What To Expect for 1st Timers and Ol’ Timers

With just over two weeks until the 13th Business of Software Conference USA starts in Boston, MA, here are a few of the things that you should expect this year. Whether you are 1st timers or ol’ timers, there is plenty going on and here are a few notes about what you should expect. We want Business of Software Conference to be the best conference you attend in the year, for content, for atmosphere, for attendee experience.

There are some new elements this year so take a look and let us know if you have any questions…

Here’s What To Expect This Year

Claire Suellentrop, Founder/CMO, Userlist.io

When marketing a product, it’s common for founders to focus on the product itself. “Look at our cool features! We help you do XYZ activity, but better!” This is a recipe for getting lost in the noise.

Instead, capturing your customer’s attention requires focusing on her ultimate motivation (“job to be done”), which is to transform her current life-situation into a preferred one.

After this talk, you’ll understand how the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ theory helps SaaS companies create effective positioning — and a proven, step-by-step process for uncovering your best customers’ ‘job-to-be-done’.

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Business of Software Conference USA 2019 Unconference Sessions

One important element of Business of Software Conference are the Monday afternoon breakout sessions. They help people meet each other, offer a break from the talks and a chance to do something different. We have had speed networking sessions and competitive task completion exercises in the past. This year, we want to do something a little different and give people the opportunity to discuss things they care about with others in small, informal groups – our Unconference Sessions.

This is how they will work

Boston Events During BoS Conference

Boston isn’t just the home of your favorite SaaS and software conference. There is plenty going on. This year, you could take the opportunity to see, among others, Baseball – Redsox vs Giants, Lizzo, ZZ Top, David Byrne, King Crimson, The Who, a Downton Abbey Exhibition (!) and lots, lots more.

Here are a few of the things you could do while you are at the conference in 2019.

Greg Baugues, Developer Community Manager, Twilio

Greg Baugues has bipolar disorder and ADHD. He spoke at BoS USA 2013 in an extraordinary talk that has been instrumental in helping start a conversation for many about mental health in tech. Today, he leads the Developer Community team at Twilio. In this short talk, he updates the BoS Community his story, and shares some of the lessons he has learned that go beyond talk, with some thoughts and observations that will help you to support coworkers and others who we suspect might be struggling with their mental health.

Talking is the first step. How can you best support a co-worker who is strong enough to take it?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Matt Wensing, Founder, SimSaaS

Warren Buffett said “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” We’ve all experienced that feeling of immense ignorance as leaders of software businesses. One area of constant anxiety is not really knowing how adjusting or changing one component of our business will impact the whole. Software businesses contain an incredible number of moving parts and variables. How can we isolate and study them? For most of us, it’s a combination of trial and error and learning from others’ mistakes when they’re brave enough to share them. Matt has spent the last 10 years starting and running his own software company (Riskpulse), learning many hard lessons along the way.

This led him to wonder: in addition to stumbling forward and searching for mentors, could he write software to simulate the future of his business? What lessons could it teach him? What could he learn if his computer could run 1,000 different startups in minutes, not years?  What light could a simulation like this shed on the underlying laws (physics) of software businesses? About people?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Impossible unsubscribes

In this week’s excellent newsletter, (you should subscribe if you are smart & cynical enough), we shared this Twitter thread showing why it can take several days to unsubscribe from some newsletters.

Wow.

This September there are 7 returning speakers at Business of Software.

It’s a delight to be welcoming Rahul Vohra, Rita McGrath, Alex Osterwalder, Steli Efti, Matt Wensing, and Patrick Campbell back to the stage at BoS, and to have Claire Lew back to lead a half-day workshop. We don’t welcome speakers back to BoS lightly – we’ve asked them to come back because their talks were top quality and because the BoS community have asked to hear more from them.

In anticipation of their return, we’re taking a look back at some of their previous talks. Read on below to find great talks about:

• Optimising for Product-Market Fit
• Why competitive advantage doesn’t mean what it used to
• Proven ways to increase your sales
• Implementing a pricing process
• How to design organisational culture

and more…

Bill Janeway, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus

There are few people as qualified to talk about the landscape of software investment as Bill Janeway. On joining Venture Capital firm Warburg Pincus in 1988 he built their IT Investment practice, which focussed heavily on Enterprise Software. It’s fair to say that they were pretty successful, investing in companies like VERITAS and BEA…

In this talk, Bill looks at the state of the software investment market and comments on how the move to SaaS has affected the enterprise market.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

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