All the talks from previous Business of Software Conferences from one place. Great SaaS & Software Talks.

If you want to watch previous BoS Talks, you can access all of the publicly available ones from here, listed by year. The more recent talks will link to the video of the talk, a transcript, the speakers slides, any follow up online AMAs and attendee notes. Great talks on building SaaS and software businesses.

Enjoy!

4 Lessons The BoS Community Taught Me

Hey 👋 I’m Paddy, and for the last 3½ years I’ve been heading up all things Marketing at Business of Software. As I write this, it’s my last week in the job. I’ve run my last BoS event, signed off on my last newsletter, and deleted myself from the ‘Meet the Team’ page. It’s strange to think that in a few short hours I’ll press ‘End Meeting For All’ for the final time, and that’ll be it.

One of the great joys of this job has been being a part of the BoS community. I’ve learned a huge amount from them over my time here, and as a parting thought I’d like to share 4 lessons that I’ll never forget which the people of the BoS community – you, the attendees and speakers – have taught me.

Lesson #1 – Make Your Users Awesome

Kieran O’Neill // Thread

Kieran is probably a serial entrepreneur – he founded his first business aged 15, (sold age 19 for $1.25m), his second and third were also acquired. He’s co-founder/CEO of his fourth startup, Thread. In this interactive discussion, Kieran shares some of his experiences and learnings having founded and grown four tech businesses before the age of 30. Kieran’s focus at Thread is to drive the growth of the business and keep developing – not maintaining – the company culture.

Prior to Thread, Kieran founded one of the first video sharing websites aged 15 and sold it for $1.25M aged 19. He was then CEO and co-founder of Playfire, the largest social network for gamers, which he grew to 1.5 million customers before being acquired in 2012. He’s a member of the Forbes, Drapers and Financial Times 30 Under 30 lists.

Video below

Cesar Kuriyama // 1 Second Everyday

Born in Peru, and raised as a math and science nerd in New Jersey with a passion for movies and storytelling, Cesar worked in advertising before leaving it all behind to pursue his own personal creative endeavours; among them a personal project – 1SecondEveryday.

It took time and a co-founder, Schoneck Shoaf, to turn it into a business, but now the App has been downloaded over 2 million times.

In this talk from BoS USA 2019, Cesar will share the story of how he accidentally turned his idea for a tool that would encourage him to be more adventurous into 1SecondEveryday. This became a thriving, bootstrapped, remote only, business that became the number one paid app in Apple’s App Store in 2018. Cesar shares the decision-making process that ultimately led to a change in business model, a rewrite of the platform and to taking outside capital.

Find out how 1Second Everyday:

• make remote working work
• changed the business model as it grew up
• discovered the ever-growing number of alternative sources of funding available to software entrepreneurs.

Video, Slides, & Sketchnote below

Regular BoS Newsletter readers will be familiar with our “Curated Content” section. Every week we collate the most interesting stories from the SaaS world and send them to out in our Newsletter.

We know our community of SaaS founders are busy – they don’t have time to scour the internet for niche software news and articles all the time. That’s why we do it for them. If you want to join this community of very clever people you can sign up here.

Here are 10 of the most interesting stories we’ve sent out to our community this month.

Growth, Funding, Pivotal Moments and the Evolution of Adzerk to Kevel

BoS regulars will know James Avery, founder of Adzerk, recently renamed to be known forevermore as Kevel. We caught up with him following the announcement of an $11 million funding round for the 13 year old SaaS business which he describes as, ‘Seedstrapped’. We talk growth, funding, pivotal moments and the evolution of Adzerk to Kevel

We cover:

• The origin and growth of Adzerk
• His attitude and approach to taking outside funding and finding the right money at the right stage for him
• Some of the BoS talks that had an impact on his company, including changing its name to Kevel
• Why he doesn’t worry too much about what might happen in the future

Food for thought for anyone on the Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death…

Video, transcript and links to talks James has found particularly impactful as he built Kevel below…

Rich Mironov // Mironov Consulting

If you don’t have a Head of Product you may suffer from: narrow focus on engineer/development productivity; underpowered product management teams; customer benefits misaligned with actual features; and lack of a realistic product strategy.

But it’s hard to hire a Head of Product. We don’t know what product leaders do, and disagree about what’s most important in a new one. We write wildly aspirational job descriptions for candidates and we confuse subject/market expertise with product management/leadership experience to name just a few errors.

Rich Mironov wrote The Art of Product Management and is a voice for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us. In this talk from BoS USA Online, he looks at the important aspects of product leaders:

• Organizing the product organization.
• Cross-functional leadership.
• Building what users actually need.

Video & slides below

Sally Foote // VP ECommerce, GoCompare

Should you or shouldn’t you listen to your customers? Do they know what they want or just what they think they want? Famously, pre-automobile era, people didn’t want a car, they wanted faster horses. So how do know when to listen to your customer feedback and when not to?

In this talk from BoS Europe 2020, Sally Foote (VP of ECommerce at GoCompare) shares her experience and expertise working with some high-profile digital businesses operating at scale to manage profitable growth and innovation in their organisations.

She will explain:

• how she uses data-driven decision-making frameworks to identify profitable opportunities that can have a potentially transformational impact
• why listening to your customers isn’t always a good idea
• how to know if you’re asking the right questions

Video & Slides below

Brian & Eric Dosal // Co-Founders, BrightGauge

Eric (the money guy) & Brian (the product guy) Dosal share their experience of starting, scaling and ultimately selling BrightGauge, their self-funded, 35 employee SaaS business back in 2019. They share an honest and open account of why they decided to sell while it was still very profitable and experiencing rapid (50% year-on-year) growth.

They share the lessons learned in starting a company in San Francisco and then moving it back to their hometown, Miami, FL and the reasons why they took the decision to sell the company. They were not VC funded and had no pressure to sell. Even with a great culture, great team, great everything, it still could be a great idea to sell. AFTER selling, there are still things to do but it’s OK to take a break and/or start a new project.

Hear their takeaways from the experience, and learn how and why to finish big and leave on top.

Video, Slides, & Sketchnote below

Regular BoS Newsletter readers will be familiar with our “Curated Content” section. Every week we collate the most interesting stories from the SaaS world and send them to out in our Newsletter.

We know our community of SaaS founders are busy – they don’t have time to scour the internet for niche software news and articles all the time. That’s why we do it for them. If you want to join this community of very clever people you can sign up here.

Here are 10 of the most interesting stories we’ve sent out to our community this month.