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If you haven't heard of this conference, some are calling it "SaaStr Lite." I got to attend thanks to friend Carey Ransom inviting me to join him in speaking at this event, and I don't think that's a fair comparison. it's a really cool conference all on its own! With two days of programming, including the Pre-Conference Workshop and the main event on May 1, we found loads of takeaways. Read on to see what we learned.
Our session, "Marketing Your Startup Through its Lifecycle" was well attended, and we had lots of great questions from the audience. You can watch the session or download the slides if you're interested.
Overall I'd sum up the conference proceedings in these 3 themes, with the lion's share on the first two:
There were numerous startups at the conference looking for money, and plenty of sessions to help them. Here are some key takeaways if you're out fundraising. Assuming you get meetings (overwhelmingly the advice here was get an introduction through your network), you'll want to be prepared.
There was a lot of emphasis on the metrics for obvious reasons. While investors acknowledged you may not have everything to the penny, you should use reasonable, defensible assumptions when necessary, not wildly pie in the sky numbers. "It should be believable" was my favorite quote.
It's all alphabet soup, but be sure you know and can rattle off the key metrics mentioned by every speaker:
CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost
ARR - Annual Recurring Revenue
MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue
ACV - Annual Contract Value
LTV - Lifetime Value
These items were almost verbatim from three different speakers, so I would pay special attention to:
Obviously growth is going to be a hot topic at a conference like this. There were numerous sessions on growth tactics, (ours included) and good news/bad news, there were no silver bullets. It's good news because the speakers mostly emphasized the same things we do.
To summarize Jason Fishman's 7 Acquisition Strategies That are Working Now
I also really liked the stages of growth analogy presented by Brian Mac Mahon:
Viking- You take the hill in a rickety boat
Gladiator- Everyone has a job and process
Knights of the Round Table - You've replicated yourself, know the plan.
Keys to growth include monetizing current customers and reducing churn. There were a number of mentions of strategies here, but among my favorites that summarized it all is "Enable continuous customer success." They mean it's not just on-boarding, it's lifecycle management.
Another favorite quote was: *Don't let customers feel the front office/back office gap." That's a personal pet peeve for me, when a team member says "that's not my department." Customers should not even KNOW that you HAVE another department! So work on these handoffs until it's invisible to the customer
download the slides from our session here.
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