SaaStr Sponsor Insider: The 2023 SaaStr Events Roadmap!

We're gonna go through it. If you guys missed— I'll just start with this tidbit, actually, 30-second tidbit. If you guys happen to miss Workshop Wednesday yesterday, we did this cool thing. And actually, let me go back to the beginning of my slides because I was halfway through the slideshow. But we did this thing on Workshop Wednesday yesterday. Our CEO and founder Jason M. Lemkin talked about, you know, the things that always work in marketing. So if you missed that one, the recording is on our YouTube page. But one of the things he mentioned was webinars like this one. So I think it's a little funny that we, you know, it's meta that we kind of do it too. So we do them as well. We have different topics for them. But again, yeah, if there's something you guys want to see in a future one, let us know. We decided because it was a good refresher for all of us too internally at VASR. One of the things Jason M. Lemkin chatted about yesterday was like doing a product roadmap or even just a demo on your calls. Answering any questions. And so we thought it'd be fun to do a sort of light SaaStr version of a roadmap, if you will, just because, you know, we do events and so that is pretty much the roadmap. But, you know, there's different like activations and features and all these things going on at our different events, so we thought we'd share a little bit more of them with you today, if that sounds good. And again, we'll try and keep these brief. I know last week's was like really long because we had a lot of really good event stuff to go through, so We'll try and make this one hopefully in 20 minutes or less, give you all the info. So, okay, on our roadmap, we've got 3 major events in person and 1 major digital event this year. APAC, which wrapped up about 2 months ago now in Singapore, was our first event. It's funny that the slide said 700 and we actually had over 1,000. Our next one coming up fast is SAS for Europa, which we'll chat about. And then, you know, to kind of round out the back half of the year, Saastr Annual, which you guys all know is our biggest and largest event back in the Bay Area, back at the San Mateo County Event Center. For those who are maybe newer sponsors, that's 40 acres. We take over and build out the entire thing. So it's kind of unlike anything else that you might have been a sponsor of or even attended previously. And then we always end our year with Saastr Scale. We do like a live, really huge, like digital mega event. And I know people think digital events are dead, but if there's any proof from SAS, SAS Resource Hub Wednesdays gaining momentum every Wednesday and having more and more people, I don't think they're quite dead yet if you do them right. And we bring in experts. We do different topics, very topical things. So yeah, that's kind of our roadmap of events. Anything you want to add, Boya?

No, the only thing I'll add is we're tracking Pretty well in terms of attendance for both London as well as annual. We compare year over year to where we are last year at this time. London's going really well. Like initially, I think our forecast was 3,000. I wouldn't be surprised if we get somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 easily. And annual, as of now, we're tracking well to get 12,500 attendees too, as well. So the good news for you is hopefully you get to meet more people if you're one of our sponsors than you did last year or previously.

Disaster. Yeah, totally. 100% agreed. We'll chat about Europa and all the learnings there. A lot has changed in our media, so I wanted to just take 5 minutes to chat about this. And for those of you who have been here every week, we'll try and add some new color and flavor to this. So the podcast, this is again one of the things I can't, you know, this again, I'm a little biased, but I do think the session was really good yesterday. It was actually our most popular Workshop Wednesday. But one of the things that was also chatted about again, if you missed it on the YouTube, but one of the things that we'll chat about is things that always work in marketing. Podcast is one of them, right? So SaaStr has its own podcast and I'll just add some color here on like roadmap, things we're thinking about in the podcast, because many of you I know have seen this again, just to add some color here of our podcast. So in the last 2 or 3 months since the beginning of the year, we've actually done things a little bit slightly differently on the SaaStr podcast. So the SaaStr podcast everyone knows and loves for a long time has been, you know, it actually started out as original interviews with Harry Stebbings, who now has his own podcast and firm, it's 20VC. So actually, if you go back and listen to the old ones, you're like, who's hosting? It's Harry Stebbings, original Saastr podcast host. And actually coming to Saastr Europa, so fun. But yeah, so we used to do like original interviews and then Jason used to do a lot of early interviews back in the day, you know, just kind of like launch it, seed it, get it going. And then what we've discovered is like slowly but surely, and that was when we did one episode a week, and then slowly but surely we started to add, you know, two episodes a week, then we went to three. If you guys have noticed, we've actually gone back to two. So that might be something that I don't think we've chatted about a lot. And again, we're trying to use this as like a roadmap kind of color commentary sort of webinar. So if it's helpful for learnings, like, We did 3 religiously all of last year. We were like 3 podcasts without fail and like kind of burnt ourselves out a little getting 3 podcasts out a week. And what we found out is it was too many podcasts per week. Like it actually didn't help our downloads. Like I think they went slightly dipped because there were too many podcasts. And so we were like a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of content that we were producing. I get it. It's a lot. So Then we went back down to 2, right? But we looked at the data for the whole year and we're like, all right, for 2023, we're gonna go back down to 2. And that has seemed to gotten us back, you know, back in the right track, back on our distribution, back on the kind of downloads that we usually get around, you know, 240,000 or more per month. And so that's been really interesting to see on the podcast. We've also done something differently of like, now you guys will notice like the podcast episodes and content themselves are a little bit different this year as well. Like we've gone back to 2. They come out Wednesday, Friday, which has worked well for us in terms of days of the week. But also we do a mix of things. So we'll do, you know, some of the very best sessions from our in-person events, some of the very best Workshop Wednesday sessions. Like some of those have been so good. We've wanted to put them on the podcast because you guys haven't been to Workshop Wednesday yet. I know many of you have. It's super interactive. And so there's a lot of really good like community stories. And so we started putting those on the podcast as well. And that's been performing really well. Really well actually. So now it's a mix of, you know, the very best sections from in-person, some of the very best Workshop Wednesday speakers, original content and interviews. So there's like original content that Jason's putting out that's just on the podcast. And there's original content that Sam Blond is putting out. So Sam Blond, who's now at Founders Fund, is OG Saastr, you know, formerly at Brack, CRO there, rippling, great, great criteria there. And he does our CRO Confidential episodes of the podcast. And those are so crazy, crazy popular. Like, so it's been cool to see this evolution of the podcast. And that's kind of like where we are now with it on the roadmap. I think for like future-looking purposes, right, we're trying to build out the CRO Confidential even more. I think we've got guests slotted from now until London, or maybe even further. So that one is gaining some traction as well. There's a lot of CROs asking us to to get on Pam and Spencer's podcast. So that one's been fun. And that's, you know, something we're looking at in the future of like, okay, do we segment more of it? But again, we're very mindful of the fact that like we did 3 podcasts and that was too many. So we're trying to find the right mix of like that quality of content for 2 podcasts. But anything I missed, Poya, on the podcast? I know you have your own podcast and Poya has his own podcast.

No, I think you've nailed it. The nice part is it's a megaphone, right? So whether it's you want to tied with a product launch, you launched a new product, whatever it may be, it might be the best way to kind of get the name out.

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so hopefully that color commentary is helpful. I'm gonna stay on this slide and then probably skip a few others. Um, again, just looking at this from like a roadmap perspective, there's actually a few things we're doing new in the newsletter. So, um, we have 3 different newsletters. The Insider is slightly newer than the other 2. So if you've been like a super fan or following SaaStr, you may know the Weekly and the Daily a little bit A little bit more, the weekly is literally the top content of the week, goes out every Sunday morning, performs amazing because it's the best content of the week and things that people wanna read or things they might have missed during the week. The SaaStr Daily, that, I almost wanna rename it Semi-Daily, but it's 3 times a week at some of our most highly trafficked times and it's the latest content from SaaStr. And then the SaaStr Insider is like some of our very best SaaStr content distributed in a newsletter on LinkedIn. So there's kind of like a two-for-one juice there of like it's being on LinkedIn and distributed there. And it's some of our best like evergreen content of all time. So those are the 3 newsletters. I'm gonna chat briefly just on the weekly and then more so on the daily. So I think on the weekly, it's always, you know, been our top performing content of the week. I think the biggest thing here on like the roadmap is like we're always playing around with like kind of like the design and like length and like how many articles is the right mix, what's the right mix. Another thing I'll say about the SaaStr Weekly is we do have this jobs section in it. And so for those of you who have open roles, let us know, we'll put them in the SaaStr Weekly. It'll go out to almost 100,000 people now. And it's for if you're already a sponsor, you can do that for free. It's like included with whatever you're doing with SaaStr. So we've had a few sponsors already take us up on this. So if you have an open job listing, let us know. We'll put it into the SaaStr Weekly. Just let us— just email us. Email me, ai@saastring.com. Just email me your job posting. We'll put it in the Weekly. So I think that's a cool section. You know, eventually we kind of want to grow and build that section out so that more people can do it and it's a little more formal. But that's kind of like what's on deck for the Weekly. And then the daily, I know these are the sponsor ads specifically here on the screen, but one thing we're going to try on the daily that's on the roadmap is, so the daily goes out 3 times a week, and the audience for this is actually almost caught up to where the weekly is. The weekly is like at 100,000. The daily is hovering at like, I think, 70 now, because it's grown a lot in like the last year alone. And so one thing we're thinking of not even thinking, we're actually experimenting with at the moment, is segmenting one of this after-dailies. So there's 3 a week. And our audience, as you guys know, is a mix of like CEOs, revenue leaders, sales, marketing, investors. And so one of the things we're looking at doing and experimenting now with is segmenting like one, you know, the middle daily send so that there is a marketing version, there's a CEO version, there's a revenue leader, the CRO version. A founder's version, an investor's version. And I think that'll be interesting for our sponsors. Because if you know, you want to target something very specific to that audience, that could be super interesting to, you know, chat with us on of like, oh, I actually really want to hit VCs with something at the end of the year, or, oh, I really want to hit just CROs and your CRO segment of The Daily with something I'm launching. Or if you have a sales tool, right, and like, you're like, I don't really need to get in front of marketers, I just want to get in front of the sales folks. Or vice versa, or a martech tool. So I think that'll be fun. We're not ready to sell it yet, but we are experimenting with how it works. So if you want to be one of the early adopters of it, just let me or Polya know and we'll let you know when it's ready to hit the market. But that is fresh off the press on the daily. Insider, we chatted about. So let's chat about Europa because I know it's coming up. It's in London. We're all super excited about it. Attendance has been crazy good. And so we want to talk about what's different at this year's SASREuropa if you've been before or if you're newer to sponsoring SASREuropa. We've chatted about this slide more so on the SASREuropa, like, to SASREuropa sponsors. And you're like, Amelia, an audience screenshot is not new. But to add to the commentary here, we've seen a shift in who's coming. And so in that sense, it is a little bit new. And I'll share my commentary and then we'll get Poya's thoughts here. SASHA has always had a really good core audience of, you know, VP level and director level and above, you know, the decision makers are coming to this event. And let me tell you from everything I've seen in tickets, especially in the last few weeks of like people, you know, as you get closer to the event, you get that natural like momentum pick up a speed and people signing up for the event, which we're at now for Europa. A lot of people are bringing their teams, a lot of people are bringing the buyers. So that's, you know, CFO, CTO, CRO, whoever it might be, a lot of folks are bringing their teams, including their buyers now. And there's a lot of VCs coming to SaaStr Europa. There's obviously a lot of founders in sales and marketing, but I think those are really important indicators, especially if you're sponsoring, right? If you're on the phone, you're like, I'm sponsoring Europa. So good to think about these things of like how you're gonna pitch at the booth, right? Like, or who you're gonna staff at the booth of like, there's gonna be more buyers there. So you may wanna send your senior leadership team, right? Like, I know it sounds odd to send your CRO or your VP to go do booth duty, but this might be the year to do it. Of all years to do it, this might be the time. So yeah, the demographics have definitely changed there. What do you want to add for folks, Boya, on that one?

Yeah, I see lots of sponsors, whether it's for Europe or Annual. The nice part about SaaSers, we get a lot established companies, right? So you can kind of rest assured, know you're talking to folks that are gonna be of value, but the attendees are of value as well because this year we're trying to push more folks to bring their team. So one of the reasons I think Amelia, to echo what she said, is why we suggest having more like a diverse set of people working in the booth, their questions are gonna be different, right? Sometimes you're gonna talk to someone technical that's gonna have a technical question, Sometimes you gotta talk to someone that knows the product inside and out, right? So it's important to have a diverse set of team members work the booth. Agreed. So if you have any questions on how past sponsors have done that, there's not one size fits all. So just let us know and we'll hook you up. So that's the beauty of this. But again, the beauty of SaaS, most teams are now distributed and remote. And for both of our events, we're seeing a nice uptick compared to last year. Which means hopefully you're going to get in front of more buyers at more established companies.

Yep, um, agreed. Okay, I don't want to spend too long on any given thing because I also want to make sure we have time for annual. Um, okay, SaaStr Europa. I know it's a little confusing sometimes when we say this, it's the fourth Europa but the first time in London. Um, so not the first Europa, it's just the first time it's actually been, um, in London. And I will say it's It's, you know, there's no doubt that this has definitely helped our surge in attendance this year. For years, people were asking us to bring SaaStrEuropa to London, but we really wanted to be at the beach last year. So we went to Barcelona. And also, you know, there's things like venue and timing and logistics. And so it did work out this year for us to finally take SaaStrEuropa to London. We're very excited. You can see it in the natural booths and who's coming. You know, we always have a global audience, but the UK and London specifically has always been number one at our events outside of the host country. So it's cool to see, you know, a lot of folks showing up for this. So yeah, I think factor that into, right, if you're a current sponsor of, of Europa on this call, just factor that into your day. Like you may see different people from the companies throughout different days, right? Like day one you might see one person, the next day you might see someone else. So To Poya's point, really good to have, you know, your right staff and your right kind of teams there who can help answer questions. And maybe they're not in the booth all day. Maybe they're in, you know, the SAASer cafe, or they're coworking, or whatever it is, or meeting VCs. Like, not everyone has to be in the booth and go to content to make the most of SAASer Europa. There is a lot going on. So do staff accordingly. Keep that in mind for any SAASer event. Not to be a broken record, we did talk about this yesterday on the workshop of like, you know, getting the booth and showing up or even just attending is only half. That's only half of it. Like you, there's a lot that goes into, you know, planning your schedule, planning your meetings, doing the brain dates, meeting your customers, right? Getting your prospects there, like doing everything you can. And so if you don't freak out, if you haven't started yet, you've got 2 months, start now, right? Start now, get the plan in shape. And I, and I almost guarantee you it will free— it will give you better ROI than, you know, showing up and doing it last minute, as with anything in life. Really quick on our speakers and why this is important, honestly, and to give it more of a color commentary roadmap flavor, as is the theme for today. We've— I know some of these speakers will look familiar to you, maybe some of them will not. And so every SAS event, 4 speakers, you know, we try and bring in what we call SAS celebrities, like the big heavy hitters Like, I think everyone knows who Joe Thomas at Loom is. Like, his headshot is like a crazy professional, and everyone— I think a lot of people use Loom here. Um, I use like a lot of people. We, we use Bill, right? So I know— and Sterling just spoke at Annual, but now he's coming to London. I think a lot of people know Parker. A lot of people know Sam from the podcast and Founders Fund. Like, a lot of familiar faces, but also some new ones, right? Um, some ones that are maybe more EMEA-focused or London-specific or Bill Magnuson from Braves, you know, we only had him digitally. And so it was the first time we're having him at an in-person event. Super fun. And so why this is important for our sponsors is like, the more of a draw the faster speakers are, the more people come to this after event, right? So like, it is inherently good for it and better for you as sponsors when the speaker lineup is killer. And I will say right now, like, our lineup is so full, we're trying to still sneak in a few more headline creators. And we're like, where do we put them on the schedule? But all that aside, I do think it is better for you because, you know, more people will come to the show overall. There's a lot of different topics too that your team itself can learn from. You know, we're doing more on like PLG, and there's, you know, there's actually a few sessions on AI and all those implications. Obviously, there's a lot about profitability this year, because that's just the whole theme of SaaS in 2023. But yeah, I think a lot, a lot, a lot to learn, a lot to learn from there. A lot of great folks to interact with. And I know, I know some of our sponsors too have customers that are maybe, you know, speaking or, and maybe it's, you know, maybe Zapier is a customer of yours, but Kieran is not like your point of contact. I think it's always nice to go up and say hello, be like, hey, you know, we love, you know, XYZ person on your team. That's always nice for that person on the team when you're like, hey, oh, you know, I work with Boya on your team and he's great. That always gets back to them, right? Like, that's always good serendipity as well. So again, not going to get too much into this. The whole agenda is live on safterlondon.com if you guys want to check it out, see it, game plan on it. But I do think it's super helpful and it shows in the attendance numbers. Anything I missed on speakers?

No, no, I just did that yesterday, right? If you have a customer or someone you want to go eye up, even if they're not your primary person, right, you can go tease, uh, go tease them to get in front of the right contact.

So always works, always works. Agreed. Okay, one thing that's new with SaaStr Europa, and I'll talk about this because it's important whether you're sponsoring SaaStr Europa or sponsoring SaaStr Annual later this year, you guys all probably know and love probably, hopefully, know and love Brain Dates. These are our main like one-on-one and group networking sessions that we do at BAFTAs that we have. We had them last year at Europa, we had them last year at Annual. So by chance you either saw Brain Dates or took part in Brain Dates or are planning to take part in it this year because it is such a great experience. One thing we're doing slightly differently with Brain Dates, there's actually two things. So how we do Super Brain Dates is actually unique to Disaster. Like, there's no other— like, I know other conferences do Brain Dates, you know, they're a great partner of ours, they're not exclusive to Disaster, but how we do Super Brain Dates is exclusive to Disaster. And then one thing that's going to be new that we're piloting at Europa with the hopes of it going well to use it annual is doing what we call a networking power hour on Brain Dates where we literally— no, there's no conflicting content in the schedule. Wow, amazing. Literally, you're not going to compete with Jason M. Lemkin, you're not going to compete with Parker. It's just going to be— there's a gap in the schedule. It's literally a power hour. And the power hour is to do as many one-on-one meetings as you can. And we're doing them via Brain Dates. They're going to be a lot of fun, probably a little chaotic, let's be honest, because it's 4,000 people getting to tables at once. I don't think everyone will do it either. Some of our attendees are slightly, you know, not as educated in Braindates yet. So they'll probably do it day 2, I think. I was like, we're only gonna get more adoption day 2 than we do day 1. But yeah, we're doing this cool new networking power hour. I hope those are not my famous last words. We're really excited about it because, you know, our goal has always been to do like, okay, how can we get everyone to have at least one good meeting And that's where Brain Dates came in initially back in 2018. So it's been, you know, 5 years of learning now. And so this year, we're like, okay, we've got the manpower, we've got the space at Tobacco Docks, which is more important, maybe, you know, let's just line up all these tables and have people book one-on-one Brain Dates. Let's just book, let's make a hole in the schedule for it so that it's focused. And I think what's great about this is like, that gives your teams, if you're sponsoring, a chance to go and network without being like, okay, I know people are gonna still be walking around getting coffee, you know, taking calls, whatever, walking by the booth, but you can safely send your team to go do that networking power hour and go book meetings. Like, I think that's magical. Like, okay, I can split my booth staff and like half of them can go day 1, maybe the other half goes day 2, but they can go book these meetings. It is not exclusive to just attendees. Sponsors can do it as well on your ticket type. So I think that's a really great feature. That'll be pretty nice because hopefully, you know, if you have a lot of folks going, hopefully you book all the meetings for them and then you have this hour of just meetings after lunch. And I think, you know, the quality of the meetings is always going to be varied. But I think if you do it mindfully, you know, the point of Brain Dates is not to be a commercial. The point of a networking happy hour is not to be a commercial, like pitch your product for 10 minutes. Like, that's not going to go well. Like, the point is to meet with somebody like-minded or somebody you've been wanting to meet. That you want to connect with genuinely and just have a genuine conversation, you know, for 10 minutes, if it— and if it leads to something in your product, listen, they will come back to your booth later, right? Like, 10 minutes is not very long. Like, it's really to get the conversation started and then finish that conversation later. But really just to get the meeting kind of set and like introduce yourself to someone. It's literally an introduction. So yeah, that's something we're trying at Europa. Again, hoping it goes well so that we can do it even bigger. It's after Annual, but hopefully that's exciting. And if you are— I know there's a few Europa sponsors on the call. We will share more about this as soon as it launches. It's not launched yet, so you haven't missed anything. You don't have to sign up for anything yet. It'll be in the next few weeks. Just since we're trying to maximize the amount of folks who are in the platform first. Okay. The other thing I'll say about Europa, and then I'll touch quickly on Annual. Meet a VC, we've very similar to Braindates, we've done this a lot for the last, I don't know, since the 2017, I don't know, maybe since the inception of Faster Events. But we've always done some sort of version of Meet a VC. And if you guys are unfamiliar, this is where, you know, we have attendees, sponsors, investors, VCs, everyone like this come and we train, we actually do some matchmaking on the Meet a VC program between the investors and founders. For the CEO. One thing that, again, we're piloting at Europa to then do for annual, we are actually going to pilot MeetupVC as a year-round program. I know interns have actually asked us for this. They're like, this is great, but like, there's 20 people, and like, I'm going to meet 10 at the event, and I want to meet the other 10 digitally or whatever, or later, like, and also like, there's only 2 bites of the apple, right? Because there's June, Europa, and there's September at SaaStr Annual. And I know for folks, you know, I know it's— I know there's a lot of stats, and we just posted it on saastr.com too, of like deal flow slowing down, but the deal flow is still happening. And I do think there's a lot of conversations happening as well. You can see it in our attendance of SaaStr Europa. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of VCs coming. So I do think this will be an important program that we're, you know, kind of re— we're doing it at Europa, but we're also turning it into more of an evergreen year-round program. So that'll be interesting. So if that's something that is like, has piqued your interest, again, just let us know. There's nothing to do yet. It's launching in the next couple of weeks. This is a roadmap meeting. It's launching in the next couple of weeks because we were honestly gearing it up to launch it for Europa, and then we were like, oh, we should make this year-round. So yeah, that's how that kind of happened there. And everyone was asking us for it. I was like, well, Europa's coming. They're like, cool, but also All right. Our maybe, you know, our no doubt biggest event. I don't want to say my favorite because I don't want to pick favorites on Fast Forward Fest. But I would say the vibe at Fast Forward Annual, it's always the best. It's indoor-outdoor for those who don't know. So I always like to use photos that show either the sunset or the sunrise or open air just so that you get the sense that this is actually an indoor-outdoor. Event. You know, a lot of people have compared it to music festivals, which I won't say because we're live streaming, but it's a SaaS festival, if you will. That's the best way to explain it. We are back this September. We are already on track for 12,000 attendees, so even bigger than last year. And let me just stop here and then I'll share some things that are newer for this year. So SAS Annual has always been our biggest event. And two of the things that we're trying at Europa are honestly because Europa is amazing, but it's clearly, even with 4,000 people, it's not at the size of Annual. It's really beneficial for us to try things out like the networking power hour, like a more evergreen Meet ABC program because now we can do it at scale at SAS Annual. So it's nice that we kind of have a testing ground for it because we tried different things. Or vice versa, like the cantina that we have at SAS Annual is now going to SAS Europa. Like things go back and forth from our events. And like in that case, we're scaling the Candina, you know, to a smaller size to fit in London and make it a pub. Like anyways, we share product features between our events. But I will say, so SaaStr Annual, you know, what's on the horizon? What's going to be newer for this year? All those good things I just mentioned at SaaStr Europa, assuming they go well and assuming we can do it even better. They will be at the actual annual, right? We will do this networking power hour. It'll be even bigger, even more impressive because of the amount of people who are coming to the annual. We're going to do more Brain Dates than ever before. We've got a few exciting things that I can't say on the livestream yet that we're trying to do, but all of it is, you know, again, we do it the lens of like, how is it beneficial to folks the attendees, then the sponsors, the SAASTR as a whole, right? And so that's how we kind of came up with like, okay, the networking power hour, it's just a version of brain dates. But it's a version of brain dates where we consciously put a hole in the schedule, right, to benefit both the sponsors and attendees. Because we usually have brain dates all day and people do them. But the feedback is always like, but I'm competing with like, I'm picking, I'm like forced to pick, I'm like, okay, do I go to this really great brain date because like, it's more one-on-one. Or do I go to this because I wanna ask the speaker a question or I really wanna learn about, you know, this new thing. And so that's always been the feedback there. And so that's kind of how like that one sprung out of it. I will say, I know we had a lot, some of the feedback too from last year is like we had too many stages at SASbury Annual. There were 8. I was like, the most ever we did at SASbury Annual. And so if you were a sponsor too, I know many of you were on the sponsored We Love stage. You know, there were 3 of those stages actually. We're now just trying to do that as like one bigger one. So you're not like competing with like the other two. Like I do think we listen faster annual last year was amazing. It was a 10, but there was a lot going on and I do think it sometimes it got a little bit overwhelming for folks. So in some cases we are trying to simplify of like, okay, maybe the cantina just does one stage so that people don't feel so competitive between like, okay, there's literally 3 going on at once and I've gotta go pick one. So that there's less— there's always going to be competition for attention, but, you know, slightly less competition for attention there. You know, we are looking at doing more things like better lounges, which, you know, the Cantina, it's kind of a lounge, kind of not. It felt like a stage. It has a lot of F&B. I like that area, but it is very busy. It's usually very busy throughout the day. There's always people in there. And so we're thinking now of like ways to not only connect those people that are in the Cantina, but also like, how do we give people more places to still work, still be functional, right? Like more, more coworking spaces, if you will, more lounges, if you will, a bigger speakeasy. So if you guys don't know what our speakeasy is, we did this for the first time last year at SaaStr Annual, super fun. There's not one at Europa. So I'm sorry, don't look for one because I know you're like, it's one of the hidden.

It's similar, it's a pub. We have the pub.

It's a pub. Yeah, yeah, it's a pub, but I'm like, it's not hidden in any way. Like, it's hidden in plain sight.

But same format. People will come sit and drink.

Same format. Yeah, same format. But yeah, that's one of those sections where we're like, okay, we're going to try different things, right? Like, the BGC was an experiment last year. I was like, no one's going to come find this place. Next time I go in there, I'm like, oh, it's like a fun, like, lounge in here. I'm like, there's music, DJ Storm is hanging out in here. People are just having a drink and taking selfies and like DJing. Like, I was like, oh, that's a little nice escape. So, you know, things like that where we're planning through now of giving, you know, you guys, especially as sponsors, more of those moments to connect with folks. Again, not always be in your booth the entire time. I know it's a lot. It's, you know, 3 days, there's a lot of networking, brain dates. And so I think in some, in some ways, we are trying to simplify the very best parts of the annual so that there's not as much competition for your attention or how you split your teams, and hopefully it will help you maximize your guys' time at the events. And then, Poya, I wanted you to share with the folks— not that it's really on the roadmap, but I know a lot of folks are using this now as like a team meetup. And one of the things that you can actually do this year is host your own meetup at the executive briefing center that we have. So maybe just talk for 5 minutes on, on that. For folks who are not familiar.

Yeah, yeah, of course. So, um, on a couple of occasions, if you're a Platinum and above sponsor, um, those folks like to use the 40 acres of land we have to either meet their customers to do like a mini, uh, user conference, let's say it, or pipeline influence, right? Or the other method that's come up most recently is they actually like to use it to have their offsite while SaaStr is happening. So a couple of weeks ago, our wonderful team members at Bee talked about how they usually like to plan their offsite around SaaStr Annual. So if you have a remote distributed team, right, if you think about it, it's going to be really expensive to go somewhere. So why not use our resources and the land we have? But the other cool thing about Bee is they're actually going to take turns and showcasing and getting product feedback. And what they want is they want every single team member that's on the team to know what it feels like to interact with their customers, right? So we've talked a lot, I think, about like bringing your prospects and customer to SaaStr. But the other thing we're seeing is we're seeing some innovative companies move up their sponsorship tier to Platinum because marginally, like the opportunity cost of doing an offsite, like it's going to be expensive. So why not? Hit multiple, hopefully, objectives, team building, meeting customers, having your team learn from the customer's voice what the feedback is on your product. So if you're interested in doing that, we just did it for a couple of sponsors over the last 10 days. So it was an interesting learning. Let us know and we can talk about remaining availability and opportunities we have.

Yeah, and that goes for— I mean, I know it seems close, but that goes for London as well. If you're like, I really wanna bring some of my CRO, customer, CMOs, whatever it is, CIOs to London. Like I, I've been racking my brain on how to do this. Just let us know. There is a whole article on it on safter.com. I will link it in the chat about doing your own mini event within an event. But I do think, you know, just to maybe end on this point, 'cause I said it was gonna be 20 minutes and now we're at 40. Maybe just to end on this point for SaaS or annual and maybe just start thinking about it now if, you know, doing it for London is a little bit overwhelming. Or I know sometimes, you know, teams need to put a lot more into place to do something like this. So if you're one of those folks who have more approvals, definitely think about this for SaaS or annual. You could tell us tomorrow that you want to do this for annual and it would not be too soon. But yeah, there's an article, I just listed it in the chat there. And I will say to Poya's point, and the great story of Bee is a good one, it's a good example. But one thing we chatted about last week, if you guys missed it, was the cost of events and the trends in events. And for those who are maybe not doing your own customer events, or you've seen, as we've seen, that things are fairly high right now for anything across the board, right? Even just to book flights is expensive. For your team, you know, outside of booth costs, swag, you know. So for— just think about that being maybe tenfold on hosting your own event of like production costs, shipping, rental costs. It's all crazy. Everything's expensive right now. We've not been immune to it, right? So we've had to get creative in some ways on how to combat that. But yeah, all that to say, like, if you're, if you're if you're, if you're there and your team has told you like, you know, we're not sure we can do our own events this year because it's just the numbers don't add up and it's, you know, I know everyone's trying to be profitable this year. This is a really great option to do it at SaaStr. A lot of your customers are probably already coming. And, you know, Mutiny, who did this last year with over 80 CMOs and marketing execs, I think if I had to guess, I would say probably half of them were already coming. To FASTR. So this was a case of like they, it was easy for them to invite folks because like half the time it'd be like, oh, this person's already coming. So they could just come to our mini customer events. And then they invited some folks who weren't already coming. But I think it's a good way to do it because then you, you get that built-in inertia of like, you know, to go fly to all these 80 customers at once, a lot more than doing a mini event within FASTR. So, you know, to Poya's point, it is open to our Platinum and up sponsors to start with, just because, you know, based on where we think the demand is going to be, that will probably max us out for how many of these we can do. But it's a fair point of like, you know, it's a great example of literally why Beej upgraded from Super Gold to Platinum was so that they could do something like this and also do a team meetup at Staff 3 Annual. So let me end there. I don't know if we have any questions for folks. I know we threw a lot at you in 40 minutes. I'm sorry that I said it was gonna be 20. But hopefully this has been helpful. It's been sort of a slightly different style of webinar than we've been doing lately because it's more of like a roadmap, future-facing. So if you guys have any feedback or things you want to see at a future SASR event, do let us know. We do actually incorporate a lot of what sponsors had ideas on or even attendee ideas on, or like, you know, everyone telling us to go to London for 4 years and then we did it. So it may not happen overnight, but usually, you know, if we have the manpower to do it, we shall. What else, Boya, for the— on this Thursday, April 13th?

We appreciate you guys. And if you have any questions, whether it's about Europa or Annual, let us know. I think the team for the most part slammed with Europa, so that's the focus. But even for Annual, we're happy to to assist and jump on calls. And as always, thanks for coming on these webinars. And if you have suggestions of what you want to see on these webinars, let us know. We try incorporating one sponsor/customer once a month, so you'll see somebody on that shortly. But outside of that, open to feedback on what else you guys want on these weekly sponsor webinars, because they're for you. But I think without further ado, again, thank you for being part of SaaSTR and being one of the best parts of SaaSTR. And until next time, be well, be safe, and catch you on a future webinar.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.

Thanks, man. Bye.