Live SaaStr Insider Series: Launching our 2025 Annual Sponsor Portal

Share my screen. Cool. So if you've joined live, thanks for doing that. Or if you're watching back on the replay, thanks for doing that too. Super helpful to do so. Yeah. Without further ado, we're going to go ahead and get started for today. Today's big topic is launching our sponsor portal to all of you guys. So I'll share my screen and we will walk you through it. If you've been a previous sponsor of SAMs, most notably in the last year, this will look familiar to you. But if you're a new sponsor or haven't utilized a portal like this before, this will be a super helpful walkthrough. So share my screen here. Cool. So just quickly to start off, we've not invited you guys yet. We figured we would do the walkthrough first and we invite all of you to the portal afterwards so you'll get it today. If you're the main point of contact, you should have that in your inbox by the end of the day. For some reason, you don't get it by the time you wake up tomorrow morning, just let us know so that we can make sure you get an invite to this year's Portal and the 2025 edition. So just a quick overview. Again, this is like fully what we want to go over today. So yeah, for the sponsor portal, this is going to really be your one stop shop going forward to find the latest and greatest information for sponsoring this year's Sastra annual event. Everything we update in these webinars will also be updating dually in the portal. So again, it's a good place to go if you happen to miss any of these webinars or if you bring in additional points of contact to help you out and plan the show. This is a really great place to not only catch up on maybe what you've missed, but get all the latest information and be able to watch some of these webinars back as well. All in again, one area to get up to speed here. So I will say there's already quite a bit in here that I'll walk you guys through and we will be updating this literally weekly going forward. So again a good place to maybe just log into and check once you have access. So once you get in and log in, the homepage will pretty much stay about the same. So this is our event overview. Again has a lot of the information we covered in last week's kickoff. If you were there, it's got our venue, location, obviously event dates, points of contact. So right here if you need to email or get in touch with any of us, super easy. We also do call out. You know, there's multiple addresses for the San Mateo County Event center, something we'll remind you of as we get closer. There's kind of a main sponsor entrance and then there's a different like default entrance. I would say if you're taking Ubers, it does kind of default to this 2495 one once you get closer. And then eventually once we open up for shipping to the show site versus the advance warehouse, it's also that kind of like default address. So just some things to know there on the venue and location that's there for you. 24. 7 We went over this last week, but at a glance on our homepage, you'll also see our sponsor hall hours. Again, this is helpful just as you're starting to think about in February and March, booking your travel and your team's travel to staff for annual. These hours will really help you decide when to come in, when to fly out and maybe how to send people at different times. If there's, you know, multiples of you going to the show for the entirety of the event. So most sponsors, I would say the sponsor load in just as a reminder, on May 12th is optional. That's if you end up having something like an activation or a bigger booth. We do recommend coming on Monday to do so. Otherwise you've got pretty much all day Tuesday to load in your booth and they are turnkey, meaning once you get the graphics from us next week, Freeman and our general contractors and our electricians and AV people will set up your booth. So by the time you get there, it will be live, it will be real. But you know, people like to get there early to do things like register their teams, pick up their badges, organize your swag, get any of your deliveries, test the booth loop. Like that does take a little bit of time, so you do have, you know, half the day to basically do that on Tuesday. But if you want to give yourself an extra buffer, even if you're not doing something, you are more than welcome to come on Monday. Again, it's just your choice on how long you want to be at SA. It does outline the expo hall hours for the three days disaster. So the 13th, 14th, 15th and then these sponsor move out on the last day. One thing I'll call out here and you'll see in our FAQs and the sponsor portal is a lot of people ask us, do they have to stay all the way until 6 o' clock? On the last day when they're planning their travel. And that is one of those things where if you aren't shipping anything back certainly like you are free to disconnect your laptop, take all your items with you and leave the booth. They'll start dismantling after the 9 o' clock move out. It is if you are shipping things back out from Freeman specifically or needing their services to maybe ship at a local UPS pickup point etc. Those activities will not start until strictly 6pm so that again just something to gauge there. I know some people have tried to ship out at like 3 o' clock when happy hour starts because there are still going to be attendees in the sponsor Hall. That 6pm is very strict for things like shipping and moving out like physical items of your booth. Now I feel like I'm probably going to run through my swag and I won't have anything left by the time it's day three. Then yeah, you can certainly pack up early. But anything that requires like shipping or managed services won't start until six since we'll still have attendees around fast re annual. So just something to keep in mind there as you're starting to book your travel or start to think about booking your travel, a few other sections you'll see on this sponsored portal and it will grow and gain more sections as we go. So maybe the most important things to look at now is number one being this task list. So you'll see that's why it's number one on the menu items. There are a few things for you guys to imminently do as sponsors once you get into this portal. Some of you have proactively emailed some of this to us. So thanks for for those who did that. But if you haven't already get your login come in. Basically these are due tomorrow because they're due once you get access to the portal. It's just things we need to start collecting from you. So that's things like your website, your description, a high res logo file that you can send here. I'll say too like if your file size is bigger than I mean it shouldn't be that even a high res file should not be 150 megabytes. But if for some reason it is let us know and we can send you our Dropbox. You know, name, phone number, your email address. Address is really important. That's one of those things we need. I think it's on here twice. Nope, it's not. Okay, address and that eventually you'll see things like the lead Scanner and booth graphics. But yeah, a lot of just kind of like small tasks to do now of getting your address and contact information as soon as you and logos as soon as you get access to the portal. So just again, shouldn't take you more than five minutes. Just something to be mindful of to try and do once you get access in the next week or so. If you don't do in the next week or so, you probably get a reminder. So just something to start to look at now in those tasks. Again, not a ton to do yet. Just again, super, super simple, super quick tasks. It should take you no more than five to 10 minutes to get us some of that additional company information. We use it. We also give it to folks like Freebie and our ab vendors. Electric vendors. Yeah, that's why we kind of need those things now. But that's the task list again, that's important to fill out your company details and then later on it's important because that's the link where you'll upload your booth graphics once they're due in April. So. Okay. Other thing that you can be mindful of once you log into this portal is the sponsor timeline. So this is something we outlined on last week's webinar. We'll go through here quickly. But if at any point you forget any of these dates, we have it here just out the section. So this will give you again a really good overview on sense of the upcoming deadlines and deliverables for our sponsors. You'll notice a lot of things either launch or take place on a Thursday. That's because as you probably know from watching this, we do these weekly webinars 9am Pacific every Thursday. And so we take this time to do like we're we're doing today, which is like launch something, explain it to you and then put it into the portal. So you'll see that cadence fairly regularly from every Thursday now through May. Just again, something to be super mindful of if you're like, okay, I can do I have to pay attention to SAX Radio every day, maybe Thursdays to get caught up in what you're doing. So yeah, last week we did a kickoff. This week we're launching the portal. And now you can upload things like your logo and company address. Next week is a big week because we'll be launching the boost specs for each level. So that's things like what did the goals look like for 2025? What are the Super Golds look like? As you guys, a lot of you have talked to David or Mona or myself in this process, you've seen a version of those boots. They're really similar from the prior year. So 2024s and even 2023s. We do just update them slightly year over year based on sponsor feedback. So you will see that reflected in the specs once we release them next week. That webinar is typically a little bit longer. I know we've been trying to keep these webinars lately a little bit shorter, maybe 20, 30 minutes. That one does take a little bit of time. So if that's one where you're like, I can't watch the whole thing, I'll just watch the replay because I, I just need to know the specs for my level. Totally understand. But we do go quite in depth into each level. Specs. Again, something super handy you can eventually share with your designer or team who's going to be designing that for you once they get around to doing it. But just something to be mindful of for next week and then the weekend after to kind of close out fabric, we will release the sponsor hall floor plan. So that's, you know, the actual physical locations of each of the levels of the booths. And then at that point, sponsor selection for booths will also begin at the end of February. Do keep in mind we do this in order of level and contract signature date. I know the number one question will get asked once it opens is what am I going to be in line to pick? It's a little bit hard to predict because we do do it by level. So I would say it's takes about a week, a week and a half just to get through the diamonds, the platinums. These are more bespoke boots that can pretty much pick anywhere on the show floor. So that, that, that process takes a little bit of time. And then we start to go concurrently through the super gold ankles in order of contract signature date. So if you feel like you're going to be out of office upcoming, just let us know. Maybe designate a secondary pocket. But a lot of times it's never been an issue to folks or, or if we know you're coming up and you've gotten upcoming out of office, we can help you getting your selection. Maybe like, we've done holds with people before if they're going out of office of, hey, these were like the 10 that I like the best. Give me any of these 10 once it's my official turn. So things like that we've worked around. Never been an issue once the selection process opens. But yeah, keep in mind it is strictly an order by level and contractors for days. But sometimes hard to predict your exact date when you'll be able to pick until we're caught up really the week after that in early March we'll be going through booth activations. So that's things like food and beverage, different activations, people that in their booth headshots mostly but different games and stuff you could do in your booth. As a super golden up sponsor we'll use the next week. If you do have speaking, that's again one thing to put on your radar. That will be a speaking sponsor speaker webinar overview. So that'll be a lot of information for them on speakers, best practices, all that jazz. If they can also attend slides are going to be due in March and then yeah, the big deadline to keep in mind is that Tuesday, April 1st deadline for booze artwork being due to this exact sponsor portal. You will upload it to our Dropbox because they are bigger files. But yeah, if you are late there is a late fee. So we always call that out as like the most top level deadline for Sastra annual other things again kind of more minor on like passes and getting your team registered and just doing all that final mile stuff pre annual. But the bulk of it is going to be making sure we've got your booth graphics in on time. As always we will remind you guys if for some reason we feel like you're encroaching upon being late, do miss that deadline. So you'll get plenty of reminders. Webinars just like this one. We added a new section for this year where you can find all the webinars once they go live. So right now you'll see there's only last week's because that was the first one. So when this week's is done we'll add this week's and so on going forward. So you can always grab the slides where they live. They're usually Google Slides. This week actually doesn't have slides because we're just going through the portal. But you'll get access to the portal and then we'll link the recording down below. If you ever miss them I will say too. They're also easy and handy to find just on Sasters YouTube channel. So if you ever go to Sasters YouTube and go to our live stream page, mute myself. You'll be able to find any of our Saster Insider sponsor webinars from weeks previous. So you can go to just our live stream, you can watch our other live streams but you probably Just want to watch these and get the info and be on your way. So yeah, these live here if you ever need them. Just to keep them all in one place. Again, this is something more so for later. But just FYI that lives in the portal is how you can register your team once registration opens. Not quite open yet. Again, this is something we won't do until March. But if for some reason you're like I really need to register my team sooner rather than later, you can let us know. Just email eventsasterink.com and we will help you do that and then we will help you get in to registering your team. But like I said, the default is going to be that we release your sponsor codes to register your teams in March. So this section is pretty much straightforward. Not a whole lot to do quite yet. But when we do send you your codes, we'll link this page to you just as a reminder. That way you can start to register your teams for sponsor passes and register your speakers as well. Again, if for some reason you want to start registering your team now, you could just let us know so we can share your code sooner rather than later. But otherwise we'll get them in March and you could start registering people then. In terms of resources, there's not a ton in here yet. There will be a lot but we get done. If you were a sponsor last year, you might remember this is where any docs will start to live. So things like the boost specs will live here. Next week when we launch them, we'll show you how to access them. Things like additional order forms will live here. Best practices, all that stuff will live in resources. Again, not a ton in here yet. Since we are just starting out on getting. Well the portal is a resource in itself. Yeah, but in terms of like PDF additional resources, those will start like the floor plan. All that will start to come next week. Again just based on that timeline. If you have the timeline is right there in the menu. So that's super helpful too. FAQs We've gathered a lot of frequently asked questions from sponsors throughout the year. So this section is frankly a lot to read when I was even reading it and rewriting it. But it does have the questions really big. So if you're like I am looking for a question, etc, leads, literature, raffle items. I don't know like it's. I do think it's easy to scan through these if it's your first time as a sponsor to read through. It does have a lot of duplicate answers of things you can find in this portal. But if you're ever like, I can't find something, it's free, probably in this portal somewhere. The FAQ is a good place to go to know where people are asking questions. And again, some of our most asked questions are here. I will say we've been known to add to this as well, just based on how people are asking us questions each week. We'll pretty much keep adding to this just based on if we're getting, like, common questions and threads will add them to the FAQs. The account is just your account here. Like, for some reason, you need to reset your password to this portal. You can do it here. If you want to change it because you're doing an alias and shared access, you can do that here. I know there's a question in the chat if the invites have gone out yet. So if you guys have joined late, just as a reminder, we just launched the portal, so you guys will get your invites by tomorrow morning. If you don't have it in your inbox by tomorrow morning, let us know. But they'll be going out today, so we're launching it to you first to your live, and then we're sending out the invites so you won't have it in your inbox yet. The other thing I'll say to that point, and then we can answer any last questions on the portal, since it's fairly straightforward, is the portal, unfortunately, is not persistent. So if you have multiple people from one company in the portal, like, if I'm in it and David's in it, you guys are going to see this duplicate task. So. So, like, we're each going to see that we need to put in the website for Booth. And if you're like, I'm not sure if David's completed that or not, you can always just ask us if you're not sure. The other common thing people have done to work around this is instead of nominating your POC to get access, which you can have multiple people in this portal. There's no limit is we've seen people use an alias. So we'll do something like events at SAS, rank.com, like our alias, that goes to multiple of us. That way we can all log in. You know, we just generate a shared password. We all have the password. That way, if one of us completes this task, then we don't have to worry about it because it will actually save that one of us has completed it. Outside of that. Yeah, you can have as many people as you need on this portal. Just let us Know our default is like if you got this webinar, invite and email, we will add you to the portal today, you'll get it by tomorrow. But at any point too, you need to add somebody or you don't get it by tomorrow. Just email eventsaster Income and we can add another person for you. Again, no limits here on how many people from your team can be in the portal. Just keep in mind that for task list it's going to be unique for each user. So something to think about if you want to create a alias or domain or group that goes to a few of you to keep it persistent. So that's the only thing to bear in mind there.

Great tip there. Yeah, I didn't know that one. So now I can tell people. That's good.

Yes, it's a, it's a good one to remember. I do wish it was persistent by company, but I kind of get why it's not. So yeah, it's, yeah it's. It's so that you complete all your tasks and I get it. So yeah, that's, that's really the hack. If you don't want to see it multiple times is to make an alias. Otherwise that is a lot of the bulk of what we wanted to go through today. This portal will honestly become your hub, your home for SAS re annual. If at some point you're like, I swear in previous years I had access to XYZ thing and that's something I'm looking to get insight on for this year, just let us know. Right? We're events@sas range.com that goes to multiple of us and we will help you from there. We again we do these every Thursday as a webinar. I'll actually add the. I think the registration link is in here under webinars. Just double check. Yes, it's here. So if you ever want to have somebody else sign up for the webinar to watch it in real time on the zoom to be able to ask questions, that's where you sign up for it. Otherwise, yeah, you can always watch it on our YouTube as a replay or as a. You know, you could just watch on the live stream if you don't feel like logging in to zoom and then go from there and yeah, so that's, that's the bulk of what we wanted to go over today. Again, super straightforward. Hopefully this portal becomes easy for you guys to use and navigate. If you have any suggestions, you can let us know. But yeah, in future weeks you'll get things that follow along our timeline. So Next week will be boost specs. The week after will be the floor plan. The week after we'll add activations and then we'll just keep adding to our FAQs. And then basically in March, we're going to start hounding you to do your booth designs because they're due in April, so you probably feel like you have a little bit more time now because it's February. But yeah, just bear in mind they're due April 1st and February is a short month. So if, you know your designers have a longer queue, maybe something to put in front of them next week once we release the specs and get that over to them so that they can start working on it. David, anything you think I missed on the portal or just in general?

I think you nailed it. I love the portal. I think the portal is the place to be. So as a sponsor, if you have questions, need things, go to the portal first. That's just, you know, a great place to keep yourself organized, on track. A couple of years ago we didn't have a portal, but now we have it. I don't know how we live without it. So the portal is great and what I want to say and it just questions, anything. Events@sass.com we'll reach all of us. Or you can reach me and Amelia personally. But yeah, no, I think we covered it all and this is great. I think we answered the question, so.

We'Re in good shape. Yeah, I think last call out and then we'll wrap. On this point, not related to the portal, but just Dave and I kind of teased this last week. If you do have an AI focused company, which many of you do, we just announced this on caster.com and all of our social medias, but you are not exempt from applying for this. So I would say if you have an AI product, I would apply for the pitch and demo stage that we just launched last week in partnership with Mayfield Fund. The price is epic. That's between 500k to 5 million. If you go to sastranual.com, you'll see it right here in the NAV AI pitch and demo stage. Honestly, submit your startup. Like, there are certain criteria for winning the prize money, but anybody can pitch if you have an AI product. So I encourage all of you that are watching that are sponsors that have an AI product. I think it's. I think we've said it's either an AI product or a component of your SaaS product that has AI that has already driven revenue. That's the Asterisk, it's not AI first to submit your startup. We've already gotten actually quite a bit of applications and I'm like needing to read them next week with the team. But we've gotten a few applications so yeah, apply sooner rather than later because I do suspect it will fill like we have certain slots for how many startups can demo live at Samsung, but it's just extra exposure. So like this is not, this is like outside of any contracted speaking you have as a sponsor, if you're a gold AI company, you're like, I don't get speaking like this is a good way to get two minutes on stage disaster. Really. No strings attached. So yeah, highly, highly recommend if you have an AI first product that you apply for this. Have like your CEO, your product person or whomever apply on behalf of your company for this. I mean what there are, there's going to be at least one grand prize winner, if not multiple winners that do get funded off of this program. There is a deadline of April 15, which again, I know feels far away, but that's kind of our hard deadline. We may sooner if we keep getting the number of applications we get. But yeah, apply for this. The prize is epic. If you're doing anything in AI, just apply. I wouldn't worry too much about like reading all this criteria, like just apply like you will get two minutes to demo its Aster, which I think is pretty epic. It's something we haven't done in a while and like we're definitely blowing up the scale of how we've done this before. Last time we did it was tons of fun. Not only is it good to demo in front of the Saster community, it's really fine for like attendees to like sit there and watch demos. It's like kind of inspiring just to see what other people are doing. And I also see if you get any ideas for tools that you're like, I'm going to try that one and vice versa right there. There will be people in the audience that are like, I want to try that product based on that two minute demo. So yeah, apply for this. And we're super excited. Anything else on this one? David? I know you and I worked hard on this. No, this is awesome.

This is getting a lot of buzz. It's really exciting. Yeah, definitely encourage you to apply. Tell others, you know to apply because it's a super great opportunity for anyone, whether it's a bootstrap startup or you know, mega company that wants to demo something new with their AI. So anyone could participate. And yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun.

Yes, apply, do the demo. We'll send you a reminder in the email too to apply. If this is you and you're like, we could do this, definitely apply. I know a few, a couple sponsors who saw this were like, I'm going to win. So I love that vibe for you and I hope you win as a sponsor. I really do. I will say I do not have final say on who wins, so I cannot pick a sponsor. But I love that vibe for you and I think you guys should all apply to pitch at Saster outside of everything else you're doing at the show and being a sponsor. But yeah, this is an exciting opportunity. I'm stoked on this. It's gotten a lot of really great feedback since we just launched it earlier this week. Hope you guys apply. Hope to see your names in the applications. I don't have any. Again, I don't have final say on who is the ultimate winner, but I do have some say on who gets to devo. So please apply so I can at least highlight you demo at Saster Annual. That'll be super fun. And yeah, this is just a fun. This is first of many fun new things we're doing for annual 2025. Yeah, this is, this is one. Can't wait to show you guys who do you want to meet, which we've been working hard on and some other cool things we've been working hard on. But yeah, this is a, this is a fun one for sure. So yeah, apply. Well, we'll leave it at that. And also, like, to David's point, like, if you have customers that qualify for that, maybe just give them a heads up like, hey, we're going to be at Saster. But also they're running this, you know, AI demo and pitch competition that you should apply for. So just something you can maybe if they win, you know, they'll be a customer for life. All right with that, yeah, you guys will get sponsored portal access again by the time you wake up tomorrow. It's going out right now, right, starting now after this webinar. If you don't get it, let us know. You'll start to get that access. Or if you need to add anyone else, let us know. Just tell events sa com portal will be your one stop shop. It's 24 7. You can always find whatever you need here for Saster. And then if you email events@sastering.com Sometimes we do sleep, so it might take a minute only sometimes. But yeah, this is 24 7. You can always access SAST here and hope that some of you do apply to the AI Pitch competition and demo stage. With that, we'll see you guys next week. Buckle up. It'll be a really good webinar on boostbacks. Super helpful as always to tune into that one or watch it back. Thanks as always for joining and we will see you guys next Thursday.

See you then.