SaaStr Insider Webinar: Last Chance to Sponsor Demo Day!

Life. Thanks for joining us. We're here every Thursday chatting about kind of all things to do with staff, third events and just. We were just talking about life in general before we started the webinar. But yeah, so yeah, today it's, it's February. So happy February, everyone. Officially. Hopefully you had a great month end. We wanted to chat about Demo Day today because it's kind of the last chance if you want to sponsor. So let me pull up our deck here that we're going to show today. Cool. This probably will not take a full hour. I'm just going to go full screen here. All right. Sasser Demo Day. You might have seen us promote this a little bit at the end of the year, slash the beginning of the year. It originally was going to be in January, but we moved it to March. So now it is March 6th. It's a Wednesday. It's the first week of March. It's in about a month and a few days, give or take, if you will. So it's, yeah, Demo day now on March 6th. So wanted to give everyone a rundown just with like the date change and what's. And what's happening since we have had a few folks ask what's going on with Demo Day. So, yeah, giving you guys the latest scoop here. We're hosting it in March. We just wanted to get, you know, a little bit extra time to have a few more speakers to bring to the Saster community. So that's why we moved it out to March. But we're super excited about it. For those who maybe don't know, we did a lot of digital events starting in 2020 and then, yeah, continued it forward. We've made the move back to in person starting in 2021, which we could chat about at the end. But primarily our digital events are so great because we can reach so many more members of the Saster community. We do have like a global community primarily focused, you know, and concentrated in North America, uk, Canada, et cetera. But it's so great that we can reach all these folks even more so digitally right when we host a digital event like Demo Day. So that's what we'll chat about today. So yeah, the, the original date was the 30th. The new date is the 6. It'll be streaming live for everyone and bringing everyone together for Demo Day. And it's the first Demo day we've done. So I'll just touch on that for a second. This is the first Saster Demo Day. We have done a lot of digital events and the premise of Demo day is kind of a amalgamation of a few previous digital events plus a few things that folks have been asking us for at Saster. You're probably familiar with the concept of demo day from like YC or other folks who, you know, has their own demo days of basically a demo day is people coming together to show off their products and ours has a little bit of a Saster twist on it. So if you've been to any of our SaaS or previous digital events like Saster scale, maybe more so it's a little bit more like Saster build which was all product focused. Saster Money was all VC and investor focused. If you haven't had the chance, we'll link the replays to Saster build. But it's very much like Saster build in the sense that build was very much product focused. So our take on demo day is we're going to have a full day or a full half day of content digitally streaming out globally. So we're expecting a lot of folks to tune in live as well as to the live streams. And Demo day will be not only showing off demos of what's new at the latest and greatest products that you guys should all know, but we're also going to bring together some of the top product leaders in SaaS today to talk about, you know, what they're building, maybe show off some of their products, do a bit of their demos, what's top of mind and what's new for them. So that's kind of the SaaS for style twist. Waylon, anything I missed there on kind of the context?

Well, I think just from like a sponsorship perspective, the exciting thing is, you know, SaaS is really known for thought leadership. We really try to stay away from commercials and that sort of thing. And that's what's made, you know, Sasser such a powerful event and why we get such a senior level audience. So I think this is really special because it's an opportunity to actually talk about your product, to do something that's a little bit more commercial in nature and also create executive connections. Right. Like if we've got head of product or CEO founder doing the product demo, you know, a lot of the people you're going to be demoing are going to be execs as well. It just those types of opportunities, they tend to close quickly. So I think it's really exciting for our sponsors.

Yeah, that's a really great point. That's something that folks have been asking us for for a while now is like, you know, A lot of our advice and tactics is super tactical, maybe less so about the product and more so about lessons learned, how to scale faster, that kind of thing. So yeah, this is kind of nice that we were actually doing a fledged more Demo day style thing for the community and for folks to learn from, just to see what's new and what's out there. Right. So great point there. So the onus of Demo Day, we talked about it a little bit, but again it's to put a Saster style spin on the classic demo day and it's really to help folks. You know, again, we still want to have that Sasser style content of helping folks scale faster. So that's why we're going to bring in product leaders. Right, to also talk about what's new, what's the latest, what they're thinking of. I'm sure a lot of folks will be talking about how they're incorporating AI or not into their products. So yeah, I think a lot of that will be top of mind and encapsulated here. If you haven't had the chance to go to some of our workshop Wednesdays, some of that will give you a good flavor as well of those maybe product style content that we're going to have at Demo day in addition to all the demos of course from leading companies. So yeah, it'll be a great day. It's going to be free to attend. So if you are thinking of just attending versus maybe getting involved as a sponsor, it's going to be free to attend. You can sign up on sastordemoday.com when it goes live next week for signups and sessions. But yeah, it's going to be a really epic day. Definitely recommend sitting in and listening to it there. So who attends Demo Day? Right. This is a digital event for us versus an in person event. So a little bit of a distinction here on the broader Saster community and our digital events, maybe a little bit more specifically. So for our Saster community as a whole, I think because of the style of content that we're putting out and the level of speakers and the caliber folks that come and participate in Saster, either as a speaker or community members, more than half of folks who come to Saster, whether it's in person, workshop Wednesday, digital mega events like Demo Day or scale that we've had in the past are at that VP level and above. And so I think that's an important call out that Waylon mentioned. Right. We do expect a strong balance of CEOs, CROs and revenue leaders. Of course, to come to demo day, I do think some investors will come as well just because we do have a big investor community within Saster to Demo Day and it is 100% live. So much like our in person events, everything we do digitally is also live. So all the workshop Wednesdays have been live. Demo day will be totally live and we'll simulcast it. We've gotten pretty good at this now. So we have a system where we live stream everything. We write up everything as like an SEO optimize article for afterwards in case you miss. In case you miss it. And that reaches a lot of folks there. Right. So again, I love our in person events for so many reasons of like being in person really accelerates a lot of conversations. It's a little bit more memorable. But I do love when we do digital things like digital events and media because we can reach a lot of folks at one time. Anything here to add, Waylon?

No, I think you hit all the notes there.

Awesome. So if you're a sponsor of Demo day, Waylon, what can the folks expect if they want to sponsor demo day and maybe why from your perspective, should they sponsor demo Day?

Yeah, well, I think some of the things I touched on already, it's that level of audience. Right. And it's consistent with the audience at our events, which is. And workshop Wednesdays, which is the types of people that actually have the ability to create budgets where maybe budgets don't exist, but also an opportunity to create connections between your executive team and the executive team of those in attendance. Those are the deals that you can forecast with high thinking. As a sales leader, you can forecast with a high deal of predictability. Obviously Saster, our events are in June and October or September rather. But people need leads now and I think that this is a great opportunity. We're anticipating anywhere from 75 to 300 leads per session. We will be sending these leads to you so people are opting in when they attend your session and that's gold right now. Right. It's been, it's been a tough year for 2023 was a tough year for many in SaaS. So I think a lot of sales teams would be pretty excited to get 75 to 300 qualified opportunities from executive level buyers this early in the new fiscal year.

Yep, yep, Great points there. Again, this is. And, and maybe this is one of the. The cases in which we actually encourage folks to do demos. Right. I know a lot of people want to do demos at our in person events if they're a sponsor. It's really hard in a live environment when, you know, folks are having so much T content throughout the day. Which is why we keep sponsored content also tactical during the annual and the Europa events as well mentioned. So yeah, this is one of those cases where we're like, no, literally do a demo. Right. Which everyone probably has. So it's fairly turnkey too in terms of content. Right. We do recommend that you have an exec demo or Chief Product Officer. Right. Or a VP of product demo just because again, our audience is of that VP level and above and that does resonate a lot with them. But again, I really love demo day. If you need those extra key one leads because you're falling behind a little bit, this would be a great way to do it. Right? It's fairly turnkey. We do a lot of it. We do all the signups, we get you the leads. Fairly easy to do from that perspective. This is a little bit more on our audience. We won't get into this too much, but just, you know, some notable names here for past attendees specifically for our digital events. This is more of a look at our digital and community audience breakdown. Again, lots of people tuning into this not only in the zoom, but also on the live stream. Our previous digital events have had over a million impressions per event on social media channels, et cetera, plus all the long tail promotions that go into it. So there's a lot of really good juice there. It's not just like a flash in the pan sponsorship if you're considering it. It does live long tail as well. So it's really nice because how we do these as we insert the, the session that you'd be doing or your demo straight into the agenda and folks are, when they're signing up, they are picking their sessions right when they sign up. So that's how you know, you get that opt in engagement with folks for your topic so you know, in case they can't join or something happens, you're still able to follow up with them after the fact. So that's quite nice because it's really embedded, it feels really native. And as we've mentioned, you know, we, we do live stream these which is really great for that additional boost as well as the long tail effect on, you know, it being on saster.com these are just some examples for views of past ones that we've done. You know, kind of there's a range here as you can see. So again, it's just a matter of seeing again a lot of these that did a little bit better had executives Right. Speaking. We're doing a fresh sort of topic this one again, I'd frame your demo as you know, the lens of like what's new and how to help folks et cetera in 2024. So if you are thinking of sponsoring demo day, we really only have one sponsorship package for demo day just to keep it easy. We decided simpler would be better. So for demo day it is a what we call a gold sponsorship. It's a live about 15 minute demo with Q and A. Q and A is very important. I would say to our Sasha audience. If you got to tune in to any of our recent workshop Wednesdays, you'll notice about half of it is Q and A from a full hour. So those are a little bit longer. But Q and A is super important. I think it's great to have that tactical time as well. As we've mentioned live video and social distribution, it's obviously promoted pre event to disaster community as well as the day of and post event dedicated lead capture as we've shown you on the agenda as well as video delivery and that post event promotion and write up. Again, really easy to do and also really great if you're thinking about bundling it with something else like one of our more evergreen as we call media assets. So Sasters Media really, you know, saster.com where a lot of this demo day content will live as well as the podcast and our newsletter. So it kind of boils down to three things. We do have three different newsletters but it's really saster.com, the podcast and the newsletters. So really quickly on the podcast and all that we'll in chat newsletters I our podcast I think is really great if you have an evergreen offer that can be translated to an audio format. Once again, the podcast is really easy to do. It's super turnkey. You just send us the script, make a landing page like you know, Visit whatever it is.comsaster we professionally voice it over. There is some availability I think in March. I have to check actually because a bunch of the end of the month yesterday as I've kind of seen our latest availability is for media. We're still going through all the Jan stuff that closed. But yeah, that being said, you know, work with us here on media placements either before or after demo day. You know I, I like the podcast because it is turning key. It's voiced over. The content we're putting out is really great right now. So if you haven't gotten the chance to listen to some of our current episodes or maybe listen to it lately and you want to cash back up. We've had a lot of really good episodes of the CRO Confidential that we run. We've done, Jason's done some original content on like what's New that's been coming out on the podcast, as well as some just podcast originals that he throws onto there. And in addition to all of the really great speakers and content from any of our events and workshop Wednesdays, et cetera, are also on the podcast. So it's always a constant stream of really great high caliber speakers on the podcast. It does, you know, reach a lot of really great folks on the podcast. And so I like it because it is, again, fairly turnkey. So if you have something that you know can be digestible in an audio format, definitely recommend the podcast. I think it's one of the top SaaS podcasts out there and it is all SaaS focused. Right. So it is definitely focused on folks helping you scale. And that that also means that people are downloading and listening to these throughout the year, you know, not just in Jan. So even if you run an ad with us in February or March, people will be listening to it throughout the year because those episodes really are evergreen. Okay. Newsletters. Waylon, you just, you just had a media run here. So. Yeah, talk to the folks about newsletters.

Yes. So I think we're seeing a lot of interest in the newsletters right now. So we have three different versions. We have the Saster Weekly that goes out once a week, the Saster Daily, which is three times a week, and then the Saster Insider which goes out both by email and on LinkedIn through Jason's LinkedIn. Jason's got over 250,000 followers on LinkedIn. Again, very high level and so a great audience. I think in general, what's going to distinguish these from other offerings out there is again, the high level of the audience. Right. The content is really focused at the exact level. It's not tactical things on how to, you know, how to run better marketing campaigns or closing tactics so much. It's really stuff that's focused at the exact level, which are the people who hold the budget generally to make purchases. So I think those are some of the things that really distinguish them. What we've seen a lot of success with is companies using media runs around either big product announcement, maybe white papers, things like that. Educational and thought leadership. Content really does perform extremely well. And one of the nice things is in addition to having large size graphics for your ad, you do get Some nice copy as well. So there is a bit of an opportunity to tell a story and lead them to a landing page. Like I said, things like, you know, new white papers or industry reports, things like that tend to perform really well, you know, and other people will tend to use it if they're doing some major events. They know that SaaS is a big audience at those events. A good time to generate some awareness for yourself leading into those events, whether Saster events or otherwise.

Yep. And I'll just say too all the differences in our newsletters, I know it's a little nuanced, so we typically actually do work with our sponsors to make a recommendation of like, if you have an asset in mind that you already want to promote out to the Saster community. Usually we work backwards of like, okay, tell us what you want to promote and then we'll give you a recommendation of how. What format of this would be the best. Like, is it a mix of newsletters? Is it a mix of newsletter and podcast? That's usually the best way to do it with us is to, to have us make a recommendation based on what your actual promotion is going to eventually be. If you don't know yet, that's okay too, right? Like if you're like, no, I know, I just want to get on the podcast and I'll figure it out later. That totally works well too. We can make some recommendations there of how to maximize, you know, the awareness as you do these. So as we mentioned, there's three different newsletters. I'll just touch on them briefly. So the Saster Weekly is what I call our OG or original newsletter. This one goes out every Sunday to, I think it's almost 100,000 now, SaaS, founders, CEOs and operators. And the Weekly is great because it's a roundup of the week's top content. So you know it's going to be heavy hitting. People really do like to open this one because it is on Sunday as well. So again, because most of our audience is VP level or above, Sunday is actually a good day to reach them because it's their downtime where they can catch up on some of the top content of the week. The banner ads, as you've seen here, are a sample of what you can do in the weekly. The daily is a little bit different in that we rotate through the sponsor ads, whereas in the weekly we limit it to two. So you're in, you're in each one because it's only four times a month, right. On average on Sundays. Whereas the Daily, we do rotate through the sponsor ads within the content and this is an aggregate of the Latest content from saster.com so if you haven't read sasser.com, you know, a lot of it is founder focused, revenue focused, see, you know, VP of sales, VP of marketing, CRO, CTO focused, somewhat super technical. We've had a lot more articles on AI lately. So all of that goes into the Saster Daily. These ads are a little bit bigger just because we do rotate through them due to the frequency of how often the daily goes out. And people have gotten, I would say, super creative with a daily. They've done things like doing gifts or videos or what you might have. Since you can rotate out your ads a little bit more frequently, we do recommend for the weekly that we just showed, since that is every Sunday. I always recommend to folks keeping your ad the same. Right. You're going to need multiple touch points on that Sunday for it to sink into the audience. Whereas in the daily, because it is going out every other day, you can play around with it a bit more and maybe swap between 2 or 3 ads max throughout the month to get in front of the community. I would definitely do the same cta, but maybe just different style of ad or copy or whatever it might be to really drive the point home with the community. Similar audience on the daily though. And then, yeah, the Insider is our final newsletter. This actually is mostly distributed via LinkedIn. There's a really great edition of it that just went live yesterday with an ad, so you can see that placement there. It is a really large, what I call billboard style format. So I kind of like that style of ad. I also like that, you know, this is distributed through Disaster Insider newsletter is published via our founder Jason Lemkin's account. So that's really good brand affiliation there as well as it does go out via email. And we know, you know, people are spending so much time on LinkedIn these days. And really the magic, I would say of the Insider, even though it's newer, it is catching up in terms of distribution, I think there's 50,000, 51,000 subscribers now. And it does, since it does go out on LinkedIn and email, the email that it's hitting for folks is their inbox, right? So I always preface like, you know, I don't think anyone is really signed up for LinkedIn with their work email. I think most people are signed up for LinkedIn with their personal email. So it is a way to get in front of them there as well. Maybe cut through the noise. If you've had issues with email deliverability, it's a good one for that. Yeah. Anything else you want to add here on media or maybe how to think about combining the two with demo day and media?

Yeah, well, I think that one thing that I didn't touch on for Demo day is just that I think it's an opportunity to really reach an audience that you're not going to reach through your traditional outbound or marketing channels. Executives are obviously, they're very busy and a lot of them don't want to engage with the salesperson necessarily, especially early in the sales cycle. They don't want to get involved with someone and everything that might entail all the follow up, et cetera. But they are interested in your product. They do want to see, they've heard of the tools, they want to see what it can do. And it's nice to provide like a low, a low touch, way, low responsibility way for them to do that. So they know that, you know, they haven't committed a bunch of time to an individual salesperson. So it's just kind of a nice way to, to get in front of them in a low pressure scenario and it makes more people come out that wouldn't come out otherwise for an actual one to one sales call.

Yep. Nope. Those are great points. So yeah, it's kind of our final call here. If you want to sponsor Demo Day, obviously it'll be open for attendees up until the live day on Wednesday, March 6. But because there is some time needed to launch promotions and work with content and scheduling, if you do want to get involved as a sponsor, it's kind of our last call now at the very last minute to still, but still be successful. Right. To get involved with Demo Day. So you could reach out to us. Waylon, what's your email for folks?

Waylon W A Y L o n@sasterink.com and Waylon McGill on LinkedIn.

Nice. I like that you spelled it out for folks. It's not a common name. If you guys want to reach out to me, I'm just AI@saspering.com. it's my initials. And with that we will see you next Thursday and we'll hope to see you at Demo Day as well coming up.