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

Rahul Vohra, CEO/Founder, Superhuman

We had a fantastic Q&A session with Rahul Vohra of Superhuman last week. Rahul gave a fantastic talk at BoS USA 2018 about how Superhuman built a method of optimizing for product-market fit. Rahul’s method has been widely discussed in the startup world, and with so many people wanting to implement it we jumped at the chance to chat with Rahul. We were joined on the Q&A by an audience at our office in The Bradfield Centre, who asked some great questions.

Watch the hangout below

Q&A with Rahul Vohra, 9th January, 12.30pm ET

Did you know that you can measure Product-Market Fit?

Not only that, you can optimize for it. When building Superhuman (the world’s fastest email experience), Rahul Vohra and his team built a Product-Market Fit Engine – a way to measure and optimize for PMF.

In his talk at Business of Software Conference USA 2018, Rahul laid out the framework they used to improve Superhuman’s Product-Market Fit. The talk got an incredible response at #BoS2018, with many attendees deciding to implement the process at their own companies.

Join us at 12:30pm on 9th January 2019 for an online Q&A with Rahul Vohra about The Product-Market Fit Engine.

Guest blog post from Mark Stephens, CEO/Founder of IDRsolutions…

I have always said that Business of Software is an unusual conference.

Everyone shuts their laptops to focus on the talks and speakers generally turn up because they want to hear the other speakers and hang out with the attendees.

And when you return from a BoS conference, things change.

As long time followers of Business of Software will know, apart from Lemmy, we believe that Mr Richard Paul Astley, is one of the greatest musicians of all time. You might *think* you know but I guarantee you do not know where that links to.

It was one of those days in the office when some things weren’t working and almost all of my time was spent jumping between ‘real work’ and dealing with tech support. Inevitably, we had to keep chat on all the time and decided to see how many song references we could slip into the exchange without affecting the meaning of the conversation.

I’ve changed some details – removed name of company and support guy and for the record, they ended up solving the problem in the end.

How many can you spot?

Business of Software Conference USA 2018 – Some Highlights

The 12th Annual Business of Software Conference USA took place in Boston, MA, last month – October 1-3. What an incredible few days. A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees who made it one of the most memorable ever, for all the right reasons. The talks will be edited, published and transcribed in the next month or so but until then, here are some of the notes, blog posts and other highlights from some of the attendees.

Read on to see Slide Decks, Highlights, and Notes from BoS USA

Bruce McCarthy, President, Boston Product Management Association

A few weeks ago I sat down with Bruce McCarthy, Founder of Product Culture & President of the BPMA, to chat about Bruce’s favourite topic – Product. Specifically, we talked about:

• Bruce’s fantastic talk from BoS Europe 2018 about the importance of cultivating a Product Culture
• How to think entrepreneurially inside a big organization
• Why you should always be looking to the horizon beyond the one you can see
• Why Bruce loves BoS Conference
• Bruce’s upcoming talk about Prioritization at BoS USA 2018 next week

Watch the hangout replay below

Chris Savage, CEO/Co-Founder, Wistia

Recently, Wistia turned down the offer to sell the company and instead took on $17m of debt – seemingly a strange move. Why? Because Wistia are in it for the long run – they want to run their business their way.

We spoke to Chris Savage, Wistia’s CEO & Co-Founder, about the thought process behind the decision, how it affects their future planning, and the pressure of taking on that responsibility as a CEO. We also discussed some of the growing pains Wistia faced as it’s grown over the past few years, and why Chris thinks taking time out of the office is so valuable

Watch the hangout replay below

Business of Software Conference USA 2018 is under 2 weeks away.

As always, the #BoS2018 schedule is designed to help Software Founders, CEOs, and Product Managers lead with confidence and grow a better business. Over 12 years of Conferences we’ve seen over 200 talks given by some brilliant speakers. This year at BoS USA there are 8 returning speakers.

Read on to find out who is returning and to watch their previous knockout talks.

Supporter Profile: Software Secured

We’re profiling the companies that are supporting BoS USA. Today, meet Software Secured – experts at Continuous and Traditional Application Security testing, who help your applications launch securely with unparalleled accuracy.

Meet the team who will be in Boston…

What makes Business of Software Conference speakers so smart?

Like most smart people, they read a lot. We always ask which books have had the biggest influence on their business lives and what they are reading now. It’s fascinating to hear what books other people read and great to see so many BoS speakers appearing on the list. This year’s book list is here. (There is more diversity in the book list than the speaker walk on music choices this year by the way – any guesses as to most requested walk on music this time round?

A great reading list.

Seth Godin on Making Software

Seth Godin spoke at Business of Software Conference USA last year to share some of the many lessons that he has learned in his 33 years in the software industry.

You can watch the talk here.