS Daily! (it’s pretty cool)
- 894,956 readers of SaaStr.com
- 36,921 blog posts, answers, and pages on SaaStr.com (a lot more than I thought!)
- 60,808 average podcast downloads (clearly #1 in SaaS)
- 160,586 followers on LinkedIn, and named #1 voice in Start-Ups and Entrepreneurship there
- 39,991 newsletter subscribers (not that great in 5 years, especially b/c our newsletter rocks)
- ~200 teams learning on SaaStrPro.com‘s automated training
- 1,600 registrants to first-ever SaaStr Europa
- 7,000+ check-ins (!) in just first 2 hours at 2018 SaaStr Annual
- 204 (!) podcasts (Harry Stebbings ftw)
- 3,609,312 minutes of watch time on our YouTube channel (not actually that many)
Phew. That is a lot from a team with less than 10 full-time folks.
However, a more critical question is, what did we improve this year? What did we add to the community?
The most important improvements and achievements:
- Launching SaaStr Europa. This was our first event outside of Annual with > 1000 attendees. It was our highest NPS event ever. We will be back in Paris this 12-13 June, targeting about 2,500 attendees over 1.75 days.
- Improving Infrastructure for SaaStr Annual. The last few years were just too crowded. We’ve moved to the San Jose Convention Center and the surrounding buildings, where we’ll have room for 6+ stages, 2 lounges, a CoWorking Space, and much much more. We’ll also have firm session registration and other upgrades.
- Launching SaaStrPro. Continuing to learn from and improve our paid training product, SaaStrPro.com, is important. Our current users love it, and our goal is to invest more here in 2019. Also, SaaStrPro did more revenue in its first year than EchoSIgn did, which is kind of fun.
- Great new members on the team. We promoted an amazing head of marketing, added two terrific leaders in content, an incredible design director, a terrific partner success manager, and multiple amazing sales team members in 2018, among others. This helped a lot, contributing to 160% revenue growth in sponsorships in particular.
- Continued commitments to inclusion. We will repeat 60%+ women and diverse speakers at Annual, and will have the most diverse attendees yet. Starting off early and providing 1,000 no-cost Inclusion Program tickets was key.
What worked less well:
- CoSelling Space 2.0. Our landlord breached our lease for the first CoSelling Space, and we were forced to move to a new CSS in SOMA. That didn’t work as well. We’re taking a pause and rebuilding a new, larger CoSelling Space 3.0 in Potrero Hill in Q1 ’19.
- Some of our secondary events. Our spring soiree was fun, but not as big as our summer social the year before. Our holiday party was also fun, but not quite what it could have been. We’ll make sure we level up here in 2019.
- Growing pains. We had a lot of growing pains ourselves. No one is immune!
See you Bigger and Better in 2019!
