Event category: Company Building
Events
November 17, 2022
02:55 PM - 03:30 PM EDT
Lessons Learned from First Time Founders
Dear first-time founder, starting and scaling a SaaS business is a true test of a person’s grit. Entrepreneurship is lonely. It's a difficult road full of ups and downs. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
A founder’s journey is a unique one. It can be stressful, an emotional rollercoaster – but also incredibly rewarding and fulfilling. In this session, we’ve gathered a handful of first-time founders to share what they’ve learned and are learning on their journey as they grow and scale their businesses.
02:15 PM - 02:45 PM EDT
Bootstrapping from 0-5 Million ARR. How to get Scrappy, Profitable, and Build a Scalable SaaS
Pierce Ujjainwalla is a career marketer and entrepreneur who has learned from the most well-respected marketing stakeholders in the game. In 2015, he founded Knak, the codeless email and landing page creation platform for enterprise marketers. Throughout the years the company has reached various milestones and recently raised a $25M Series A. In this session Pierce talks about his lessons learned from bootstrapping to $5M and beyond. This session is for those who are currently raising or holding to raise so they can learn what they can do to grow/bootstrap their SaaS while the market is tough.
November 16, 2022
03:20 PM - 03:55 PM EDT
Is Sustainability the Secret to SaaS Success in Times of Turbulence?
There’s been a major push in recent years from tech leaders toward sustainability. Leaders recognize that not only are sustainable businesses more profitable than conventional ones, but they also perform better during times of economic turbulence and uncertainty. A study from A.T. Kearney during The Great Recession tells us sustainable businesses outperformed their less-sustainable counterparts over a six-month period by 15% during the previous massive downturn.
SaaS businesses looking to survive and thrive in the future should focus on sustainability (if they aren’t already) to make their business calamity-proof. In this session, Michael Denham will sit down with Charles Assaf, Co-Founder & CEO at Novisto and Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO from Teal book to discuss ways leaders can create and execute a solid ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) strategy. They’ll talk about: how to develop an ESG strategy, why is it so important, what the benefits of a strong ESG strategy are, how to measure ESG performance and impact and more!
November 17, 2022
04:40 PM - 05:05 PM EDT
Tactical & Practical Company Building Lessons from Paddle, the SaaS Unicorn Taking on Stripe
Paddle is quite a non-traditional, forward-thinking tech company with a non-traditional Founder at its helm. Join Christian Owens, Founder & CEO Paddle, and Douglas Soltys, Editor-In-Chief at BetaKit as they talk about Paddle’s journey from 0 to $1.4B and the lessons, stories, and hard-won advice that comes along with building and scaling a SaaS business that serves SaaS businesses.
09:05 AM - 09:30 AM EDT
An Analysis on 23.2k SaaS Companies
As a leader in the SaaS, recurring revenue world, your job is always getting harder. Competition is increasing. Your customers are expecting more from you. The relative value of your features is declining. The strategies you’ve used to grow your company in the past aren’t going to work for you. You can either adapt to the new SaaS economy or fall behind.
Given these shifts and some unique and proprietary SaaS market data, Chief Strategy Officer at Paddle and Founder of Profitwell, Patrick Campbell will be showcasing the results of a deep study on what's shifted (and how you can thrive despite these challenges). Having seen inside more SaaS Companies than anyone else on the planet, Patrick will teach you a helpful framework to re-evaluate your retention strategy and increase your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), who has accelerated in this new era and those who haven't (and what you can learn), a better understanding of where the SaaS market is heading and actionable takeaways from the data to implement.
November 16, 2022
04:15 PM - 04:35 PM EDT
Lessons and Predictions from 3x Unicorn Serial SaaS entrepreneur, Louis Tetu
Serial entrepreneur, Louis Tetu, has seen this tape before. Throughout his 30+ years leading multiple international technology businesses at 3 public software companies, Tetu has learned how to weather economic storms to ensure no good crisis goes to waste.
While no one could have predicted some of the macroeconomic or political issues that were on the horizon, one thing was very clear to Tetu: a decade of economic growth and low cost of capital could not last forever. Tetu’s current company, artificial intelligence platforms leader Coveo, had arguably one of the better-timed IPOs of 2021, raising $247M in November 2021.
In times of turbulence, as in times of growth, you can always set your business up for success by thinking long-term and developing strategies to take advantage of the environment, by thinking differently. Now that a perfect economic storm is upon us, leaders must remind themselves that there is a sun above the clouds, despite not seeing it.
Louis will share personal views, inspired from his experience, about how to think about growth, talent, workplace, efficiency, markets and products in turbulent times, and how to emerge stronger longer term.
November 17, 2022
09:30 AM - 10:05 AM EDT
Raising Your Seed Round & Beyond
In August of 2021, Kathleen Chan, CEO & Co-Founder at Calico raised a CAD $2.6 million seed round which included Serena Williams. Shortly after, in November 2021, Shawn Hewat, CEO & Co-Founder of Wavy, raised a CAD $2.5 million seed round. In this SaaS North session, Shawn & Kathleen alongside early-stage investor Eva Lau will sit down with Betakit’s Douglas Soltys to talk about raising capital. In this candid session, you will learn what investors look for, how to navigate the process of raising your first round and how to manage your investors afterward.
November 16, 2022
02:30 PM - 03:10 PM EDT
Bootstrapping Your SaaS: The Path to Profitability
Investors are telling their founders to prepare for the worst. That it’ll be hard to raise money, even if you’re doing well. But you won’t have that problem as a profitable, bootstrapped SaaS founder. Bootstrappers were built for times like these.
We’re not saying Bootstrapping is better. There’s a time and place for both. But this session? Is 100% focused on Bootstrapping. Hear from the founders and CEOs of multi-million-dollar bootstrapped SaaS businesses. Learn what it takes to bootstrap your SaaS: the pros and cons, the scaling strategies and secrets. What does it really take to bootstrap a startup these days? Find out.
11:05 AM - 11:30 AM EDT
How to Troubleshoot Growth Going from $1M to $10M ARR
In the world of SaaS, it is common for sustaining growth to be more challenging than attaining initial traction. What do you do when you're trying to reach the next growth milestone, but nothing really seems to stick? Squeezing ad channels doesn't quite net the big, dramatic result in growth you were expecting. You're at a loss for what part of the market to focus on next. Slow or unexciting growth happens all the time, but there are ways that we can overcome the slowness and beat the "Slow SaaS ramp of death". In this talk, Asia Orangio, CEO and Founder of DemandMaven, will take you through the complete end-to-end process of how SaaS companies can find growth opportunities that may not seem so obvious. Plus, see a case study of how she helped her client take advantage of those growth opportunities and 10x their revenue.
