You’re an impostor.

You had a good idea one day. Your good idea turned into a great product. Slowly but surely, you gained customers who paid for your product. Then you started employing people. People who looked up to you, trusted you, followed you. You’re successful – both the business and you personally.

And yet, there’s still that little voice in your head.

You’re an impostor.

Jon Reynolds, Founder, SwiftKey

Jon Reynolds founded SwiftKey, the predictive typing app, in 2008 with university friend Ben Medlock. From launch in 2010 to now, SwiftKey has grown to over 300 million daily users. Jon was CEO of the company from its genesis and guided it from humble beginnings, through to selling the business to Microsoft in 2016.

In this fireside chat, Jon tells the story of SwiftKey – its early days in Cambridge, moving to a USA office, and acquisition. A fascinating story of a vastly successful tech company.

Video & Transcript below

Jason Cohen,  Founder, WPEngine

Jason Cohen is a hugely successful entrepreneur – he is the founder of Smart Bear Software and WPEngine (which recently passed $100m in annual revenue). In this, his 4th talk at Business of Software Conference, he raises the issue of Founder Health. Are you the Hacker News ‘Founder in Pain’? Or maybe you struggle making the big, emotional decisions that necessarily come with running a business? Jason has words of comfort and challenge for you.

Video, Hangout, Slides & Transcript below

BoS Editor: This blog post is written by our friend Leon at IDR Solutions. IDR Solutions are regular attendees at BoS Events – in fact Leon wrote this as a response to our recent Scaling SaaS Marketing Hangout. Join the conversation on Twitter – Leon tweets at @AthertonLeon.

On the recent hangout with Andrus Purde, one of the questions from the Q&A was about pushing users towards the sales team for a demo before letting them try the product.

Mark Littlewood recalled recently receiving emails from a company trying to sell their services where everything about pricing on their website pushed you towards filling in a form to speak to their sales team. Mark was most unimpressed by this.

I think his exact words were “No, not ever!”.

Product Development is the bread and butter of the SaaS Business.

Seeing the seed of your idea grow into something useable and sellable – that’s the stuff of dreams. But the road to a market-ready product is filled with Product Development potholes.

What are the rules you need to abide by when building a great product?

Jason Eckenroth, Founder, ShipCompliant

The 2 years since ShipCompliant’s sale has given its founder Jason Eckenroth plenty of time to think about the process of acquisition. Is it really the big win that it is so often made out to be? What’s more rewarding – the big cash cow, or sticking with the business through potential growth plateaux?

Influencer Marketing is big business but in a very short amount of time it has become so rife with fraud you cannot trust what you read on social media.

On Saturday, the New York Times published a detailed expose of the activities of a Social Media Influencer company called Devumi who sell fake and fraudulent followers and engagement to people desperate for validation and influence. Influencers peddling their shtick to the world are fraudulently misrepresenting their ‘influence’ for financial gain. They’re everywhere these days and they are making money as a result of their fraudulent behavior in all sorts of ways.

How do you spot the frauds and fakes?

3am in the morning – 5 hours to close.

I felt the weight of 17 years of building a business all come down to this moment where I’d lost absolute, complete confidence that I was gonna make the right decision.

Walking away from something I’d built for 17 years. It was my life. And I had no idea what was gonna be on the other side of it.

Jason Eckenroth founded ShipCompliant in 2000. A bootstrapped company, it grew to be a highly profitable market leader – well loved by customers with a NPS of over 70.

Jason sold the business to a private equity house in 2015. He stayed on to lead the new business unit before the acquirer was sold on to another private equity house in 2016 at which point Jason left. A significant financial success for Jason, no question, but…

Would Jason sell again?

Dana Denis-Smith, Founder, Obelisk Support

Consciously bootstrapped from day one, Dana focused early effort on building a community and creating a product that meets a market need.

Early customers and clients were managed on spreadsheets, then a relatively primitive, off the shelf CRM system. She realised the critical piece in making the business successful was managing the relationships between people on both sides of the transaction and it was only when you could understand this dynamic that there was any value in investing in technology at the point that you could not scale without it. Dana shares insights into her quest for product market fit as well as thoughts on ways that all companies can tap into undervalued talent pools.

Video & Transcript below

The First BoS Hangout of 2018 was with Andrus Purde, founder of Outfunnel and ex-Head of Marketing at Pipedrive.

As Head of Marketing, Andrus Purde saw Pipedrive grow from a small startup to over 50,000 customers. Hear his insight in running a marketing team through that transition in this very interesting Q&A.

There are over 170 published talks from Business of Software Conferences available to watch right now.

That’s a lot of talks.

Tens of Thousands of hours worth of Business of Software talks were watched this year. New talks, old talks, short talks, long talks.

Out of those 170, which talks did the good people of the Business of Software Newsletter deem the most useful to them in 2017?

(You can sign up for said excellent Newsletter here)

Here are the 5 most recommended talks from 2017:

Tim Dobson, Senior Account Manager, Formisimo

Tim Dobson is a homeowner and drives a Mercedes. An undeniably true statement. However…

He lives in a van. Voluntarily.

In an attempt to escape the trappings of the life of being young and employed in technology, Tim moved out of his house and into a Mercedes Sprinter – his new Minimum Liveable Product. Having spent 2 years living in a van, Tim talks about the process of scaling his MLP, and whether shipping Van 2.0 is feasible.

Video and Slides below

Get all 18 brilliant talks from Business of Software Europe 2017 immediately.

We’ll be releasing these online one-by-one over the course of the year, but you can get them sent straight to you inbox right now.

You can download the videos so you can watch wherever you are – on a train, plane, that coffee shop you love going to despite the fact it has no WiFi.

Including full length talks from:

Andrus Purde, Founder, Outfunnel

People talk a lot about scaling SaaS, or scaling your hiring or culture. But what about marketing? How does your Marketing need to develop in line with the rest of the business? Andrus talks about the four distinct marketing stages your company will go through as it grows; and how, ironically, just as you get comfortable doing something, you’ll need an entirely different skill set to continue successfully.

As an Estonian, he thinks a lot about conflict, (his words!). In this talk, he likens the four distinct stages of SaaS marketing to the evolution of war.

• Hand-to-hand combat
• Scalable weapons
• James Bond villain stage
• Weapons of mass destruction

Video, AMA, Slides, & Transcript below

Kirsten Butzow, VP Product Management & Marketing, Pragmatic Marketing

No matter what size your organisation, you have almost certainly worked in a team that doesn’t work as effectively as it could. As organisations grow more complex, the problems increase in size and complexity exponentially.

Kirsten describes some of the most dysfunctional teams she has worked with and how even leaf-cutter ants could teach them how to function more effectively.

Slides, Video & Transcript below

How to get a speaking slot at a Business of Software Conference.

While every event has different criteria and some conferences can have hundreds of speakers(!) every conference has some sort of framework to assess potential speakers and their fit with the event they are running.

Business of Software Conference is a little unusual – our challenge is never filling the 15 (max) speaking slots with great speakers, we have over 500 applications a year to speak.

We have to craft a story across all of the talks – and the limited number of speaking slots means we think very hard about every speaker who has a speaking slot.

There are four main things we consider when assessing potential speakers for Business of Software Conference. Other events may have different criteria but if you are applying to speak at any software conference, bearing these four things in mind will make your application stand out at any event. (You might also be interested in Neil Davidson’s original post on this which includes some real examples of speaking applications).

Here is the secret formula for successful conference speaking applications…*

Alex Osterwalder, Founder, Strategyzer

Alex is the author and inventor of Business Model Canvas, a best-selling book and tool to visualise, challenge and reinvent business models. At Business of Software Conference Europe 2017, he led us through an exercise to help identify the jobs your product should be doing to meet the needs and pains of their ideal customer.

Video & Transcript below

One of our favourite parts of BoS Conferences is the Lightning Talks. Lightning Talks are short, 7.5 minute presentations on anything tech-related with a strict set of rules:

• 15 slides
• 30 seconds per slide (they advance automatically)

A simple formula, you might think. But to be informative, entertaining, and concise in such a short amount of time is no mean feat. Timing is everything – it’s much more difficult than you might imagine it to be!

Here are all the lightning talks from the 2016 BoS Conferences.

Jason Eckenroth, Founder, ShipCompliant

Jason shared some of the things he did to make ShipCompliant the successful business that it is. More importantly, he’ll talk about the mistakes he made in selling and what he wished he had realised before he did. He believes ‘Exit by acquisition’ should not be the only manifestation of success for bootstrappers.

Video, Hangout, & Transcript below

The Biennial Thinkers50 2017 ranking was announced last night, and we were not at all surprised to see some familiar faces make the top 50.