Lessons Learned Running Our First Online Conference

In March 2020, we ran Business of Software Conference Europe as an online event – our first ever virtual conference. Even with the short timeframes involved in putting this together, and the significant distractions going on all around us, the conference was a resounding success, with attendees noting that the experience of the online event was remarkably close to an in-person event.

As ever, we focused on two principles:

• Learning new skills and ideas
• Meeting other smart people.

We learned a lot and there are definitely things we’ll iterate on at our upcoming online conference this September, BoS USA Online 2020, to make it even better. We’re also learning every day from other online events that help us all learn the things that work and the things that we can do to create a memorable, fun and valuable experience.

Here’s some of the things we learned that will help us to make BoS USA Online even better:

Claire Lew // CEO, Know Your Team

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

In These Uncertain Times…

A rather wonderful use of some of the messaging from inbound emails Jessica Salfia at the West Virginian Council of Teachers of English turned into a poem.

It takes something special to turn some of the terrible marketing copy being shoved into outbound email into something that is both beautiful and somehow energizing so congratulations Jessica, you win our Lemmy of the Week Award.

There’s an alternative career as a copywriter waiting to happen. Probably. If you wanted it.

Messaging, of course, is incredibly important and no doubt you have seen almost every possible version of these lines land in your inbox over the past few weeks – quite often, followed immediately with a sales pitch, buy-now offer or something similar. The words lose their effect and often seem to stand in stark and hollow contrast to the marketing message or sales pitch that follow.

We’re going to try not to do this at BoS.

• We know what’s happening in the world around us already.
• We don’t want to offer cod-scientific advice or easy platitudes or fill your inbox with meaningless words.
• We want to try to focus our effort on serving and building our community around the world and be a place where you can extract the highest possible value from some of the smartest software people on the planet.

ENJOY:

The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining

Amir Salihefendic // CEO & Founder, Doist

At the turn of the century, remote working at scale would have been impossible. Today, more and more teams are discovering the benefits and flexibility that remote working provides; and in an ever changing world, could remote working become the new normal?

Having founded Doist in 2007, Amir Salihefendic is the CEO and founder of the company behind Todoist and Twist. Born in Bosnia, he grew up in Denmark, started the business in Chile and now lives in Barcelona with his family, but has colleagues spread across 25 countries.

In this BoS Talk from Business of Software Europe 2019, Amir will discuss why he believes remote-first could represent a massive paradigm shift with widespread implications for the future of work. You will learn the ten most valuable lessons Amir has learned whilst growing and operating a fully remote company – including why trust is important, why asynchronisation is greater than synchronisation, and why retreats are worth their weight in gold – plus hear his answers to a host of great questions in his Q&A section at the end.

Video, Slides & Transcript below

Ayat Shukairy // Co-Founder, Invesp

Ayat is a ‘queen of CRO’ with over ten years helping companies create websites that customers love, and that result in increased sales and retention.

Most marketing talk, or business strategy meetings, emphasizes the importance of ‘customer first’. Yet if we take a look at companies, and how they operate, the  C-Level exec are still calling the shots without paying heed to the needs and wants of the customer. We have all stumbled across a website which uses terminology and jargon that the average person simply can’t understand or when a design is simply the result of a bunch of executives deciding what they ‘think’ their customer wants. Even when companies embrace a customer first approach, the way they tap into their customers voice doesn’t give them the right result.

In this BoS Talk you will learn:

1. How to conduct qualitative research to tap into the customer voice more effectively
2. How to pair quantitative and qualitative research for a more global understanding of the customer journey
3. How to use what you’ve collected to design a voice that addresses the real motivations, needs, and wants of your customers.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

David Cancel // CEO & Co-founder, Drift

David Cancel is a 5x founder and 2x CEO with four successful exits to date. Currently, he’s co-founder and CEO of Drift, a startup that’s making it easier for businesses to talk to their customers. Previously, he was at HubSpot as Chief Product Officer after they acquired his company Performable.

In this (fireless) Fireside chat, we delve into what inspires and motivates David, how he came to start five different companies, and how he leads a high-growth company. Plus there are some great questions asked by the audience at the end that helps David open up about what he has done and what’s next.

Video & Transcript below

Whitney O’Banner // Engineering Manager, Medium

Google famously published a leading reference for establishing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a way to align teams and set short-term goals. In this BoSTalk, Whitney O’Banner (Engineering Manager, Medium) delves into which aspects of Google’s video should be embraced, which should be updated in line with the times, and which should be left in the ’90s.

Whitney leaves you with three ‘top tips’ for incorporating OKRs into your team, plus answers a few of the audiences hard-hitting question in the Q&A at the end of the talk.

This talk touches on how innovation can come from the bottom and that the upper hierarchy shouldn’t be so quick to shoot down ideas that come from grassroots. Marty Cagan (Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group and previous BoS speaker) recently published an article about OKRs which echos some of Whitney’s points about empowering teams and giving team objectives instead of individual objectives – BoS is often ahead of the curve – check out Marty’s post on svpg.com.

Video, Slides, Sketch Notes, and Transcript below

Rich Mironov, Smokejumper Product Executive

Rich Mironov gave a fantastic talk about Software Pricing at BoS Europe 2019. Yesterday, he joined Mark to answer questions from an audience both at our offices in Cambridge, and online.

Questions answered included:

• If I know how much money my product makes for each customer, how much of that value should I capture?
• How do I understand the pricing units for my software?
• Who should own pricing? Product/Marketing/Sales/CEO?
• How do I move upmarket from relatively low SaaS pricing to big enterprise sales?

Watch the Q&A below

Isa Watson, Founder & CEO, Squad

With a background in chemistry and pharmacology and being an MIT MBA with a focus on finance and economics, Isa’s corporate career started at Pfizer where she was a chemist and data scientist before moving to JP Morgan Chase. Whilst VP, Digital Product & Strategy for Small Business at JP Morgan, Isa observed that the bank branches that were most profitable were ones with the most engaged people.

She took the leap into the world of entrepreneurship when she founded Squad in 2015 having seen an opportunity to help companies understand how to do this better but it was a huge career pivot that saw her leave corporate life to go it alone and pursue this.

She will talk about some of the ways that companies can provide a better environment for humans to work and share how she came to realize that in her startup, she had to bring her ‘best self’ to the business every day – no one else in the business has more impact on the morale and well-being of the team than the CEO.

Video, Slides & Transcript below

Join us on Thursday 20th February for a live Q&A with Rich Mironov on Software Pricing

4PM (GMT) // 11AM (ET) // 8AM (PT)

Register for the Online Q&A

Join us in person in Cambridge, UK

Software is intangible: it doesn’t have weight or size or per-unit manufacturing costs.  But if we’re in the software business, we have to assign units and prices that reflect our value to customers.  And we should be mapping out software pricing strategy before we start development, not the day before product launch.

In his BoS Europe 2019 talk, Rich Mironov – a 40 year Silicon Valley veteran – covers some software pricing essentials
•    Computing (estimating) customer value
•    Pricing units, or what we count and how we scale
•    Segmentation, pricing/value tiers and how upsell works

This live Q&A will give you the chance to ask Rich directly some of the questions you have regarding software pricing and helping you to navigate through the darkness of packages and pricing structures.

If you’re based in Cambridge, UK you can join us at The Bradfield Centre. We’ll be showing a screening of Rich’s talk on the topic at 3pm, after which Rich will be joining us via video link for the Q&A. You’ll get an opportunity to jump on camera and ask Rich your question too!

Register for the Online Q&A

Join us live in Cambridge, UK

15 Talks / 5 FAQs / The BoS Podcast

At every Business of Software Conference we record all the speakers’ presentations so that you can learn from the array of talks on offer to our attendees. We release new talks regularly right here on our blog for you to enjoy free – now and forever. We also welcome back the BoS Podcast – streaming the top BoS Talks straight to your device.  Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor.fm, and more – don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts recommending us to the world!

Below is a round-up of the best SaaS content we’ve released over the past quarter. You’ll find:

• 15 talks from our expert speakers
• 5 BoSFAQs – Answers to some questions we get regularly asked
• Fresh episodes of the BoS Podcast

Below you’ll find great talks from April Dunford (Author, Obviously Awesome), Bob Moesta (Founder, The Re-Wired Group), Laura Roeder (Founder, MeetEdgar), and many many more.

Enjoy these brilliant resources for SaaS entrepreneurs

Professor Clayton Christensen | An Appreciation.

We’re very sad to hear that Professor Clayton Christensen has died at the tragically early age of 67. He was a mensch.

He left a dent in the universe and leaves a hole that cannot be replaced. One of the most lovely people and someone that has had a huge influence on many of us in the Business of Software community. Our thoughts are with his family and many friends.

His life measured well on every dimension.

The Email Game: The Key to Happy Customers // Rahul Vohra, Superhuman

How can you find fun in the usually mundane? Do you design your business software like game designers design games? Rahul Vohra founded Superhuman as the antidote to boring email platforms.  Being able to do things faster, without distraction, and with a goal of inbox zero makes you change your perspective on emails.

Rahul has spoken before at Business of Software in USA 2018 about the product-market fit engine and creating something people love to use. In this talk at USA 2019, Rahul talks us through the different aspects to think about when designing business software and how to make an everyday task exciting and surprising for the user.

Video, Slides and Transcript below

“To be in this incredibly supportive community means everything.”

No, I’m not just making up some ego-massaging marketing guff here – these are real quotes from attendees of Business of Software Conference USA 2019.

BoS USA has and will always be about helping our attendees grow their businesses. We do this in two simple ways:

1. We put software entrepreneurs and practitioners on stage who have smart things to say and insightful stories to tell about building great, sustainable software businesses.
2. We allow plenty of time for you to meet and chat with the other 300 software entrepreneurs and leaders who attend the conference.

But does it work? Is it actually different to other conferences?

Well these people certainly thing so – watch this video to hear why you should attend BoS USA 2020…

#BoSFAQ – Your questions answered by our expert speakers

BoSFAQ: Hiring Outside Your Network and Hiring Remote

We like to help all our followers with a full compliment of educational and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.

With over 200 talks to watch – for free – there is something for everyone; the first step is knowing your problem. That’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers.

If you’re new to BoS you should sign up for our regular, guaranteed content-filled, updates here. When you do, you will receive an email to confirm your subscription. Once confirmed, you can reply to the email with your biggest challenge. We will handpick some talks that might help you address it.

This week we’ve been asked:

Q| How do we ‘Cold Hire’ and find out more about Remote Hiring?

April Dunford, Founder, Ambient Strategy

Sometimes it takes a system design engineer and some cat gifs to really help you see what you’re doing and this funny and informative talk from Boston in 2019 has both! In this BoS Talk April shows you how important positioning is to your product and how you can be doing yourself a great injustice just by positioning incorrectly.

April is an expert marketing practitioner turned executive consultant and author who helps technology companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

What To Expect In The Tech Industry In 2020

For several years, the overriding narrative in tech has been about funding; venture funding, IPOs, and M&A. The obsession with ‘Unicorn’ creation has spread from the US and has become an obsession in the European tech media too.

‘Success’ has become measured by the size of an exit, often with very little thought or consideration to the outcomes for early investors (often washed out by the time a liquidity event happens) or the founders (there are plenty of founders with company exits of hundreds of millions, or billion $ headline exits that leave with very little, or in some cases, nothing).

Leaving aside the lack of financial success in many cases for both founders and the teams they have built, there is increasingly more talk of the effects that driving or riding the rocket ship can have on relationships, mental health and quality of life.

So my prediction for 2020 is this…

2010-2019: The 5 Most Watched Talks From Business of Software Conferences

As I hope you know by now, you can watch over 200 talks from Business of Software online for free. We think it’s probably the best collection of talks about building and growing great software companies available.

Here at Business of Software we often get asked what our favourite BoS talk is. We think that’s an unfair question – our conferences are like our children, and we love them all equally! Having said that, I love a list – and it feels wrong not to celebrate some of the fantastic talks across our conferences over the past decade.

So we’re joining with the great throng of Best-Of-The-Decade lists, with the 5 BoS talks that the internet hive-mind has watched the most over the past 10 years.

Without Further Ado…

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers

We like to help all our subscribers with a full catalogue of interesting and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.

With over 200 talks to watch there is something for everyone – the first step is knowing your problem; that’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers. If this is your first time on the site, you should sign up for our regular, guaranteed content-filled, updates here. When you do, you will receive an email to confirm your subscription. Once confirmed, you can reply to the email with your biggest challenge. We will hand pick some talks that might help you address it.

This week we’ve been asked:

Q | How do companies adapt for growth and find their next breakout product?

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers

We like to help all our subscribers with a full catalogue of interesting and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.  With over 200 talks to watch there is something for everyone – the first step is knowing your problem; that’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers.

This week we’ve been asked:

Q | Where do I start with jobs-to-be-done?