17 Talks From Seasoned Entrepreneurs

At every Business of Software Conference we record the talks so that you, the great people of the internet, can join in the feast of learning that our attendees get to gorge themselves upon. We release new talks regularly right here on our blog.

Below, you’ll find the 17 videos we’ve published so far this year. Speakers include Rahul Vohra (Founder/CEO, Superhuman), Wade Foster (Founder/CEO, Zapier), Jane Austin (Director of Product Design, Babylon Health), Jared Spool (Founder, UIE), and many more.

We’ve grouped them into 6 categories, for you to browse easily:

1. Leadership
2. Product & UX
3. Building Teams
4. Creativity
5. Sales & Marketing
6. Business Models

Come, join a multitude of SaaS entrepreneurs at the great watering hole of knowledge to learn from some incredible teachers.

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.

“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

David Barrett, Founder/CEO, Expensify

Growth is often measured in terms of market share, customers or revenue, with the onus on marketing and sales to grow the business. Expensify however, has become the fastest-growing ERP software in the world not by growing the sales or marketing teams, but by developing a uniquely user-driven product. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Expensify Founder/CEO David Barrett shares his insights on building product-led growth, and what it means to create a product so engaging that it can spur and maintain its own growth organically.

Video & Slides below

Carl Ryden, CEO/Founder, PrecisionLender

Carl Ryden has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conferences for a long time. His company PrecisionLender has been seeing incredible growth over the past few years, providing a huge amount of value in the banking sector. In this talk, Carl talks about how PrecisionLender use AI to offer a valuable service to their customers, and what he sees as the future of AI.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

1-2 July 2019, April Dunford UK Book Launch Tour

We are delighted to be partnering with the brilliant April Dunford for 2 Book Launch events in the UK in July to celebrate the release of her book ‘Obviously Awesome: How To Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It‘.

Join us for an evening of networking and learning, with a talk on Product Positioning from April Dunford. There’ll be plenty of time for Q&A off the back of the talk too, so come armed with questions for April. All attendees will receive a copy of the book – which is fantastic.

Read on for details of the events and to get your hands on tickets

Alison Coward, Founder, Bracket

Hiring a group of talented people is difficult. Making that talented team work together well, now that’s even harder. In this talk from BoS Europe 2018 Alison Coward gave some great advice on how you can design the way a team communicates and works together to ensure you get the most out of everyone on the team. If you’re looking to improve your team’s collaboration, this is must watch.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Who Comes to Business of Software Conference USA?

If you are curious about who comes to Business of Software Conference USA, be curious no more.

We’re as bored as you probably are about signing up for an event then getting endless marketing emails from companies associated with an event that we didn’t ask for or want. In this age of growth hacking and list building, conferences are rich pickings for unscrupulous operators who use attendee lists to build marketing lists for themselves or others. Last year we even had approaches from an organization that wanted to sell us our own attendee list, complete with emails and phone numbers… quite the surprise considering we NEVER share email addresses of attendees with anyone and our attendee list is for the exclusive use of attendees to make connections at the event.

When people ask us, as potential attendees, speakers, supporters, who comes to the conference, we don’t think it is right to send an attendee list. We do want you to know the type of people that come however.

To give you an idea, here’s the breakdown of attendees by company size and a list of job titles by company size for BoS USA.

Forget the talks, forget the people, the highlight of the conference for me personally was receiving this…

Business of Software Conference Europe 2019, 11-12 April 2019, Cambridge UK

This April we’re running our 18th Business of Software Conference. Over the past 13 years we’ve spoken to hundreds of founders and CEOs of software and SaaS companies looking to scale their business. We’ve seen a common set of problems and hurdles that they encounter during the growth stage.

This year at BoS Europe we’re answering some of the most common questions we see scaling companies struggling with. We’ve brought in speakers who have experience taking companies through these problems, either as CEOs/Founders scaling their own companies, or as consultants helping SaaS companies to take the leap into growth.

Here are the most common questions growth companies have – find some answers at BoS Europe

Wade Foster, Founder/CEO, Zapier

We had a fantastic conversation with Wade Foster about remote working yesterday. Wade is the Founder and CEO of Zapier, a 200+ person company who’ve “never spent a dime on an office”, as Wade says. All their employees work remotely, distributed across the world. Wade has an extraordinary amount of insight into what it takes to make remote work successful and in this Q&A session we mined the depths of his knowledge, discussing hiring, onboarding new staff, how to manage employee benefits across countries and cultures, standup meetings, and how to communicate effectively across the company.

This hour of Q&A is full of useful insights and practical advice from someone who has spent years iterating on and improving the process of working remotely. Watch, listen, and learn.

See the hangout & sketch notes below

Join us on Wednesday 6th March for a live online Q&A with Wade Foster on Remote Working, CEO/Founder of Zapier

Wade Foster and his co-founder started Zapier (it rhymes with ‘happier’) back in 2011 during a hackathon. Now, the company has over 200 employees and no office. Zapier is a fully-remote company, and has no intention of changing that.

Join us for a Q&A where Wade will share his processes for running a fully remote organization – how Zapier goes about hiring and onboarding their employees, how they run meetings, and how they work to continuously improve their culture.

The Q&A will also be shown live in The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge UK, preceded by a screening of Wade’s talk from BoS Europe 2018.

Scroll down to join us Online or at The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge, UK.

Jared Spool, Founder, UIE

Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. What do we believe – our gut or the data? In the world of KPIs, some practices, like growth hacking Monthly Average Users (MAUs), have hurt the online experience. What can help designers have better instincts? What do you really need to help management interpret data and create analytical experiments that provide design insights? This talk will show you:

• What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate, actually tell us about our users’ experiences
• Why techniques like a money-left-on-the-table analysis can show us how metrics impact design
• Why asking, ”Would you recommend this?”, is a bad way to measure brand engagement

See the Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Paul Kenny, Founder, OceanLearning

Paul Kenny is no stranger to the Business of Software Conference stage. A sales coach with experience working with software companies including Redgate and StackExchange, Paul has a huge amount of experience and insight to share on the process of selling your software. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Paul talked about the important things to get right to set your company up well to turn your software into money.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below