David provides a first-person recap of Day 1 at the SaaStr Annual conference (≈12,000 attendees). He describes the busy conference format (concurrent 30–45 minute sessions) and summarizes sessions he attended: David Kellogg (Host Analytics) on CEO challenges; a marketing session emphasizing onboarding/activation/retention before scaling marketing; Jason Lemkin interviewing Ryan (who sold his company to SAP for $8B); a TalkPush session by Gillian on customer success strategies toward 130% net retention; and Leela from SurveyMonkey on talent acquisition and using SurveyMonkey for data-driven decisions. He expresses enthusiasm about the event, networking, and note-taking.
Chapters
Hi, guys. David here. Well, day one of Sastra, and it was fascinating. I. I don't think I was prepared mentally to be in a room of so many people, 12, 000 people here at Zastra, and I just didn't comprehend the spacing and people and the buzz. And it certainly has exceeded, exceeded expectations given it's the end of day one. And just thinking back on what it was like today, I saw some incredible speakers. It's funny, every 45 minutes you can interchange and head over to see someone new talk. And there's three people who are typically talking across each one of those 40 or half an hour slots. And you look at these slots and who you're going to go and see, and the lineup's incredible. They've got amazing speakers. I wish I could spread myself thin and see all three of them, or at least two of the three, but unfortunately you can just select one. So I spent my time mostly focused today on how we can create efficiencies video my job across marketing, customer success and creating technology efficiencies for our users. So I saw a host of people. The first person I saw was David Kellogg from Host analytics, and he was talking about the top five things that CEOs wrestle with. And then I jumped into a session around how to build highly functional marketing teams. And what I got out of that was you really do have to get onboarding, activation and retention right before you can really justify making a huge commitment into marketing. And it's probably more important to get your users talking about your product more so than marketing who are trying to put spin on the benefits of customers using your product, which I totally agree with. So it was really nice to hear that. There was a session with Jason Lembrook, who owns Sastra. He's the CEO and founder, and he interviewed Ryan from. Paul Tricks always get that name mixed up. But they sold their business SAP for $8 billion, a lot of money. So he's come out skipping and they known each other for a really long time, so the banter was right up there. And it was a great interview that Jason did with Ryan and very inspiring as well, given that he got himself into a position where it just wasn't about the size of the company. He was having fun and he really felt like he was adding value to the industry that he loves. So I could really resonate with that. And then I jumped into a session centered around customer success. A lady named Gillian, who's the SVP of client services of Talk Push, a very competitive market, spoke about how to build up customer success for 130% net retention, which is definitely our ultimate goal at video my job as well. So that was really nice. And then lastly, I saw Leela from SurveyMonkey Twitter talk and a bit biased, but I really like Lila. She's from the talent acquisition space. She was working over at Lever, she worked over at LinkedIn for a little bit and she's got a background in recruitment. So it was really good to hear from her perspective and just see what she's up to over at SurveyMonkey. And she mostly spoke about capturing data through SurveyMonkey and questions and making data driven decisions. So that was, that was a real ACE presentation that Lillard did. But look, it's an amazing event. I'm really looking forward today too. I've just taken so much notes and I've met so many people. It's an awesome event so far, so it's definitely living up to the hype and more. So anyway, stay tuned. I'll plug you into today too and give you a bit of a summary of how things are going as well. Thanks and bye for now.
