Live SaaStr Insider: Sponsor Networking Launch

quite a few things today for sponsors. So yeah, one, if this is your first time joining, I do recommend joining the rest of these. We do these every Thursday, 9 AM Pacific from now until SAS Re:ANNUAL. So the last one will be, what, like the 7th or something? But yeah, we'll do these from now through annual. We do these every week, super important information. We do also record and livestream them. So if there is a week upcoming where you know you won't be able to make it or a member of your team won't be able to make it, highly recommend watching the replays. They are on the SAS YouTube channel. We are going to make sure everybody gets them every week going forward as well, just because there's so much we cover in these replays. So just a quick note there. I see some both new and familiar faces who are joining today's webinar. So yeah, thanks for joining live or thanks for rewatching if you are indeed one of the people rewatching. There's quite a few things we wanna cover today. So the bulk of what we'll go over today is networking. And then if we have time at the end, we'll try and hit just a few last reminders since the annual is only 32 days away. So yeah, we're getting really close now. And hopefully you guys are, you know, feeling good, getting excited about the show. I know many of you have already turned in your booths, which is great. There's only a few of you left that need to do that. If you haven't done that yet, I would say that's highest priority so far. And then, yeah, we'll kind of get into what's the next priorities here today. So, okay, first and foremost, it's important to talk about registration when we talk about networking because they go hand in hand. So I know we've seen a wave of people register just in the last week. I think that's because we kind of told folks, hey, you know, the networking is launching very soon, very shortly. And if you want to be in it, you do need to be registered, which is true. So if you haven't done so yet, I would say maybe 40% of you have registered. So there's, there's still quite a few of you that need to register if you haven't done so yet. Everybody has been sent their unique sponsor registration code, including those of you that maybe signed in the last week or day with Saster. Everybody has their unique registration code. If it's something you can't find in an email quickly, no worries, just email us events@saxtrank.com. We can get you a copy of your code. If you kind of forget what you've seen in the last week of like who's registered and who's not for your team, we can also send you a snapshot of that. So yeah, just reach out to our team if you can't find this, super handy. But yeah, first and foremost, when we talk about networking, we also have to talk about registration because they are all tied together. So The most important thing will be to register your team. The second thing I'll say is networking is not transferable. So if you sign up with like a placeholder, because you're not sure maybe still of the specific members who are coming of your team for SAFTR, but you want to start booking meetings and just transfer to somebody else later, it does not work that way. It will basically cancel out any meetings you post once you transfer a ticket. So just know that it should be your actual people who are coming in May. And so that's really the best way to do it is if you already know who's coming. And we'll kind of, we'll explain, David and I will explain today like the steps that are gonna happen now. So if you're like, I'm, don't be panicked if you're like, I'm not ready to register my entire team yet and like access the networking. It is double opted. So for that intensive purposes, it does matter, but you don't need to panic about it. Like it's, it's much better if you just have the actual people who are coming in May to be the ones registered. Again, if you're joining late, that's just because the, the platforms and the way in which we do networking is tied to being a sponsor ticket holder. So the only way for us and our systems to talk to one another is to have the sponsor all-access pass ticket. Again, last caveat, I'll just refresher, meetings in this case are not, and networking is not transferable, so needs to be under the person. That is ultimately going to attend and do the networking, right? So just a good rule of thumb there. So there's 3 things we're gonna talk about in networking today. One is customer passes, two is workshops/pray dates, and the last one being who do you wanna meet? So we're gonna try and go through this as best we can since honestly it could take more than an hour in reality if we did like a whole deep dive. So we'll try and do an overview to go over the major points of each of the 3 areas because they are very important in their own way. So, um, first and foremost, customer passes. You guys might have heard us talk about this, or maybe this is something you're hearing for the first time. Regardless, we've done this program for the last, I think, 4 years now where we've opened it up historically to Super Gold, Platinum, and Diamond sponsors to be eligible to invite current customers or active prospects using this program, the Faster Customer Pass program. We are— this is an announcement for today. So if you feel like you're a Gold sponsor and you didn't know this information previously, we decided as a group we will in fact open this up to Gold sponsors as an added benefit for your guys' sponsorship in 2025. So the, the eligibility for customer passes at each level is now reflected here. Again, this is like new. You will not have like really seen this previously. We did a version of this last year with Super Gold and up, but now we are— there's so many of you now, we decided to include the Gold for 2025 as well. So how this works at each level, this is the default eligibility. A few of you have custom eligibility in your contract. If you have something custom, we will tackle your custom eligibility. Other than that, these are the standards per level. So Gold will now have 3, Super Gold will have 5, Platinum will have 10, and the Diamonds and up, I mean, are actually truly custom. So it says 15, but they're really custom. So how does this work? What are we talking about when we mean customer passes? We— what we're not talking about is the people staffing your booth. So that's one big differentiation. These are not the people coming to to, these are not like the people that look like this, they're not coming to staff your booth. They are coming as a guest of you being a sponsor of SAS RE:ANNUAL. So let's say David didn't work for SAS, but he works for another company. I don't know, I'll just use Descript 'cause they're a sponsor of RSE Sphere. And he wanted to invite not another member of his team, but somebody he's been talking to who's either a customer or, you know, he has, he's been talking to his VP of sales, and they, they're trying to get the customer over the line. They're like, you know, what, what incentives can they give them? A customer path is a great way to do that. It's a great way to have a closing meeting on site at SaaStray Annual. It's a good way to have a preventative journey on site at SaaStray Annual with your current customers and really a great touch base with people who are, again, either current customers or active prospects using this program. The only caveat is they do need to be director level and above, and we do not ticket service providers through this program. We only ticket those who are directly in B2B, SAAS, or AI, and they do need to be director level and above. You know, i.e., we're not ticketing a bunch of SDRs that you know, we're not ticketing a bunch of your friends that just wanna come to SAAS or to utilize the program. That's really not the goal here. The goal here is to treat this as an added bonus, an incentive where again, you can get an extra deal over the line, or you can meet with a customer that you've been meaning to talk to and really wanna just, you know, either check in with them or maybe they're not having a good time and you wanna give them a stiff. These, those are the goals of the program. The goal is not to just give out tickets to people you know. The goal is to actually use this and like maximize your time at the event. David, anything you want to add there?

Yeah, I just want to say it's kind of been like a, you know, we rolled this out as a beta, like a test, I think with a couple sponsors like 2 years ago and then expanded it last year. And this year I think it's great, like expanding it to the Golds. It's been— I've just had great stories over the years of sponsors telling me, hey, this was a way that they got a really easy or invaluable quick win from Saster before the event even started. So I think Emilia said it well, going to customers, going to, you know, really bottom of funnel opportunities, engaging your sales team. You know, a lot of the folks on this call are in events and marketing. I think sales knows, you know, like, hey, it's a great touchpoint with someone in bottom of pipeline to extend this valuable invite to SaaS. I think the average ticket's like $1,300, $1,400 now. Right now, yeah. So it's a really great value add. And a win-win. So we're happy to help. And, you know, again, I've seen sponsors kind of get an ROI from the whole event off this alone almost immediately. So anyway, it's a great opportunity.

Okay. So how it works, hopefully you guys get that. If you have any questions, just reach out to me and David. We can help walk you through it. How does this work in actuality? Right. So there's, there's two simple ways that work. One, if you're like, okay, I've talked to my sales team, I know exactly who I want to invite. Starting today, we're gonna send everybody their sponsor customer path spreadsheet. It'll probably take us 2 days to get through everyone, so don't be alarmed if you don't have it by end of day. There's a lot of sponsors this year, but you will get your sheet by end of day tomorrow. And what you'll do is you'll just fill it out. It looks exactly like this. I'm gonna actually pull up the sample here, so it'll look exactly like this, but instead of example, it'll be your company. Let's say you're a Super Gold and you have 5 of these, so these will be your 5. You will just need to give us their registration details, and these should be, again, people you've already spoken to. Like, again, the, the goal, the, the goal of you inviting them is it's a gift to your customer or prospect to come meet with you with Zaster. So that's why it's important that your team invite them in this format. So that's how customer passes work. This is what counts to your allotment. You add them to your sheet and your, your sheet is specific just to you. Like nobody else has this data. It's just you and Zapier. These are people you invite as long as they qualify. Again, assuming they're director level and above in AI, B2B, SaaS, and they're not a services provider or agency. We will get them ticketed and we'll let you know when they're ticketed. So that's all you have to do. It's super simple. Just fill that sheet out and that's how you'll know how many customer passes you have. Something new we're doing for this year as well is something called VIP invites. So again, two buckets here. If you're like, okay, maybe I am in marketing and I can't get my sales team to do this. There's another version called VIP passes. The criteria is a little bit higher because in this case, the end scenario, SaaSer would invite them versus you inviting them and already knowing this person. This is the scenario in which SaaStr doesn't— may or may not know this person, but you want our help inviting this person as a VIP to SaaStr Annual this year on your behalf. Again, these should be people you're somewhat talking to. Maybe they're more top of funnel. That's fine. They need to be at a VIP level though. So for us, it is one level up, meaning they need to be VP level and above. Same criteria in B2B slash or AI. And this could really be, we've had people pilot this with us already. So I will say that we've already had probably 5 or 6 companies who have piloted this new VIP program with us this year. And so that's why we're now rolling it out to everyone because it's actually worked pretty good. So the, the concept of the VIP pass is people we would invite and they do need to be VP level and above since we're inviting them, right? Like directors and above that, you know, our customers, you should use your customer passes for. If you have basically a wishlist, a target account list, people you really wanna see there that you know that are in your funnel, in your database, maybe you can't, again, maybe you can't get a list from your sales team, but you can get a list from your marketing platform of like the top 50 people that have been engaging with you. Just sort that by VP, like VP level and above and put it into your VIP invites tab and we will, We will invite those only that qualify. So if you're like, you know, I'm not sure if this is gonna be too many people, that's okay. I would say about 50 is probably the sweet spot to put in this. If you put more, then it's gonna be too high of a volume for us to go through an invite. But yeah, I'd say if you wanna put like your top 50, top 100 accounts on this, we, you know, leave the onus on us since we're the ones doing the invites for VIP passes to invite those that qualify. And these do not count against your customer pass allotment. So that's the nice side of it is there is a higher criteria for it, but if they qualify, we'll invite them and we'll let you know if they're ticketed without it counting towards like, let's say your 5 that you have in a Super Gold contracted. So that is something new we're doing here. Hopefully, you know, that makes sense on— there's kind of just 2 paths here. One is the VIP invites need to be VP level and above, and SaaStr will invite those that qualify. Customer passes should be people you know. They need to be director level above either active customers or prospects, and these would be used for your customer passes directly. Anything else on customer or VIP passes, David?

I think you covered it there. Yeah, I think we'll get you the sheets and just, yeah, it's just that there's the two tabs. I think it's pretty clear. Let us know if you have any questions. And again, great opportunity to really maximize the experience at SaaStr. So we're here to help.

We're here to help. Okay. Customer passes, big deal. We did end up ticketing, I think, 300 or so people last year, which is a fair amount of people, all of whom qualified under these customer passes. Again, you— I've— as similar to David, we've had really great stories of people saying that, you know, those customer passes really help them get the right meetings and people to the booth that they may have already been talking with that are maybe either local to the Bay Area, thinking about attending SaaStr. It's a good way to build rapport and a relationship with your, you know, your customers and prospects. So that's customer passes. We'll move on to the next section, which is probably the beefiest one, which is the networking braindate workshops. One thing I'll say on Braindate workshops, same spiel here. You do need to be ticketed in order to access Braindates. It is a direct link to their platform. The direct link does take about 10 minutes. So if you sign up and then you immediately try to get on the platform, just know it will take a few minutes for it to go from one place to the other. It was every year. So just give it a few minutes, like sign up, Go do something else and then come back to it because you'll be able to get into the platform. So that's first and foremost caveat. So what are Brain Dates? You might have heard us talk about this and we're actually doing it in a new and improved way this year. So even if you have been a previous sponsor or attendee of FASTR, this is really great information to know since it has been improved and changed for this year. So Brain Dates are essentially group workshop sessions that are based around like knowledge transfer, playbook, things you want to learn or things you want to share about at SAS Re:Annual. The whole goal and premise, which I always like to start with, is about, you know, learning something new, fostering, you know, mentorships, exchanging strategies. That's really the point of these. We also, we also started calling them Brain Date Workshops for a reason this year. I just think it's an easier way to think about it. If you're like, I don't really know what a Brain Date is, just think about it as a micro workshop. It's a host and 5 people, and that's— it's a mini workshop, right? So if you're a host, there's things like slides required. It's just a lot easier if you think about it as a workshop versus I don't really know what a branding date means. But if you think about it as a workshop, you're probably already in the right place. So think about it that way. A few things it isn't, because I've had people ask this before. And again, if you're new to it, you might be a little bit confused the first time you drop into it about maybe expectations versus reality of what it is and isn't. Our— none of our platforms are what I call a Wild West networking platform. So I know there are a ton of other industry events that just have event apps and you can literally scroll through and like see every person. Neither Braindates nor Who Do You Want to Meet will let you do that. Neither as a sponsor, attendee, normal person. Really only the people who can see everyone are the people who work at Zaster. So, again, none of, none of it is to do that, right? There is, there's a reason you're sponsoring and there's a goal for sponsoring and that's to connect with people IRL. This is the helpful way, like the two ways we're gonna talk about with rain dates and who do you wanna meet are basically bonuses to help facilitate that, right? But a lot of it is still gonna be the core of your booth. So I think that's an also important thing. Like I know we're giving networking the time of day. By spending like an hour on it today. But think about the fact that every other week we've really talked about the booth. And that's because, you know, the core majority of your time is, trust me, once you get this after, the majority of your time is not going to be spent hopefully like staring at your phone. It's just going to be talking to people who come by your booth. It's going to be engaging with people who are in front of you at the conference IRL. It's really not going to be checking your phone for networking requests every 5 seconds. Like that's not the goal. So Just keep that in mind when you go into networking. I think it's good you spend some time on it, but proportionate. Like, I wouldn't try and hack the system, because trust me, we've done a lot of stress testing this year. If you find a hack, let me know. I don't think it's hackable. And that's not a challenge. That's just a statement. So it's, again, I just think it's a good framework and mindset to think about it. You know, manage your time proportionally if you want to do these kinds of things. But I will say in particular, in particular, the Brain Dates, they are work because they're workshops. We'll get into that in a minute. If you do end up hosting a Brain Date, we do require slides. So if you're already on the call and you're like, I don't want to make slides, you're probably out to host a Brain Date. It doesn't mean you're out to join a Brain Date. It just means you're probably out for hosting a Brain Date, which again, totally fine. I would say maybe 10% or fewer of our sponsors end up hosting a Brain Date. And that's because you have to make slides. And for most of you, if you're already— you're a Super Gold enough and you already have content, I mean, your slides are already due. Like, you ask— doing another set of slides is one, quite difficult. If you're a Gold sponsor, you're like, okay, maybe I'm game to do slides. Like, they are due fairly quickly, so just know that too. Like, you know, semester is only 30 days, so all this moves fairly quickly. All that to say is Slides are required, so don't sign up for them unless you're ready to put in the work, because otherwise we eventually, our team, if we don't get your slides, will cancel your Brain Date, which I would hate to do for our sponsors, but has been known to happen in the past when we couldn't get slides from people. So again, not something for maybe the faint of heart on hosting a Brain Date. Certainly there's an air of you can join Brain Dates, which is a little bit easier. But they are meant to be engaging and facilitating discussions, right? So just keep that all in mind on like what Brain Dates isn't, just to hopefully set expectations there. If you're like, okay, I've heard the spiel, I'm still game to try and submit a Brain Date to get accepted, there's a few things you should know there on what the moderation team will accept. We talked about this a little bit in registration, but first and foremost, it can't be a bait and switch of any kind. Unfortunately, we've had people in the past post a topic that looked really well, and then when they sent us their slides, it was literally product pitch, so we had to cancel their Brain Date. Again, because we asked for slides, not really a great way to hack the system and try and do that. Like, the moderators will just cancel it, so probably not worth your effort to try and hack the system, in my opinion. Things that are pitches, commercials, otherwise straight-up talks, This is not the place for that. I'd say if your company has AI and you wanna do a straight up pitch, sign up for the AI demo stage. There are still a few slots left. Sign up for the AI demo stage. I'll show you where to sign up for it. Anybody can sign up for it, including a sponsor of Saastr. If you come here to saastrannual.com, you'll see this AI pitch and demo stage. It's a 2-minute demo. Like if that's all you wanna do with Saastr and you're a sponsor, sign up for this. Don't sign up for Braindates to try and hack it. Just sign up for the CI Demo page. This is the place to do it. That's the place to do it anyways. So like, again, hopefully that's clear. For things that, you know, topics that I've often seen that will get rejected from our moderation team, specifically for sponsors, like if they're too pitchy, that gets rejected. If it's a commercial or otherwise a straight up talk about what you do or what your product relates to. Or I've seen a lot of people submit like, oh, we're in this space that we want to talk about because we're in this space. That still gets rejected. It honestly should be what's working for you. That is, that is like a trial and tribulation that other people can learn from. That is what people want to hear at Brandeis. They want to hear your playbooks. They want to know how you're how you're using AI, what you're spending money on, what you're not spending money on. They don't— they want to know what's working because they want to copy it, right? They want to know where you failed so they can avoid it. Like, those are the topics people want to see. They want nothing related to your product. Trust me. Like, again, if you want to do a product thing, you want to show off the product and it has AI, sign up for the Mayfield AI Demo Pitch Stage. Don't try and sign up for Brain Dates because if you do, they'll probably just point you to the demo pitch stage if you submit something that's along those lines. You will notice the first time you sign up for Brain Dates, all of basically what I said is encapsulated in this code of conduct. I know some people blow by this. Read the whole thing. But they are really great guidelines of what we do and don't accept so that hopefully you submit a topic, it gets accepted, versus rejected. I would say between— and this is not a scare factor— I would say between attendees and sponsors, most topics were rejected last year because people didn't read this. So again, just read this. Second, I know this is maybe like whatever oversimplified advice. If you go on sasre.com, we've got the— or even SASRE Annual— we've got this really great SASRE SaaStr AI that all of us use. All, you know, people use, I think, like a bunch a minute. You can ask it here. It's loading. You can also hit the chatbot. So you can ask Jason's AI, how can I help? Okay, I'll do it in real time. Like, I am thinking of submitting a brain date for SaaStr. You can put in your LinkedIn, and I'm just gonna, you know, give it some parameters. I am, let's say for most of you, I'm knowledgeable about SaaS and marketing and AI. What are some topics I should speak about? Honestly, guys, if you do this AI thing, I'll probably give you some good topics that will get accepted. This AI is pretty good. It's trained on all Caster content. Like it knows all about, yeah, like these are pretty good. I'm like, I'm like, these are pretty good. This is not canned, by the way. I didn't know I was gonna ask for AI this. I just thought of it in real time, but these are pretty good topics. So like, if you're like, okay, I don't know what I should talk about with Aster. Honestly guys, put it into our AI, do what I just did. Ask for AI what to do for a brain date. It just gave me 7. It's still going. Like, pick a topic that you're like, okay, I think that one not only sounds good, but I would be prepared to talk to that, to, to speak to this topic, right? Like, all right, let's just take the first one, for example, how AI is transforming SaaS marketing, practical use cases. That is actually one I could talk on. Like, the team Saastr obviously has our own AI. I could talk about that. I could talk about how it's improved our copywriting. I could talk about how it's improved our creative team and saved us time. I could talk about how it's become our main content editor. Like, there's a lot of use cases I could talk about. We've also talked about our AI on the last two Workshop Wednesdays. Like, it's completely transformed how we operate at SaaStr. Like, this is a topic I could make 5 slides on easily and host a Brain Date. So, you know, I would say talk to our AI, have it suggest you some topics, pick one that you feel comfortable with, submit it to Brain Dates. If you get accepted by the SAASr team, just make your 5 slides and that's it. But honestly, this is my best advice. Because I know a lot of people have in the past asked us like, hey, what do you think I should talk about on like an individual level? Like, here's what I know, here's what I don't know. Again, our AI is trained on all the SAASr content. Just ask it. It will tell you, like it did for me in real time, a pretty decent amount of topics that would make a great Brain Date topic. So that's my best advice. Ask our AI for topics. They're pretty good. But just pick one. And when you submit it, wait to be accepted before you make slides. But assuming that it gets accepted because we used our AI and it's a great topic, we'll accept it. We'll send you the template. You make slides. Everyone's happy. The thing I'll say— and I guess just any thoughts on that, David?

No. I think, yeah, that's Esther AI tool is really cool. We've been getting a lot of traction with it, and we've been seeing what people are writing internally. It's, it's been great. So yeah, no, I think that's all great advice and, and yeah.

Yeah. It's good. Yeah. It's, um, listen, underrated, our Saastr AI is probably every day. Um, yeah, I don't like, I, I, I'll be honest. I use a combination of it and ChatGPT. Both have like strengths and weaknesses. Um, but since ours is trained on all, literally all of Saastr's content for 10+ years. With all of our YouTube videos and sessions from annual. And it's been trained on our Saastr annual policies. So like we've, we've had it ingest like our speaker guidelines and all the content. Again, I did not stage that, guys. It did it in real time. These are pretty good topics. This is my best advice for you. Just ask our AI. You don't even have to admit that you asked our AI. I won't notice. I'll be like, wow, that's a great topic. User AI, no shame. Also, I'm signed in, but you can use our AI anonymously. So if you're like, ah, but Amelia and David are gonna see that I use their AI to come up with the topic for Raindates, one, I think you should. Two, I'm signed in on Delphi, but you can use this anonymously. So you could just submit anonymously. And even if you put in details about yourself, we don't read all, like I don't read all these chats every day. There's a lot to do before annual. So no shame if you use this— I actually think you should use this also to get you prepared for all the AIs you'll see at Zaster but use our AI! That's my best advice for you. Use our AI. Okay, we've covered a lot of this so just on like the last logistics pieces for how brain dates work technically— technically? The blink of an eye. We don't launch networking to everyone until next week. I think we said the 15th, but then we realized it was tax day in the US, and then we said the 15th. So we don't launch until next Wednesday. The reason we're sharing this with you guys now is so that once we launch it, you can get in and start doing this right away. Again, technically this is live, so if you are registered, you technically can start submitting now. We're not gonna ding you if you start submitting now before other people get on the platform. It just means you may see some things like fluctuate as we, you know, add or remove topics because we're still adding our pre-seeded topics. But other than that, if you wanna be in sponsor-like mode for the next 4 or 5 business days, what you would do, or if you wanna wait till Wednesday, You can post a new topic on this link. Aha. Oh, it's actually funny that I did this. I'm actually glad I did this. I have a topic posted on Brain Dates as a test topic, and it has not been accepted yet. So you'll, you will see this if you post a topic on Brain Date and it's not accepted yet. It means that you are limited in the amount of Brain Dates you can create. So since I already created a topic, and it has not been accepted by our moderators, it will not let me post another topic until it either gets accepted or rejected. So again, good thing to know here, you can only post one at a time. So like, again, if you get ideas from our FasterAI, put in the best one you feel the most confident on. Also, if you're going to lead a Brain Date, I would not recommend leading more than one. Like, it's just too— it's a lot of overhead. Like, you're like, oh, I'm going to go crazy. Like, I just have this person on my team. Like David's gonna be dedicated to doing just brain dates. You know, you get overloaded when you get on site. I think people always forget that brain dates, all of FASTR, are a lot of energy once you get on site, right? Again, a lot of people are like, oh, I'll book my meetings when I get there. I'll figure that out when we get there. And then you get to the booth and it's literally slammed the entire time the expo's open. So again, just food for thought, caveat there. You can only post one at a time. I think part of this, David, I've, I've mentioned a couple of times, like balancing time, right, between booth and being in person. I guess just any other tips you have there. I know you've seen some sponsors be successful with Brain Dates, but yeah, I think maybe balance between everything else they're doing too.

I think part of it too is dividing and conquering. You know, I think part of it is also the levels, right? Like you should send a mix of people to SaaStr. You know, our number one persona are founders. If your founder can come, fantastic, right? That's a great place for you to engage in braid dates. I would leave your, you know, have your AE staff the booth and, you know, and I'd make a booth schedule where some can then go off, you know, whether it's AEs or founders or product leaders or marketing leaders go out and take part in all the different things happening at SaaStr. So Yeah, I don't know if that helps, but that's, that's, I think, come up with a plan for your staff and yeah, try to have, in particular, the more senior-level folks engage in brain dates.

Yeah, there's a few questions here in the chat too. We'll just answer live. If we plan to do a brain date, is it recorded? It is recorded. So yes, you should be— you should, again, think of it as a workshop, like all of our workshops. At DASDR are recorded. They're not all necessarily live streamed as a Brain Date, but they are all recorded and captured, meaning, you know, we adhere Brain Date speakers to the same level we treat the CEO of Snowflake of. You do need to be, you know, presentable, business attire. We've had folks in the past just show up in a t-shirt. I don't know, I get doing like, you know, I'm in the booth and then I'm going to host my Brain Date. Maybe throw a jacket over it. Again, you are the presenter of this group Brain Date. You know, people expect a modicum of presentability in the Brain Dates. We will, again, if you submit one, before you submit a Brain Date, you should just ask yourself, and maybe we'll make this a slide too, just ask yourself, am I prepared to feature this topic and do slides if it gets accepted? If the answer is yes, then step to do will be, you know, submit it here to us, see if our moderation team accepts it. If they do accept it, they will send you our SAFTR slide deck template and ask for your slides back, right? Again, they'll re— they review each and every slide deck. So if it's too pitchy, they're gonna tell you. If you can't get there on a second iteration, they're just gonna cancel it. They have a lot of speakers and content to go through. If it doesn't meet the bar, they just move on. Trust me, there's no time to iterate. On doing like 5 rounds of revisions for a Brain Date workshop that's in less than 30 days. So just keep that in mind if you do end up doing a Brain Date. There's a few people asking for the slides and recording for this, for, of what I'm sharing, not for Brain Dates. So one, I'm gonna drop into the chat the slides. One thing One thing to note is we use this same slide deck every week, so we've just been adding to it. That's why you'll see it was updated yesterday. We went over— this is the team, as, as David on our internal call, and we have to do it for today. So we update this every week. You can— that's why you'll also see other information in this slide deck. But this is the same like every week. So if you want to save this, great. For the recording, we are going to send it to everyone, but if you want it, we're live streaming streaming right now. There's those— there's 400 people watching on X too, uh, but you can go to our Master YouTube channel, go to the live tab here, and you'll see there's a few more people watching here. But yeah, this is the instant, instant replay. I'll drop that in the chat too, not to be too meta. Um, here's the also link to the recording in real time. Okay, cool. Uh, let me see if there's any other questions. Yeah, we answered that one. There's a good question here on Brain Dates. Is there a submission deadline for Brain Dates? So we're gonna answer that one live. Brain Dates do have a finite amount of spots. So yes, there is a, there is a deadline in the fact that if they all fill up, there will physically not be more room to do your Brain Date. They do have a physical limitation in the real world, not in our AI. So yeah, there is— the sooner the better. Again, I love that you guys are so engaged on like how to make a really great brain date. Again, my intention— I know maybe sometimes I sound a little scary because I talk really fast on these webinars, but my intention is not to scare you guys into like not doing brain dates and like getting discouraged. It's just to help you have the highest propensity to submit a brain date that gets accepted by the moderation team. Second caveat, the moderation team is not just me. So if you email me or David and you're like, please accept my braindate, I'm like, I probably won't even actually see it. It does not go to me. I focus on other things. I will not say who's on the moderation team. It's several people and it is up to them. I leave it in their capable hands. Cool. A few other questions here just on Brain Dates, and then we'll move on to who do you want to meet. If we do host a Brain Date and it is recorded, do you share it with us? We do. Again, just know, you know, it's like a single-shot camera, so it is what it is. And you may not get it like, you know, May 16th. Probably be a few weeks post-event before we share your recording, but Maybe our AI can help us do it faster. Okay, another question on the recordings. Are Brain Dates hosted in dedicated rooms? They are not. Brain Dates are in a shared semi-private space. And we only, we don't record, there's literally like 60 Brain Dates happening at once. We don't record all of them. We record some of them that we flag. So if we flag yours and we decide to record it, We will let you know. There is another question on— I've downloaded the app. I don't know what app you've downloaded. Maybe you could tell us. There's no data. Okay. Not sure what app you downloaded. The SASTRA app. Got it. Okay. So that's a, that's a good flag because the— there's— I know this is an app screen, so you guys are probably like, How do I get into the app? It's not called the SASTR app. Ah, that's why. So there is an old SASTR Events app on the App Store. That's what you just downloaded, Mariel. And for anybody else who might still have the SASTR app, I think sometimes it's called SASTR Events. That is our previous SASTR Annual app. So if you download that, I'm actually trying to get it down because it's the old app. But if you download that, yeah, there's not going to be anything in that because that's our old app. So there's nothing in there. Next week when we launch to attendees, again, if you're registered, this is also the importance of registration, you'll get the attendee networking launch email, which will have directions for the new app. It is kind of in this next 2 slides. You can't see the name of it. You can download the new app just to be ready. Just know you won't be able to get in yet because it's not— it's not— you need a code. And the code doesn't go out until we launch to attendees for Who Do You Wanna Meet? But the Who Do You Wanna Meet app does have all the Faster Events app stuff in it, meaning like your agenda, your ticket QR code, it's all in there. I'm about to explain it in a second. It does integrate with Braindates. So just know for Braindates, if you're trying to access it on the app, it's no longer the Faster Events app. There's a new app. You can download it now ahead of next Wednesday's launch, but you won't be able to join yet. But you can download it now so you have it ready. Any other questions on Brain Dates? I think those were some good ones. Let's just check the chat. I think somebody asked previously when our slides due. I don't know if this meant for Brain Dates or for just slides in general, but if you're a— if you're a sponsor who has speaking included in your contract, slides were already due. So You haven't turned them in yet.

Yeah, I was gonna say, for a group brain date, um, or for brain dates here, um, do slide— the, the 5 or so slides need to be submitted or no?

They need to be submitted after we accept your topic, right? I wouldn't make slides now. I would have us accept your topic first. If we accept it, then we'll ask you for the slides. So don't— we won't ask you for slides until it's accepted. Perfect.

Good.

Create your own. Okay.

Well, if there's any more questions on Brain Dates, feel free to email me or Amelia, and we'll do our best to answer.

So great. Okay. You guys can keep dropping questions in the chat.

Yeah, that too.

We're, yeah. Or, or keep going in the chat, you know, it's, it's working. Yeah. Okay. We'll try and save I'll try and go through this in 7 minutes or less so we can go through any like specific questions you guys might have at the end. We'll just do open Q&A. I'll probably stop the recording for that because it's live streaming. So just last thing for the recording and then we'll do final questions. Who do you want to meet? PM, I got to trademark this, but who do you want to meet? The name tells what the program is. It's simple. It is, however, a question mostly we pose to our attendees, not our sponsors. And the question is, who do you want to meet? Again, simple premises. It works for attendees in a different way than it works for sponsors. So we'll explain how it works for sponsors on these next few. Okay, so who do you want to meet is a double opt-in program for sponsors. Meaning yes, you can see our app live right now. I think it's live right now. I know the team was pushing an update from our testing, so I saw some notifications, but I think it's still technically live. So, um, you will see this live in the App Store and on the Google Play Store ahead of next Wednesday's launch. Um, it is called Dafter Who Do You Want to Meet. Again, you can download it. Um, you can try and get in, but it's going to say enter your join code, which you won't have because again, we We have not launched it to everyone yet. But if you're watching this after Wednesday, then your join code should be in your email. So for sponsors, the number one thing to know about Who Do You Wanna Meet is there's two components of it, but in both formats it is double opt-in. So the best way you can think about this is for sponsors, it is mostly a passive double opt-in system, meaning you will not be able to send requests to people. But people will be able to send requests to you. So let's just say I'm Amelia, I'm an attendee of SaaStr Annual and David is a sponsor. If I wanted to meet with David and learn more about the company, I can request a one-on-one meeting with David. David would then get a notification and if David accepts it, it would book us for a one-on-one meeting. You guys would pick a time, it would book you in our Who Do You Wanna Meet lounge. Super easy way to to get a meeting. But again, caveat for sponsors is that it's passive because it's strictly double opt-in. The first opt-in for us is always gonna be on the attendee side. That goes for this way and it goes for the bonus way that we do it for Super Golden Up sponsors. So it is always strictly on the attendee to opt in first. It will email you and, okay, and I know the number one question we're gonna get is like, well, what's the point of me being a SAP? If it's just double opt-in. Our— uses AI. So it is gonna suggest sponsors to normal people. Like if I'm attending and David and I have very similar interests and alignment on topics, or, or, or number one use case, I'm looking for a solution that your company provides. 'Cause when people sign up as an attendee for Who Do You Wanna Meet, they can say what they're looking for. I'm looking for a compliance tool. I'm looking for cloud infrastructure. I need more GPUs. They can say what they're looking for. And if David has filled out his profile and said, I'm an expert in these things. Yes, I happen to be selling them because I'm a sponsor. One, it's gonna tag David as a sponsor. So attendees will know you're a sponsor. And if they wanna meet with you, because you guys match up, right? Like, let's just say I'm looking for GPUs and David works at nebulous and it matches us. I can say, okay, I do wanna meet with David to learn about this in a formal way. We can book a who do you wanna meet meeting. That is the number one benefit to sponsors. I know you guys are gonna be like, but I want to meet. I get it. Maybe next year. This is the first year we're doing this. So we will take a lot of feedback on who do you wanna meet post-event. This is brand new. The AI is not perfect. It's not a party. But it's pretty good. We've been testing this for the last few months. It's pretty good. It's got a lot of great rules and like complex logic it uses to match people. So I'm excited about it. I think even in a passive format, I think you guys will have like one meeting per company, like in my humble opinion, if not more. So I do think you should, again, be ready to sign up. There's nothing you really need to do now. And even when it launches, there's still not a lot you need to do. Because it's in double opt-in. Anything you can think of there, David, that we should clarify? Because it is new, right?

Yeah, I think that's it. Look, it's new. We're testing it this year. We're excited about it. I know this has gone really well at other events with the same process. So, you know, we're excited to try it out. We encourage you to try it out. And yeah, and we definitely want feedback after. But I think this has the potential to be great.

Yes, I agree. It is double opt-in mode. How it works, again, double opt-in. It will— our AI, our AI will actually email you. If you respond to it though, a real person will respond. Our AI will email you once you have a match. Again, most important thing is once we launch it Wednesday, get in the app and fill out your— fill out the who do you want to meet interest part of it, because that's how it's going to matchmake you with attendees. So again, if attendees are looking for something that your company provides, this is the best way to get ahead of them in this format. The rest of the app, you'll be able to do like free roaming. It's just the actual meetings part is gonna be strictly double opt-in mode. For— you, you, you can still do other things in the app. Like, again, you can access your ticket, you can access Braindates in the app. You can access your schedule if you wanna sign up for sessions, you can do that in the app. So like, that'll all be in there. You can do all that same as you would've on the old DASER Events app. It just means you may also get a meeting request between now and May 13th. It is gonna notify you in the app, but it'll also email you if you do get one. If for some reason you're like, I've been in the app and no one's requesting me, it's double opt-in, guys. Like make your profiles as good as you can. Two, do not sweat it. Like this is a brand new program between being in your booth, having Brain Dates, and some of you having Who Do You Wanna Meet meetings, you will still have plenty of IRL traffic. So again, I wouldn't over-index on this. I wouldn't get discouraged if you don't end up with any opt-in meetings pre-event. Two, just remember a lot of attendees show up and book their meetings. So don't sweat it if you go into annual and not a single person on your team has a who do you wanna meet often meeting from the app. Like I wouldn't over-index on this. One, it's new. Two, you're gonna meet so many people on site, you may even forget that there was an app in the first place. Honestly, I've had, between me and David, we had a lot of sponsors be like, we didn't even do brain dates. Like we just did our booth, we did an activation, we rocked it. It's enough for us. And that's, that's the fine strategy. Honestly, you don't have to do all this stuff. It's extra work. Trust me, I know we set all this up. So yeah, it is extra. It's extra, extra, extra. Okay, last thing we do on who do you wanna meet? We piloted this last year, so you guys will see the screenshot on here from last year. If you are a, and this is strictly super golden up, everything else I've talked about, you know, we've opened up for all sponsors basically. Um, this is strictly Super Gold and up. Um, again, I know the number one question we get/anticipated getting on the new Who Do You Want to Meet program since it's double opt-in for sponsors is, okay, are you gonna do anything to facilitate the fact that I would like to have more meetings than maybe one or two from the people who opt in? Um, and the answer is yeah, if you're Super Gold, Platinum, Platinum Plus, or Diamond. Um, you'll know because it's in your contract. If you're not sure, you can ask me and David. Um, two, if you want to upgrade, you can still ask David. And the, the— we do basically a bonus who do you want to meet option. So we go out to attendees and we solicit them to opt in to meeting with your company, usually an exec. So that's the other Just kind of asterisk on the bonus meeting for who do you want to meet. We require it to be your executive. That's the way we can get you more meetings. They don't really want to meet with your SDRs, no offense. So that's the way we can get additional meetings. But I'll show you the numbers on this slide. This is how many additional meetings we got for people last year. Draw ahead 100, over 100. You're like, honestly, I was like, this is too many people to meet with. Again, this on top of everyone else, you're gonna be the faster. That's a lot of people. Like, that's a lot of lead volume. Google had over 100, G2 had 50. Like, these are high volumes of additional opt-in meetings that we gave to sponsors. So just know if you're super golden up, there's nothing you need to do on the additional bonus program. You can email us if you wanna make sure that you have the right executive for it. And you can email us if you want to make sure you have the right time schedule. All cool. Other than that, it's also passive, right? So we will send you the double opt-in list on April 30th. We give you the whole list. We don't come through it. We let you do that and then you can set meetings with them. The onus is then though on you to set those meetings, right? We can do a few things on the Who Do You Want to Meet app to facilitate the meeting in the app if you guys want to do it that way. But honestly, The way everyone did it last year is just by emailing these people. Just email them, pick a time, book a meeting on site, and you're good to go. But again, it's passive until the 30th. There's nothing you need to do now. Same thing on just general, who do you wanna meet? Nothing you need to do now except, you know, you've set up your profile once it goes live on Wednesday. Hopefully this has been helpful. I know we've taken an hour. We said last week this would probably take an hour, but hopefully this is a good prep so that, you know, our goal was when we launch Wednesday, you guys don't feel blindsided by— there's like 5— like, there's like 2 different apps live now, and I don't know what a Brain Date versus a Who Do You Want to Meet is versus a Summit, which we didn't talk about, versus an AI demo stage. Like, there's just a lot going on at Taster. So again, don't sweat it too if you're like, I can't keep this all straight. It's okay. It is often For Who Do You Want to Meet, you just set up your profile. That's all you have to do on Wednesday. Just set it up. We'll match you. If you're super golden up, again, we'll match you. Final takeaways from this is just last takeaway on Who Do You Want to Meet and reminder, passive. So just set up your profile once the app is live. If you're watching this later, it goes live on Wednesday, April 16th. So past that point, just download this app, ask for Who Do You Want to Meet, sign up, and your join code will be in your email. And you will passively get meeting requests as a sponsor. Active thing for you to do if you decide you wanna do a Brain Date is to start submitting that to us now. So you can go to sasstrangel35.braindate.com, put in your email, login, and start submitting your topics to us. Again, number one piece of advice there is to use our AI that's on sasstr.com to help you create a really great topic that would hopefully get approved by our moderator that you can speak to. Last kind of one active, one passive thing for you to do on customer passes. We're gonna send out these spreadsheets in the next 48 hours, but you do need to actively put in your customers. Highly recommend you do this because as David mentioned, tickets are like $1,500 right now. So good boon for your customers and profits. And if you do have people you want us to invite, which is again more passive for you, put them on the VIP tab if they're VIP level and above. With that, I'm gonna stop just the livestream in case there are any specific questions we want to go over for today. But hopefully this was helpful. Just for the recording's sake, if you guys have any other questions, reach out to, you know, David or myself. I'm AI, it's Astrid. David, it's Astrid. You can put both of us on it, that's fine.

Can ask our AI too, it might be able to—

You can ask her. Actually, our AI knows a lot. Like I've seen a shocking amount of people ask it questions about SAS Re:ANAL and it will answer them. I'm like, oh, I'm glad you do that. Somebody actually asked it about networking. I don't know if it was the 10-year sponsor yesterday and it answered with who do you wanna meet? And its answer was Braindates. And I was like, we just, yeah, I was like, we just did this.

Amelia, there's a couple questions here. One from a sponsor about their 10-minute speaking session. And, you know, I guess I could just answer that, you know, let's, um, um, yeah, let me just— our speaker team will flag it, Muriel, and we'll get back to you. So, um, maybe it was sent, maybe went to spam, maybe slipped through the cracks, not sure, but it's noted and we'll address it. And then a question here about will sponsors be informed if things are missing from the portal task list?

Yes.

And the answer is yes. So you will hear from us if things are missing. If you haven't heard from us, then things are on track.

Correct. Yeah, we're— yeah, usually we bug people if they're missing stuff. Joe, I know your team is pretty up to speed, so I don't think you've missed anything. Last thing I'll say for folks just in our final 60 seconds, if there are no more questions. Sponsor booth proofs are also gonna start going out today. So I know many of you submitted on time and have been waiting for your proofs. I have a bunch of them that I've stared at. I'm gonna do a final review with them with David, and we will send them out to you guys. So booth proofs coming imminently. This deck and recording are there for you. In real time. Um, networking launching next Wednesday. We do have our check-in next Thursday at this time. If you guys have any questions after you downloading it into the app, ask us there. Ask us next week once you get in. Um, happy to— we'll spend more time on this, as I'm sure we will. Um, next week we are going to go over just final, like, reminders, any, like, deadline. I know there are— I know this week from Freeman There's like an upcoming deadline. Well, one, if you haven't submitted your booth for like the 5 of you, there's that. Two, there's like an equipment deadline. So if you did wanna order any extra furniture for your booth, I think they would like that by tomorrow in the Freeman portal, just ideally. What other deadlines? And then there are like things like next week, if you wanna order things like power, extra hard lines, you can still do that. So we'll cover a lot of the logistics stuff next week, but we will answer any questions you have about networking 'cause the app will already be live. Um, so we'll answer you there. Thanks everyone for joining and hanging out for an hour. It's longer than usual. Um, any closing thoughts, David?

No, I think we covered a lot. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think next week it'll be great to come back once you have access to the apps and ask more questions. Um, so we will see you then, I guess.

Yeah, we'll see you then. Hopefully this will get you guys prepped. Hopefully we'll see more of you next week. Thanks for joining. And I think you're all excited for SaaSTR. We'll see you in about 32 days IRL. And yeah, we'll see you guys next week.