Jason Lemkin and SaaStr community members reflect on how the conference has evolved, emphasizing authentic networking, cohort-based learning, and the personal growth of launching a company. Lemkin notes the unexpected difficulty of scaling SaaStr itself while highlighting why attending SaaStr Annual is essential for founders seeking continuous education and community connection.
Chapters
I am Jason M. Lemkin. I'm the facilitator behind the Saastr community, and I'm very grateful to everyone that has come this year and been part of this sort of first inaugural Saastr Annual, which is great.
In retrospect, this event kind of seems like a no-brainer.
The world of SaaS is unique, but there's some common threads. Why we create the wheel? If somebody already has success, why not learn from them to share best practices?
Unique is the amount of collaboration that goes on. We're all in this fun struggle to kind of push this boulder up the hill, and have people that have already pushed it up the hill helping you, that's the whole point of this.
However you connect with people, it has to be authentic. SaaS entrepreneurs just have a huge hunger for learning, you know, they have a huge hunger for education, for networking, and Saastr is really pulling the SaaS community together in a powerful way.
The ability to connect with people is invaluable in that is about the future.
Going through founding a company is probably the most effective way to learn about yourself.
Be patient. You don't need to be in a rush to make your company, like, huge and hire a bunch of people right away.
Build a great product, but don't stop there. Build a great organization because it's the SaaS companies that succeed, not SaaS products. Don't listen to all the naysayers and the Debbie Downers and the negative folks. Just stay focused on what works. PremiumBeat.com.
It's that if you can get a cohort of people experiencing and going through the same problem and put them together so they can actually talk amongst each other as they're learning from things. That's really powerful.
If I was in the audience, I'd be stealing pieces from everyone. The community is at the core of defining not only who you are as a business, but who you could be.
It's never been a better time to be a software developer because you can literally change the world with a text editor. V.com. Now is maybe the best of times, and it's a 10 in SaaS.
If you didn't come, you missed something. If you did come, you know that you have to come again.
No question, I'm gonna come here every year.
If I can find other people that I can share these stories with and they can give me some advice, that's critical.
Building Saastr has been an order of magnitude harder than I ever anticipated.
I think all founders go through these same set of journeys.
The fact that we all almost failed, that we all almost went bankrupt multiple times, it's hard.
