Learnings From SaaStr Annual 2021 with SaaStr SVP & GM Amelia Ibarra

All right, welcome everybody to the Hopin booth. We're so excited to keep presenting you the best content possible here at our booth at IMAX 2021. I'm so excited today to have a guest from one of my favorite events. I have to come clean, you know, I'm a tech junkie. I'm a geek by nature, and you know, Zaster is like a point of reference for everybody that has anything to do with technology. Amelia Ibarra, welcome to our space at Open. Do you want to give a really quick introduction? Yeah, sure.

Thanks for having me. Um, it's great to be here. It's, it's hot at your booth, so this is fun. Um, it's good to be back in person. I'm Amelia Ibarra. I'm the SVP and GM at Zaster. We're the world's largest B2B and SaaS cloud community. We just had an in-person event after a long lapse, so I'm sure we'll talk about it more.

Oh my God, I can't wait. And apologies to my in-person audience here if I'm looking at Amelia and Mila. And hi to everybody online. Yeah, we love you. So Amelia, obviously, Software is an institution when it comes to tech events, very specifically, as everybody in the past 18 months, nothing new here. You embraced digital, you embraced virtual, you did your pivot.

Everything in between. Yeah.

Let's start with that. Like, how was your pivot? How did it play out for you?

Well, you know, it's interesting. There was no roadmap, right? When the pandemic first hit, we, we weren't sure what to do. We just knew we had to try and get our community together, right? Content and community has always been at DASR's core. So that was at the front of our goal and the front of our mind is like, okay, this This crazy thing is happening to everybody. It's us, it's our community, it's everybody out in SaaS and tech and cloud. So what can we do? So, you know, we were 5 days away from loading for our SaaS Annual 2020 event when we got the shelter-at-home order in San Francisco, Santa Clara County. So as you can imagine, we had all these speakers lined up. We're like, well, I guess we'll just tell the CEOs of like Slack and Vox and PagerDuty not to come because they can't come. So we emailed them a week later. We're like, hey, so this lockdown thing might be last— we don't know how long it's going to last, right? We didn't know at the beginning of COVID We weren't sure. So we just emailed them all. We're like, hey, would you come do a digital event with us? We've never— we hadn't typically done big digital events. We've historically done in-person, some small webinars, right? So that was kind of like at the at the start of it. It was kind of the first of its kind at the time. And we've, we had all of our speakers that were just so, so ready to share with community through this tough time, share their learning, share their playbooks. A lot of them, you know, related it back to the market crash back in 2006. So we were talking about like Black Sheep events as the anchor. And it, the community really came together. I think we had like 10,000 people sign up in a week. And it was insane. We didn't think that was going to be the volume, right? We're like, well, we've got our speakers, they're all at home, they seem fine getting on the Zoom. Like, let's just create some content for our community and like whoever shows up is awesome. And that way all of our ticket holders and our community can come. Um, so they did and it was just this crazy good response. So we kind of took it from there and we kept doing digital and we've done more there on like the content, the community, the networking side. And then yeah, we were just waiting and doing a lot of research and A lot of plans that got eventually thrown out the window until we could come back to in-person.

Well, the way we position these sessions, this one specifically, it's called Brain Trust.

Yes.

And the objective of it is to borrow your brain to help other planners to deal with, like, you know, situations we deal with every day. And the situation right now is how we're going to go back to in-person. I remember probably March 2020, the announcements week by week, we're first going to implement measures.

Yes.

Uh, and then it didn't happen. So you had to cancel like everybody else. Uh, and then I saw again, uh, in the buildup of your latest event that obviously things were still unsure, uh, with things out there. So take us through the comeback to in-person. What was your thinking? How did it happen? How can we maintain safety, I guess, during this stressful moment? Yeah.

So since we're talking brain trust, right? It was definitely a long road. There were a lot of plans we ended up scrapping. We knew first and foremost, like, I think it's— we're in an interesting time. I think our industry not only coming back to events, but everything that just happened with Astroworld. I know it's not necessarily like B2B or SaaS, but I think it's interesting because a lot of people now are coming out and saying like, who is, who is the burden of care on? I think if you take that as a subject of like, who's the burden of care on for health and safety as a group? Organizer, whether it's, you know, a concert, your own user conference, whatever it may be. Who needs the Board of Safety on for security? Like, all COVID testing, like, who should have to do all this? And so as event hosts and organizers of a community event, we always put our community first. And we, the moment we started planning, I know Jason M. Lemkin, our CEO and founder, was very much like, we have to make sure our community not only feels safe but comfortable and that they want to come back. So day one, I started looking for health and safety vendors. We started looking at venues that were both indoor-outdoor because we, we knew that some of the early research was that, you know, outdoor was lesser for the spread, it was safer, it was more comfortable. So even 18 months ago, we were like, we probably have to move annual outside, which is our biggest event. We're like, that's— we're always in convention centers like this.

How many people do you have for annual?

Typically we have 10,000. This year we had 5,000 because our international folks couldn't come. Like, the ban just got lifted a couple months ago. So yeah, typically 5,000. So when you think about putting all those people in a room, like, we wanted to have health and safety first. We knew that we had to work not only more closely with thinking outside the box of, you know, let's find an outdoor venue. Okay, we found one. How do you build booths like this outside?

How do you run power?

We have to get tenting. We had to do all these things that we had never previously done as organizers. And so we figured out how to do it, right? We've made some mistakes that we fixed on site. There's always going to be learnings when you're trying something new. But our— what we saw at this event is like the community really responded to it. Like we kind of became adaptive. We were like, it's going to be like Coachella, or it's going to be like You know, your favorite tech festival, just outside this time. And we weren't sure, we're like, I don't know if people are going to go outside. Like, people are used to being in conventions. So it was kind of a risk, but we knew at the end of the day it would be the right call because it would be safe for our community. Folks were comfortable. They didn't have to wear a mask unless they were inside. We did rapid testing for all of our attendees. So we had to be back. We did vaccine checks. So we did all these things. But there wasn't a blueprint, right? So we kind of— we just put our community at the front and we said we're going to do whatever it takes to make sure we can all safely get together, that we have rapid tests available, that we have temperature scans, that we have masks, that we put— we built stages outside, we built foods outside, we ran power. There was no Wi-Fi. There's no Wi-Fi in a parking lot.

Like, we're not going to even start to think about that.

There's a lot of logistics that went into it. So That was a big part of it, was like getting the logistics right for moving something outside like that to be comfortable and also managing people's expectations on our communications, right? We're like, this is outside, like, let's embrace it. We told all of our sponsors it's going to be outside. We told everybody coming it was going to be outside.

So let me backtrack a second here because I mean, your community, for those that don't know, we're talking about the tech community, the top of the top of the tech community.

Yes, founders, CEOs.

The type of attendees where something goes wrong, they're going to be on Twitter laughing at you. They're going to tell you. Seconds, right? And you're gonna be a meme in a minute. So very tough audience to deal with, right? You made some key decisions here, right? Stuff like implementing vaccine checks and rapid testing. You put some interesting signage at the door that became actually a positive meme for the show. Can you walk us through the thinking behind it? Was it dictated just by the audience needs, obviously, of being safe? Or was it also, I don't know, insurance you were thinking about and like complications that could have come out of not thinking that way?

Yeah. So here's the almost scary part for event organizers, right? Because I know a lot of those listening right now in the audience are like event organizers because we're at an event conference. Like there is no one blueprint that people are going to tell you to follow. There's no one playbook and all the rules are different. So we had our event in San Mateo County. Well, the rules in San Mateo County are different from even San Francisco. San Francisco city-like rules and regulations. So what you can do in one county you can't do in others. So for us it was a little confusing because we're like, okay, we gotta find somebody at the city with our venue who could tell us what's going on because the rules keep changing. And then they kept changing, right? It's like as COVID had waves, it was like some rules would come back, some would decline, and then like, you know, there's less masking, there's more masking. So it's hard to keep up with that change for an event at our scale. So we, between Jason and myself and our events team, we just laid out a set of rules, right? We're like, we're going to follow these. These are going to be our, our key testaments, right? That we're not going to, we're not going to change it no matter what, because other factors can change. But at least if these are our rules, like everything around it can kind of fluctuate, but we know that we'll deliver on this. So we always said at the very beginning, like, we're we're gonna do vaccine checks and we'll find out a way to do it. So we had a health and safety partner literally check, manually check the 6,000 people who registered like vaccine cards, right? Like that takes time and money. We did, we found people who could do temperature checks that were passive so that, you know, there's not people like scanning you. We found ways to do like passive badge scanning. So we did all these things and we said like, we're gonna stick to these. We're gonna put them all over the website. We're gonna tell everybody who's coming. So that, you know, if you're coming to this event, you have to not only meet these health and safety requirements, but like you can feel comfortable when you do get here because everybody else is in the same boat, right? Like everyone else has been vaccinated. Everybody else has just done a rapid test. Nobody has a fever. So that's what we stuck to. And as things fluctuated in San Mateo County, like there was some masking, there wasn't. And then by the time of our event, there was some social distancing rules, but then there wasn't, right? So it's like, How do you keep up with all that? You can't. Let me just tell you, you can't. It changes too much. So you just have to figure out your cornerstone of what makes sense for my event attendees, what makes sense for us as the organizers, and stick to it because everything else could change. But at least if you have that, then it doesn't have to keep changing, right? Because you can't keep up all that change and do a live event. It's too stressful.

Unbelievable. And congrats for doing that and making it happen. Like, okay, so you mentioned that obviously the event wasn't running at 100% capacity as compared to previous years.

Right.

Did you do anything? And I want to introduce here the big H-word, hybrid. Did you do anything to cater for those that couldn't be there?

Yeah, so we did. We live-streamed all of our stages, which we had never previously done. We've done a little bit of live streaming like past years, like 2017, 2018, of just the main stage, right? Just some of the smaller stages. We decided going into this year, hey, half our audience can't come. We still have this great content that people want to watch. So we did a completely free component that was all digital, kind of perpendicular, um, rather than hybrid because they didn't really overlap too much. So I call them more perpendicular. But, um, we, we did that so that people could still watch content. So yeah, that was the first time we did that, which was interesting. On day 1, we had like, we started the first whole day as just digital, right? We're like, okay, we have a lot of people signed up who can't come, who can't be here, they just want to watch digitally. We're on site, we're like, let's just do content from on site live. It's like, you know, booths are still being set up, whatever. Well, as an organizer, that was super hectic. And we were like, oh, why did we do this? I'm like, oh, okay, we, well, we did it because we wanted to like serve our digital audience as a distinct audience, right? We wanted to make sure they had content that you couldn't watch. And it was— the speakers just dialed in via Zoom. They weren't at the event site. It was just our teams managing, like our streaming team managing it. So that was interesting. So that was the first time we did that, uh, and people seem to like that because they could watch it in real time, whereas typically it takes a while for us to get our sessions out because there's so much content.

I can imagine. So We've talked so far about the things you've done. Yeah, let's look at analyzing them and like give a vote to them. Will you keep on doing it or will you change something? And like kind of drawing conclusions, I guess.

Sure.

Outdoor events.

Oh, we're doing them.

Are you doing again?

I don't want to go— listen, I would have never thought, and I don't think Jason would have either, um, I don't ever think pre-COVID we would have ever thought to move our conference outside. I mentioned all the infrastructure things we had to do. Crazy, crazy time, money, budgets, like just crazy, right? Like we would have never done that if we hadn't had a push from our community to find a way to safely host an event, right? People are like, we want to get back in person. There's a lot of reasons why SaaStr exists for training, for playbooks. A lot of people bring their teams to SaaStr and that's like their big team meetup. So we, we knew we had to fill this need and help people get there. So that's why we did the safest event possible. I was worried, honestly. I was like, I don't know if people are gonna like it. I'm building a booth outside. The sponsors might hate it. Like, they were in the sun for part of the day, right? You're like— I'm like, bring sunglasses. But they all loved it. Like, they loved being outside for 3 days. I was blessed with good weather. So like, it all worked out for the best. So we're already planning to do outside, more outside next year. Like, yeah, even bigger outside with some inside because some people did use our inside spaces, you know, if you want to go take a call, whatever it is. So yeah, outdoor events, I love them.

Great. Um, so hopefully we're not going to need it anymore. Should we need it, vaccination testing, are you going to keep on doing that?

Yeah, we're going to keep on doing it. Um, I think one thing that's interesting with our health and safety team, who I still talk to, um, they work with a lot of events, they work with NHS, um, and they're of the impression that COVID, some form of COVID will linger for the next few years, right? It's like, as much as I think we feel a little bit when we go to events like these, or when we go to events like SASS, or that COVID's a little bit over, like, it's still lingering, right? We're getting into the fall time, the flu season too, like and now people are starting to get their boosters. I think it's just something you have to plan for because if you don't, right, it's a little bit— again, things keep changing around you, like I said. So it's like for us, we plan on having still like vaccine requirements and uploads and that all stuff has gotten easier, thankfully, right? So let's do that. But yeah, we'll still have it because I think there will still be a need for it for the next few years.

And what about virtual events? Are you going to keep on doing them or—

We're doing them. We have one on December 15th, as a shameless plug.

Yeah, go for it. What is it going to be?

December 15th. Yeah, it's— we've done about one digital event per quarter. We're working on like doing more hybrid year-round networking because that's what our community really wanted after this in-person event we did. They were like, this is awesome. We still want to do more, like for some people who couldn't be there, right? Or for teams that are hybrid.

So interesting.

Yeah.

So hybrid, synchronous hybrid, is it still happening? Will it still be the case or are you just going to focus on in-person and virtual? I think it's— no judgment.

No, no, no. I was like, Paul, you might be a little bit biased, but hop in.

Yeah.

No, but I think for the industry, right, it's an interesting time because live events like this are starting to come back. Events like ours where we did an indoor-outdoor just came back and was held successfully, right? So it can be done. Festivals are starting to come back for next year, right? Coachella's back next year. Like, I'm excited to go. So I think as organizers, we should plan on it being around because people have adjusted to this now, right? Like the way we had to adjust to the pandemic and finding a safe way to do our event, people have adjusted to digital work. All of TeamCast is distributed now. We used to all be in San Francisco. 2 years ago, now we're all over the place. I can't even tell you where everyone is, right? Not in the same time zone anymore. So I think it's something where we have to embrace it, but the best parts of it, right? And I think for us, it's— it needs— they both need distinct attention. So it's like your digital component, if you're going to do something that's digital, focus on that or have an owner for that. If you're doing something in person, have an owner for that. Where they meet, you need an owner for that too, right? Of like, where do those two meet in the middle? And that's how we define hybrid. That's how we think about hybrid is like, where does the digital world interface with the physical world? And how can you make sure that like they both still have a great experience? Because if you try and do like half of one and a little bit of the other, neither of them are good. Yeah, exactly.

And you know, we're often, we think that in general, like there's no, the concept of planning events has never been more fluid than it is right now. There's no, the future is hybrid, the future is virtual, the future is in person. The future is whatever you want to do for your audience.

Exactly.

And tech companies should support that in some way, make it easier for you hopefully. But I want to ask you also, I guess in terms of the future, like, but before I move to that, one more question just came in. What is your biggest learning from running virtual events during this hiatus that you applied to in-person? Did you change anything in how you schedule the sessions?

Oh, we totally did. That's a great question. I love this question for the Brain Trust. Love it. We actually learned a lot about our audience and our community through the virtual and the digital events. So we did about a dozen of them before our in-person event, and we saw saw what we, what we believed kind of in our gut was reflected in the data. And then we learned a lot of things. Like we added a lot of roundtables, we added a lot of like small group sessions because a lot of people came through our digital events who were really great like-minded people in our community who should be risen up to like a speaker level, right? So we took some of those attendees, we made them speakers at annual. So that was super helpful. That's where we like benefited from digital in in person. A lot of people, when we did digital sessions, we learned about different content formulas, right? Like how to— our team has gotten like really good at making a catchy title so that people sign up for the session and then go to it. Like we figured out that like, you know, how, how many is the right amount of slides? I'm like, well, it depends on how long the presentation is. We figured out the right presentation length is 20 minutes on Zoom. I'm like, We can solve these. I'll tell you right now, it's 20 minutes. So we figured out a lot of these hacks, right, of like how much Q&A is too much, where do we do some Q&A, some not. So we took all these learnings from doing I don't know how many digital sessions in 12 events, probably 300, um, and we use that to impact our in-person events by changing the format of the content. We changed the speaker times, um, we We made everybody bring data where they could. Everybody had to have slides. It's one thing we learned from digital, like if you try a fireside chat, it doesn't work on digital, right? Like it's, it's hard. What we're doing here works because you've got faces in front of you. If we would just do this like two boxes on the Zoom, it's, I mean, I love Zoom, but it's harder, right? Like people can disengage.

That's okay. You can say you don't love it as well.

There's a barking dog. You know, things happen on meetings. Right, in the digital world. So we took all that and we're like, okay, let's bring that to our in-person events, which changed— we changed the time of day that we normally do our sessions. So we just took it as a data point, right? We're like, okay, we've got all this data from our past in-person events, but now we have even more data from 300 digital events. So we took all that and we injected it in. We moved things around. We changed some of the sizes of stages based on it.

Michelle, a lot, quite a lot.

Quite a lot.

Almost another podcast episode here for this. Let me ask you, did you see any different reaction in the in-person audience? They're coming from burnout and Zoom exposure in terms of like their attention spans at sessions and stuff like that. Did you change that? Would you change anything going back?

No, I think what we learned much like here is, you know, people were really ready to go back. Ended up being— we didn't plan for this, but SaaStr ended up being the first largest in-person event that was back in the Bay Area. I'm like, that's not something you're like, let me put this on a whiteboard somewhere. Largest in-person San Francisco event, right? I'm like, maybe somewhere in somebody's office, but not in ours, right? We're like, health and safety, vax checks, make sure people are happy, um, like adoptable dogs, you know, like very different whiteboard. So And it ended up being the biggest one. But it's not something that I think you can set out to do. And I, and I think so many people told us that they brought their teams, like a lot of people who had come as individual founders, like brought their entire team. A lot of people, that was their first time they had met people on their teams that they had hired remotely during the pandemic. So it was just a lot of people saw people that they, you know, their Twitter friends with or like their LinkedIn buddies with. So that was such a unique moment. And I don't think it's going to last, right? Because as in-person events are coming back, there's going to be more and more moments for people to meet. But I don't know that people want to travel as much either, right? It's this weird conundrum where like people want to go back in person, they want to see their friends that they've missed. But you're also still getting on an airplane and like, I think people are fit to are easily fatigued by events like this too.

So there's a lot of happening. 30 seconds. Can you tell us what was written on the sign that you put at the entrance of Sassafras? Because that was quite the moment.

We did. It went viral. Again, we did not plan for it. It said, please do not enter if you have symptoms of COVID-19, racism, or homophobia.

Yeah, I love it. And with that, I want to thank Amelia Ibarra for being with us. It's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you.

Thanks, Julian.