How we Build

SaaStr Annual was freaking awesome

SaaStr Annual is a new annual SaaS event hosted by Jason M. Lemkin‘s SaaStr organisation. The inaugural event was this past Thursday in San Francisco.  I’d been excited about SaaStr Annual for some time and it was my primary excuse to make the trip from Berlin and spend 10 days in San Francisco.

I haven’t had such a good time at an event since Point Nine Capital’s awesome SaaS founders meetup in San Francisco last October.

I’m now convinced that the more specific an event is, the more valuable, engaging and ultimately more fun it is. At ChartMogul we’re building SaaS metrics software for SaaS companies so there couldn’t be a more perfect event for us.  Just to highlight how relevant SaaStr was, we’ve only been selling ChartMogul for one month (therefore don’t have huge numbers of customers yet), yet we bumped into two of our paying customers and several of our very active trialers. Both the customers had flown from different parts of Europe to be there.

The majority of folks I met were founders of SaaS companies, mostly beyond the seed stage.  I think we were one of the few earlier/seed stage startups attending.  This is great for us, surrounding yourself with companies who are where you’re aspiring to be in N months feels like a healthy practice (you improve fastest at sports when you play someone better than you).

The speakers were just about as good as it can get, making appearances were (among others) the Founder/CEOs of BOX, Slack, Yammer and Zenefits (unbelievable).

For people in SaaS it was the only place to be on February 5th.

Huge kudos to Jason M. Lemkin and team for pulling off the SaaS event of the year.

Nick Franklin

CEO, ChartMogul

@Nick_Franklin