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Why You Need to be at SaaStr This Week

February 5, 2018

I’m jazzed to spend this week at SaaStr 2018 annual mega conference & SaaS gathering in San Francisco.   Over 10k + founders, VCs, and execs will be participating in the 3-day conference. The organizers have focused on including women and “under-represented” groups—40% of the speakers are women and 60% altogether between women and under-represented groups.  Many of us may be waiting in line for the restroom for the first time in our lives at a tech conference!

It will be great to see a lot more diversity at an industry conference, and more importantly, to hear different perspectives on:

  • Raising capital versus bootstrapping
  • Understanding and solving customer problems, and
  • Building high performance teams.

SaaStr focuses on “lessons learned” getting from $0-$50M from founders of leading companies like Box, Coupa, Hubspot, Atlassian, and dozens more.  Sessions focus on jumpstarting and growing the sales organization, and how to manage leads better—with 40+ hours of content promised.

One of the great things about SaaStr is in the past they’ve recorded all or most of the sessions and made that available to the general public so you don’t have to go to the conference although you miss making contacts and networking—and being burned out from all the conferencing and partying.  In the past I’ve missed it, but OPEXEngine is big enough now that I’m looking forward of a couple days of intense brainstorming what we can do better and how industry best practices are changing.  I’m super excited to meet up with customers, partners and lots of new folks at the conference.

If you want to talk benchmarks, metrics to measure performance or efficiency, or anything else related to growing a great SaaS company and you want to meet there, drop me a quick line at lauren@opexengine.com.

My focus is totally on how I can help build OPEXEngine into the go to place for SaaS benchmarks and SaaS FP&A.  I’m always looking to see how we can better present our amazing data so that management teams get more value in benchmarking their operations.  Here’s a few of the sessions that I’m planning on attending:

  • 10 Things I’d Do Even Better – Lessons Learned (Marketo)
  • How to Measure the ROI of HR (Greenhouse Software)
  • Product Principles for Fast Growing Companies (Intercom)
  • Visual Stories that Sell (Pixar)
  • 10 Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS (HostAnalytics)
  • Intacct’s Journey to a $850M Exit
  • Fundamentals of User Adoption: What Changes as You Scale (UserIQ)
  • Smooth Scaling: Three Female CEOs (Accompany, UserMind, PagerDuty)
  • And so many more

The technologies and best practices for building great companies are changing, whether we are on now in the 2nd generation of SaaS or the 3rd.  Benchmarking growth, efficiency and productivity for SaaS companies is what we are all about at OPEXEngine—and I’m hoping to learn some new ways of doing that next week.  Happy to share with the SaaS benchmarking community what I learn!