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!

Jane Austin, Director of Product Design, Babylon Health

How can good design be integrated into your business profitably? Jane answers the question by considering the ‘anti-problem’, sharing 10 ways designers and business people can guarantee their behaviours and activities will ensure they never see eye-to-eye, their efforts will be wasted and everyone involved will know it is not their fault. You will probably recognise most of these techniques in action in your own organisation… Watch, and learn how to integrate design into your team effectively.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Why don’t customers get, buy and love your product?

This guest post was written by Caroline Brown, co-founder of The Scale Partnership, a Cambridge UK-based positioning and marketing strategy specialist.

“Positioning is the cough medicine talk. You only go because it’s good for you.” So began April Dunford’s prescription at the Cambridge, UK launch of her first book, Obviously Awesome, hosted by Business of Software.

So somewhat ironically, ‘positioning’ itself has a positioning problem. But how do you know whether your product – or indeed company – has nailed it or nosedived into a viper pit of a positioning? And why does it matter? Isn’t growth hacking where it’s all at, anyway?

In short, no.

Mikey Trafton, CTO, Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas

There are 3 reasons your team isn’t doing what you want them to do, says Mikey Trafton.

1. They don’t know what you want them to do
2. They aren’t motivated to do what you want them to do
3. They’re not capable of doing what you want them to do

In his 3rd talk at Business of Software, Mikey picked up from where he left off at the end of his previous talk ‘How To Recruit A Badass Team‘. You’ve hired a great team, but you need to learn how to manage them. Mikey is here to help you help your employees succeed with processes, tools, advice, and war stories from his experience as an entrepreneur.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

It’s a tale as old as… computers.

Imagine the scene – you are a bright, tech-savvy entrepreneur and you create a tech product. You know it’s brilliant – it’s clever, it’s complicated to build, it’s simple to use, in the history of time no one has ever made something so brilliant as this.

And yet… no one wants to pay you for it. It’s the curse of the tech founder – clever product, no sales. We see this time and time again – tech founders who make incredible technology but struggle to take it to market effectively. Maybe this quote hits close to home for you?

If it is a curse though, the good news is, you can break it!

An old colleague saw this on the first page of April Dunford’s book on Product Positioning.

She laughed and said,

“That should be called Cambridge Disease, the inability to articulate why anyone should care as much as you about your clever technology.”

Perhaps a bit harsh, the fact is that almost every company struggles with positioning.

If it is a disease though, the good news is, there’s a Cure!

“You’ve got a cool product, but nobody understands it. You think it’s simple, but customers don’t. They compare your products with those that are nothing like it.”

Ouch. From page 1 of Obviously Awesome: How To Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It, it was clear that the team at Business of Software needed to read April Dunford’s new book. The book is April’s thesis on Product Positioning: why you need to think about it, the 5 components of effective positioning, and a 10-step positioning process.

As an executive consultant, April Dunford brings 25 years of marketing experience to the table with this book. Her CV is impressive: VP of Marketing at several successful high-growth startups, an executive at 3 global tech giants, and 16 products launched to market over her career. She’s been consulting for 10 years, and is now a sought after speaker – you can catch her on her UK Book Launch Tour this July, or in Boston this September at Business of Software Conference USA 2019.

There’s lots of wisdom on offer in Obviously Awesome. Here are our 5 key takeaways from the book.

Peldi Guilizzoni, Founder/CEO, Balsamiq

In 2018, Balsamiq celebrated its 10th Birthday – an impressive achievement for any SaaS company. Founder Peldi has attended Business of Software every year since 2010, and has 5 BoS talks to his name. In his talks Peldi updates the BoS Community on the story of Balsamiq, and the ups and downs that come with running a growing, bootstrapped SaaS company. They are archetypal BoS talks: honest, full of insight, and give you a peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of a successful SaaS company.

In this talk from BoS USA 2018 he shared another honest update about his worries in Balsamiq’s milestone 10th year. On realizing he’s still too integral to the business, Peldi started the ‘Winter 2018 Injected Turbulence Project’ – delegated product design and engineering management, deleted Slack and witter from his phone, and stopped watching their internal wiki.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Tendayi Viki, Author

Innovation is hard. It takes more than a clever idea to make a business. Tendayi Viki works with entrepreneurs in startups and large corporates who are looking to innovate. Here he presents 8 business model questions to consider when attempting to innovate, followed by a Q&A with some great questions about innovating in a large corporate.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

“How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess.”

Warren Buffett

April Dunford shared this quote in her brilliant book, Obviously Awesome. We’re all reading it in the office. Not because she’s coming to the UK and we’re hosting some talks with her in early July nor because she’s speaking at BoS USA this year, (both are true). It’s because it is a great book and has changed the way we think about what we do.

One thing the book has changed our thinking on is how we approach working with supporters. We are a relatively small event, deliberately so. Our goal is not to run the biggest, the fastest growing, or the most profitable software conference in the world – we’re interested in being a conference that attendees and supporters alike love to attend.

We want to offer the best conference experience possible.

We love our supporters, we could not exist without them.

Nilan Peiris, VP Growth, TransferWise

No marketing channel scales infinitely. That’s the message Nilan opens his talk from BoS Europe 2018 with. So how do you build sustainable marketing to keep your business growing sustainably? Drawing on past experience working with early-stage startups and as VP Growth at TransferWise, Nilan gave a three-pronged talk on the subject:

• Learnings from running Marketing at early-stage startups
• Optimizing for Word-of-Mouth at TransferWise
• The Economics of a Mission-Driven Business

This talk is full of stories and marketing tips from the first 6 years of TransferWise – highly recommended!

Video, Slides, & Transcript below