SaaStr Annual 2018 is upon us! The SaaS community’s event of the year is packed with dozens of talks and workshops – but which ones are truly essential? Here’s my rundown of the sessions you really shouldn’t miss (and some further reading to tide you over in the meantime).
Pro-tip: You can see the full schedule for the event here. Don’t have a ticket? Use the code Cleverbridge20 for 20% off your ticket price.
1. Smooth Scaling: 3 Female Tech CEOs
Featuring: Amy Chang – Accompany | Michel Feaster – Usermind | Jennifer Tejada – PagerDuty
This is my personal surefire bet for being a highlight of the event. With decades of proven SaaS growth between them, these are the people (and, yes, they happen to be women) that you want to be learning from if you want to scale your business – whether you’re growing your Sales team or expanding abroad.
Fun fact: PagerDuty has sponsored SaaStr’s Diversity & Inclusion Program for this year’s event. They’re helping to make 200 no-cost tickets to SaaStr Annual 2018 available for members of under-represented groups. Good on them!
2. How to Build Out a Revenue-Generating Partnership Strategy: Lessons from Slack, Stripe & Segment
Featuring: Jassim Latif – Slack | Federico Menapace – Segment | Cristina Cordova – Stripe | Houman Fardin – Wealthfront
In this talk, the speakers present a “tell all” on the things each has learned over the years building partnership strategies to grow their SaaS companies. With the likes of Slack and Stripe onstage, you’ll want to take notes.
Stripe’s a hyper-growth company, so it will be interesting to hear from Cristina on how they’ve built products with leading ecommerce, accounting and invoicing partners to grow their business ecosystem.
Company blogs are tough to nail, but Slack does a great job. If you want to read more from Slack, check out their blog: Several People are Typing.
3. Why CIOs Really Buy SaaS Products: Do You Believe In Your Own Product?
Featuring: Paul Champan – Box | Alvina Antar – Zuora | Sheila Jordan – Symantec | Wendy Pfieffer – Nutanix
I’m highlighting this session as it covers a highly under-appreciated – and often underestimated – topic. Subscription CIOs are a new crop of technology leaders challenging the status quo, but why figure these key decision makers out for yourself? Hear the critical motivations and most top-of-mind questions of today’s new breed of CIO straight from the source.
And for some excellent pre-show reading, Box does a pretty great job with their developer-focused blog.
Bonus: Fireside Chat: Growing & Scaling SaaS Businesses from $1M to $500M ARR
Featuring: Byron Deeter – Bessemer Venture Partners | Karen Peacock – Intercom
With ARR being the most important metric for SaaS companies, I’m anticipating the room to be at standing-room only capacity for this session…
Running a subscription program is challenging – to say nothing of expanding into a new state or country. At cleverbridge, we help SaaS businesses take control of subscription management. My team and I will be on hand at SaaStr Annual 2018 to answer questions and offer advice on reducing churn and maximizing your subscription revenue.
Schedule a few minutes to meet me and the rest of our subscription experts and pick up some of our killer giveaways (Booth #13!). More info here.
Tarmo van der Goot is a Senior Business Development Manager at cleverbridge
