SaaStock 2017: The European SaaS ecosystem is growing up
For the last 3 days the European SaaS ecosystem found its home in Dublin for this years version of SaaStock, which is a conference purely focused on the needs and challenges of the Software-As-A-Service industry. For me personally it was the second time at the event and it was even better than last year (which was not easy). The big advantage of this format is that it has a strict focus on purely SaaS topics, so it’s really valuable and easy to take actionable insights back home. The conference has grown from around 500 people last year to over a 1,000 participants and people are mostly founders, executives and investors.
In the 3 days I talked to lots of people from the ecosystem and listened to 20+ talks. As a result I now have a much better understanding of where we are with quintly and how we stack up with our metrics against all the other SaaS companies around. Although we already made it quite far in a bootstrapped way, when listening to all the great stories you start feeling really small and unimportant. On the other end I found a lot of people that also bootstrapped their company successfully so it’s great to see that it still works although more and more companies are going the venture funding way.
It was a great honor for me that I could give a talk about “Building a SaaS company with only Technical Co-founders” and share how we build up quintly from 2010 until now with little knowledge about the SaaS ecosystem. I explained about the challenges we had with figuring out the right marketing and sales approaches and how we maintained the bootstrapping mode through the different phases.
In general I had the impression that the ecosystem as a whole got much more structured compared to last year. Most of the people I talked to had a very good understanding of their metrics and all the growth, product and customer success processes seem much more professional. I even had a bad conscience sometimes, as in some areas our processes are not that structured yet. There was so much to learn and I have already written down a lot of things that we will try out at quintly.
It was great to see that customer success as a discipline is becoming much more important. In the past I always had the impression that sales and marketing are dominating the discussions but the event showed me that customer retention is moving more into the focus of the founding teams.
A good sign for the growth of the whole ecosystem was also that the expo got much bigger compared to last year. There are more and more companies that are purely focused on products for SaaS companies which emphasizes the importance of the industry over all.
To sum it up, it was again a really great conference and I can highly recommend it to everyone in the SaaS business, especially for founders and customer facing roles. I’ve already bought tickets for next year and we will have more people from the quintly team joining so that we can get the maximum learning out of it.
See you in 2018, Dublin :-)
