With our first SaaStr Europa behind us (and over 1,500+ registrants for our first big event in Europe — wow!), it’s time to get going on the 2019 SaaStr Annual!
We’ll be back again, bigger and better than ever, with 12,500+ attendees, in a 3+ day event from Feb 5-7. We’ll have more than 2x the floor space than last year, so crowds should be a bit less of an issue, 5+ total stages including an AMA stage, two of which will each seat 2,500+. So there should be plenty of elbow room.
We’ve already got some great speakers lined up, from the CEOs of Hubspot, Y Combinator, WP Engine, Peek, Zendesk, Tradeshift, Flexport, Algolia, Zoom, Mixmax, Glassdoor, Hired.com and more (wow!), and we’ll have tons of leaders in revenue and product, including the CROs of New Relic, Brex, and many others, and top VCs from Brittany Skoda, the new VP of Investments at Workday, to Megan Quinn, General Partner at Spark Capital, to our always popular State of the Cloud with Bessemer Venture Partners, and many others. All-in, we have room for about 200 speakers and 500 mentors spread across 5 stages and 1000+ Braindates.
Now is your chance to join the ranks of SaaS greats and legends, like Jeff Lawson, Leyla Seka, Stewart Butterfield, Therese Tucker, Aaron Levie, and many more. Be in front of 12,000+ SaaS fanatics and experts at SaaStr Annual 2019!
Apply here.
Who are you?
You’re a founder, CEO, CXO, or VP of an early, growth, or scale stage SaaS company. You’re not your company’s pitch person – we’re looking for your unique perspective and opinions, not a demo of your product (no matter how great it is). Your content needs to be around solving a familar problem and how you did it, not what you did it with. The key: you want to share the non-Google-able answers to questions.
We’re very committed to inclusion and diversity. In 2018, we had 60% women and multicultural speakers and we plan to achieve that again this year. We’ll be offering speaker training to all speakers, so don’t let a lack of experience onstage deter you from submitting. We do not allow “manels” and strongly prefer sessions that add to the diversity of our gathering. In addition, please note that VCs interviewing their own portfolio CEOs are generally discouraged. They tend to be our lowest rated sessions.
Also note: all sessions which are vendor commercials will be rejected. Generally speaking also, if you are < $2m in ARR or so, you are too early. But you can propose a panel instead with leaders later than that stage, which you can lead.
What is your format?
1:1 interviews (Ex.: Stewart Butterfield/Slack, Jeff Lawson/Twilio)
Panels (Ex.: Customer Success, Sales Ops, VP Product, European Founders). Ideally, at least some of the panelists already know each other.
Single & joint presentations (Ex.: Byron Deeter/Kristina Shen from Bessemer and Promise Phelon from Tapfluence)
Deep Dives (Ex.:AMAs, SEM for SaaS, the most hypertactical topics out there)
What is your topic?
This is what we’re looking for, somewhere in these realms of topics. Please be sure to tell us specifically what you’d want to cover in the topic. (As in, don’t just say ‘Customer Success’ – specify ‘hiring for customer success’ or ‘customer success KPIs you should know.’) The 2018 Agenda is going to be place you should start your thinking.
Sales
Examples of great topics: Sales Mistakes that Can Kill Your SaaS Business and How to Avoid Them; Building Sales Operations from $1M to $50M: Who to Hire, When and Why; Three Non-Obvious Lessons Learned Selling to SMBs; How the Best Outbound Sales Teams Are Managed
Customer Success
Examples of great topics: The Secrets of Net Negative Churn: Customer Advocacy; How I Built Our First Functional Customer Success Organization; How To: NPS 75 with 40K Customers
Investing
Examples of great topics: How to Raise a Big A** Round; How VCs Try to Spot Unicorns at $1k in Revenues, And What You Can Do To Look More Unicorn-y
Getting Funding
Examples of great topics: Good Intentions, Bad Advice: How to Keep Your Board Aligned with Your Vision; Who Needs the Valley? How to Fund and Scale your SaaS Juggernaut Outside Silicon Valley
Operational
Examples of great topics: 12 Key Levers of SaaS Success; Numbers That Actually Matter for Founders; Build, Break, Stretch, Repeat: Lessons from Scaling Google & Stripe; Navigating Your Career in the SaaS World: A Primer; Measuring Excellence: Operational Benchmarks for Founders
Marketing
Examples of great topics: How To Gain 30 Thousand Leads Every Month. Like Clockwork; The CEO’s Role in Marketing: How to Hustle, Build Momentum, Sell Your Company – and Yourself; How to Market to Customers Small, Medium, Large and Extra-Large: All at the Same Time from the Same Budget
Product
Examples of great topics: What a Great VPP Really Does — And Why You Need One – NOW!; Building a Product Both CIOs and Devs Love; Infrastructure for Non-Devs: What CEOs Really Need to Know in 2017; Grow 10x Faster & Cheaper with Product-Led Growth
The Founder’s Story
Examples of great topics: Get to $100m ARR While Burning Almost Nothing: 6 Learnings in 6 Years; How to Manage Up and Have Happy a Board. Even When You Miss a Quarter.
How we’re selecting:
We generally build sessions around unique perspectives to share with lessons we think would be valuable for other founders or execs to hear. So, don’t be alarmed if we reach out and ask you to participate on a panel or in some other format than you originally submitted. We want to make sure you and your topic are able to shine on stage in 2019. If we are interested, someone from SaaStr will reach out to you. We run on a rolling basis, so as we build out themes and content, your topic may become a better fit. So, if you don’t hear from us right away, you may later in the summer. Lastly, we are firmly not pay to play. Speakers are selected completely independent of any sponsorship.
