Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:00:19 All right. Welcome back to another episode of rogue startups podcast. I'm Craig Hewitt. And with me this week is Alex Duma, the founder of sass stock, which is a popular SAS conference. That's in the fall, typically in Dublin, that I've been to twice. And so Alex is on today to talk, you know, about conferences, a little about SAS, uh, and a little bit about coronavirus and how that is, uh, kind of affecting everything. So Alex, how's it going? Yeah. Going well, but yeah, the license to be on the podcast to chat a couple of times a week, not in person, but so I have a conversation now. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. So for folks who don't know kind of much about SAS doc, do you want to give kind of a, a bit of kind of bio on kind of who you guys are in, what you do and kind of who you try to serve, I guess, in the, in the SAS conference space?
Speaker 1 00:01:14 Yeah, sure. So it's been going for, well, this is the fifth year during that time we evolved from a, uh, from a blog, a podcast, and some staff meets up with, I was running it in 2015 to coming up with the idea of sass dolphin, that the initial idea was to be, you know, the first conference in Europe for B2B fast community and bringing everybody together. Uh, we ran that in September, 2016 ended up having about 700 people from 34 different countries worldwide come to that event. So it actually became much more than a European event from that very first event. We have people from India, Australia, Brazil, us and Europe as well. Um, and, um, and yeah, from that point on, we decided to, you know, really kind of focus on the events on connecting with people throughout the kind of five years. We ended up, uh, running five conferences in five continents, uh, and all of these conferences, you know, helping SAS companies get traction and grow and scale typically, you know, uh, very focused on B2B SAS.
Speaker 1 00:02:18 Uh, really, I would say kind of the early growth stage in a company's founders, you know, very strong on the founder side of things, their exact teams and investors. So two people come to learn, you know, from their peers, uh, to, to learn from those a few steps ahead to do business, as you do at conferences to have fun in Dublin where, you know, the flagship is, uh, which we won't be having fun in Dublin this year, sadly. Um, and a lot of VC deals and fundraising it's done, uh, you know, at Sasol at these events. So we've been, you know, a hundred percent pretty focused on being an events business and offering that value through our events, to our community for, you know, for these five years, uh, you know, uh, until now, uh, which we can get into later. So now, but reinventing what sat stock is. So, you know, very much so in front of bring a lot of that value online.
Speaker 2 00:03:13 Yeah. I'd love to dig into kind of how that pivot is gone for y'all. Cause I think a lot of other people are in your boat and even people that listen to this podcast are kind of having to go remote. But I was wondering if you could define for us kind of how you think about, you mentioned like kind of starter or tracks can attractions scale companies that typically come to SAS dock, they're not a hundred million, there are some hundred million dollar a year companies, but, but, but kind of how do you bucket those kind of groups of people?
Speaker 1 00:03:38 Yeah. So, um, so effectively, you know, we, we obviously capture data of who's coming to SAS stop. Uh, generally those that benefit the most, uh, are those with real, real businesses with revenue, we're not, you know, I've been to many, many conferences like web summit for instance, and have great times there, but often you'll meet people that are entrepreneurs or have an idea and they're there for inspiration. And, uh, you know, they, they're currently employed by somebody or, and they're looking to make that leap to be an entrepreneur is run a business. It's typically, uh, whilst I welcome, you know, that sort of bucket or group of people, you know, at Sasol, we don't already see them there. And typically we see people that lost to business have at least 10 employees generally as a minimum. And I would say that probably about 30% of those are looking to get to that first million in revenue.
Speaker 1 00:04:37 And then the sweet spot for us is really between one and 10 million in revenue. And so we capture the data in terms of, you know, what is the revenue of the person that's attending the business that they're running, right. And also the size of the company. So, you know, we get, we get to see whether they're once 10 employees, you know, tend to 25, 50 and above, or, you know, 250 and so on. So as, as the scale gets bigger, as we get to, you know, a thousand plus, you know, we, we see, uh, a much smaller number of companies represented at that stage, really that sweet spot is at that earliest stage. And we had that thing to, you know, to look at what we use from that as well to the conference that we are, because in terms of the content that we deliver, again, not necessarily naming names, but you know, being too many other similar events, right.
Speaker 1 00:05:27 Where the content is, got all the unicorns on stage, right. And then 6 billion valuation or 10 billion valuation and phenomenal stories. Right. But so far removed from the audience that are there, that actually, what can they learn from that person that they can take to their business, you know, today or tomorrow. And so what we do at fat stock is, you know, we have various different stages of content where we have attraction stage where, you know, people are that those that are speaking are, you know, those that are either at the same level, that'd be, maybe you can just got their first 10 customers and sharing that journey, you know, and just go to their first million. And it's much more applicable, much more relevant because it's not that it's not a million miles away from where, where the audience is. So we really kind of came to the, you know, different types of content, different experiences for, for those that are really kind of across the board.
Speaker 1 00:06:20 Even some recently, uh, uh, two years ago we noticed a start up program because really those that were, let's say a one to five and one to 10 employees and, you know, under 250 K ARR, we weren't serving very well for the first three years. And actually we realized that there's a whole load of folks out there that probably need more help, you know, then those that are, you know, the 5 million ARR range or the 10 million ARR range. Right. And we've crafted sort of programs for them to do that. You know, certainly at the, in person conferences, they're now taking this online.
Speaker 2 00:06:55 Yeah. I think it's interesting. Like I look at what we talk about on this podcast and what other conferences I go to. I think it's easy to talk about that beginning stage, you know, getting those first 10 customers, cause it's a lot of the same stuff. And I think this stage kind of maybe where we're at and maybe where you guys are at as a conference is like, you have, you know, we have seven employees, we definitely have product market fit. And now it's like, okay, the things we did from three years ago to now are not the same things we're going to do for the next three years. And so how do you, how do I, as a founder and a CEO think about like, okay, I have to step back from my day to day, I have to go hire this person. And not that person, I have to think about product in a different way.
Speaker 2 00:07:33 So I think it's, I think it's challenging to create content around that, but it's super important because I think a lot of us get to this point and we sit here thinking like, what the hell am I going to do now? Cause like everything I know is applicable or a lot of stuff I know isn't applicable anymore. And so I really appreciated the kind of traction and growth stuff from staff stock. Cause you do have, you know, the CEO of Calendly and Hotjar, and these companies that are doing millions of dollars, but are only a couple of years old. And so they're not so far removed that like you hear from like, you know, Jason fried or Jason Cohen from WP engine and they're super smart and experienced guys, the things they say just aren't applicable to me because they did it so long ago. And from a very different perspective than we're doing it today.
Speaker 1 00:08:18 Yeah. A hundred percent. And that's the challenge, I guess let's say for a conference business specifically, you know, part of the playbook for a conference is you need the Jason, Jason Cohen's to sell tickets. Right. You need some big names to kind of show that the conference has credibility and they draw the crowds, you know, but actually, you know what we're, what we've learned. And what we're seeing is that, as you said, people can go and listen to, you know, both of these amazing founders, but what you learned from that is very difficult often to apply it to your own business where you are, where you're at and what you want to know is, you know, the companies, as he said, maybe the, you know, the CEO of Calendly or, you know, CEO of Hotjar or, you know, those type of companies that are just that little bit, you know, one step ahead of you, but I have done phenomenally well and I'll sharing how they done that, you know, and how like Hotjar for instance, and I don't want to talk. So from David dominant, the CEO of Hotjar on a YouTube channel and how they, he built a revenue engine to get them from zero to 10 million in revenue in two years. Like everybody wants to kind of know how to do that. Right.
Speaker 1 00:09:24 But to get to a hundred million people yet you want to get to a hundred million, I'd love to be a hundred million, but we know that you, you know, first of all, we need, maybe we need to get to five startups or SAS. Right. And we do have these local people that come to our events, maybe some the names of the speakers, but then more look to the content. But we do try and cater for both to try and get the big things in because it's what works, right. We're not one or the other, want a case for everybody.
Speaker 2 00:10:06 So, so pivoting to, to what's going on these days with you guys, obviously coronavirus has changed a lot of what you do and how we all live and, and especially going to conferences. And so I know you guys have taken SAS doc online and remote. I'd love to hear just kind of, you know, state of the union kind of where things stand there, uh, at this point we're recording here in the middle of,
Speaker 1 00:10:25 Of August. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so yeah, so I guess very quick sort of backstory on that, although everybody's aware of coronavirus and what's happening globally, you know, this year, but you know, many industries have obviously been hit by coronavirus, uh, pretty badly. Uh, SAS is actually one industry that seems to be actually booming. And in many ways, not all SAS companies are immune to coronavirus. And again, a lot of, especially if you're an SMB, uh, you know, focus SAS company where your product is maybe not essential that you may have seen, you know, higher turn than usual. Uh, and some SAS companies perhaps would have been, you know, affected by let's say, VCs, not investing or pulling the, you know, funding and so on. So not totally immune, but certainly a stronger in industry than the events industry, which really has been, you know, hit very hard.
Speaker 1 00:11:17 And, uh, you know, I saw all kind of in the beginning of March, we, we sort of see coronavirus, you know, the big problems in Italy, you know, started to spread. So it's coming to the UK and, uh, we saw at the beginning of March, uh, probably about 150 events globally canceled in one week. Um, I don't see that radio on it, you know, uh, gets your attention. Right. And, uh, I initially I thought, well, you know, our first conference, we have four conferences plans this year. First one in Latin America in may, one in San Francisco, uh, into June, then, uh, Asia in Singapore in September. And then our fax one in Dublin in October. And initially it was like, well, it's March, you know, like who knows what's happening, maybe like, we'll be okay to run our offers to then in may, you know, in Brazil because it's near summertime and maybe it'll all be blown over by then.
Speaker 1 00:12:10 But I think like within a week that may be kind of turned into like, actually I think we're not going to pay me to do in person events this year, do it safely for our community, for our team. Uh, it'd be too much of a risk to kind of have that optimism that, you know, it will happen because again, uh, we, we, we, I know I made that decision then very early beginning of March that, Hey, I don't know what's going on right now, but I just kind of feel from what I'm seeing that in, you know, conferences are not coming back this year. Right. And, and perhaps those that are thinking that they're coming back, uh, being wildly optimistic, you know, from what I'm seeing. And I saw like a bucket of people within the industry that were perhaps still are holding out hope that they can do, you know, large scale in person events at some point this year and they haven't canceled their events.
Speaker 1 00:13:05 And, you know, I'm quite surprised about that, but perhaps they have too deep that they either don't read and they can't take themselves out, but we made that call early. And then, you know, when we're looking at a growth year at the beginning of this year, we were looking at, you know, we were planning on 60% growth, which was quite ambitious, but that was the plan, but it was all focused and centered around these global in person events, these mass gatherings, which all of a sudden were banned and, you know, kind of being talked about this, you know, super spreader events and made a decision to take that away. And then it was like, okay, what are we going to do? Because we're taking away our single source of revenue because we were not a multiproduct business, you know, certainly, you know, at this point, so I had, over the years, we've had a number of ideas.
Speaker 1 00:13:52 I thought of a number of other ideas thinking about it. And I just kind of came to me in terms of like looking at our value and how do we bring that online called a ballroom meeting? You know, we have about two hour meeting with our executive team. We went through seven ideas and then we were like, which one can we execute the best, fastest time to value for our customers, fastest time to revenue for us. And we picked initially, you know, online conferences, right? Like we're a conference organizer. We've never done it online. We don't know a lot about online conferences, but we think we've got skills to kind of, you know, transfer air and kind of made that work. So we decided on that left all the other ideas on the shelf. We did the pivot. Uh, we went through March with zero revenue.
Speaker 1 00:14:37 We lost money. Then in the first quarter, because of that week, we would obviously generated some revenue, you know, January and February for our in person events and then made that announcement to our customers. And so on that we're not doing in person, man. I have a lot of groups understanding and support from, from our customers and partners where a lot of that was rolled over into kind of next year. So actually a lot of our expenses for these capsule events were not refunded, but rather rollover today, but we're not getting refunds from venues. And so on.
Speaker 2 00:15:10 Sorry, is it the same for attendees? Are you crediting attendees for like the next year's event? Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:15:15 Exactly. So we're predicting attendees, they're getting access to our online conference. If you bought a ticket, I know that you're getting your credit for next year as well. And so for us, and that went down like very well with a few exceptions right then, and at many other conference businesses, have we said, okay, yes, we will refund everybody. You know, we would have gone out of business. Right. And that's not what we wanted to do. And our partners were very supportive of that as well. So we went with the online conference, we came up with desktop and remote being our first online conference. We decided for it to be a global conference, which I think may like it kind of worked, but also may have been a bit of a mistake because we wanted to get given that way. We're running a global events business.
Speaker 1 00:16:03 We have, you know, communities in all of these different continents. We wanted to cater for them. And also for that to be a bit of a differentiator for us. So some of the other events out there, but really across all the, all of the time zones. And, uh, and to do that, you know, we ended up having a mammoth, you know, at 10 hour online event across two days. So 10 hours a day. And, uh, I think, you know, for any one attendee, that's far too long online, uh, however, um, we w what we did and what we saw from a behavior perspective was, you know, the Europeans were, were that, you know, often, you know, in the afternoons and the U S you know, folks kind of came in, you know, maybe 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM. And you know what, with us until the evening, and even some of the Europeans, they were doing their work during the day, and then we'd log out at 5:00 PM and we couldn't pay for Asia and Australia.
Speaker 1 00:16:59 So we pivoted, we ran that first event, you know, it generated roughly about 360 K revenue significantly down on our in person events. Um, you know, we'd bring, however, the cost is so much lower. You know, the risks would be running up easier in many ways to kind of set that up. And we did get a new audience as well as existing, uh, you know, sat, stock, um, uh, delegates coming there. So being aligned, it, you know, it lowers the barrier to the people to attend. Because like, as you think you've been to our event, your Dublin, you had to fly there and you have to leave your family. You have to leave your business for a week, you know, and there's all these costs associated, but now we're kind of, you know, all these people that could never attended a festival, then person have that opportunity to do it for the safety of their own home right then.
Speaker 1 00:17:54 And so that there are many positives, but certainly what we've seen is much more than 50% lower revenue from this was offers today. But now we have three more online conferences for the rest of the year, two regional ones, and we're replacing our flagship one with <inaudible> online in October, um, and taking a lot of our learnings from the, uh, from the first online conference to improve this, uh, event and experience, for instance, one example. So we did a retro, uh, you know, afterwards where effectively, you know, what works, what didn't work when we did the round Robin with that group of team and came up with a whole list of what works and what didn't work. Uh, one of the things we're adapting is we're not doing two days and 10 hours per day, and trying to please everybody across the world. And in fact where we're running it across four days and the first day, each day will be no more than four hours per day. So it's a bit more bite sized that people commit to that. So it was one of the examples of the learnings that we have.
Speaker 2 00:18:58 So you said that like pro uh, revenue is down quite a bit like half or so, or I think you mentioned of going to the, in person events, but profitability, like on a per conference basis, like, obviously your costs are, I don't know what they were, but much lower. Like, did you guys do okay. In terms of like the health of the business with
Speaker 1 00:19:17 Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, revenue was, I mean, given that, that was our first online event. I mean, it gives down in prices, but what event do you compare that to in our portfolio? So certainly if you need to Dublin, Dublin is a multimillion, you run an event remedy perspective. And then if you look at our events, our in person events in general, certainly we'd normally be looking at, you know, 30%, uh, you know, probably biology, uh, you know, on that. And with, uh, online, uh, we were looking at 80% gross profit margin athletes. So that's what we have. And then there's me then as a, as a CEO is not, I'm not the only person running the business, but then all of a sudden seeing our profit margins up and seeing that this, you know, as a business model is actually more interesting to me then, you know, the huge risk risk that we take with the in person events and the huge cash outflow, outlay, uh, the upfront cash outlay that we put, you know, it's all of these events.
Speaker 1 00:20:19 So, you know, there's a lot of risks that we do. It stops the cash out of the business, but online events, it doesn't do that. And it's super profitable by the revenue is lower. So looking at that and thinking about that as a business model, I mean, certainly we we've got the short term decision, which could be, could become long term. And I kind of hope it does in many ways in that obviously because of Corona, you know, the next 12 months, all of our events are online, which then means that we can focus on building a much more kind of profitable business. And, but we do want to come back in October to, to Dublin. Again, you know, it's a factor of events, a lot of love into that. And then over the five years, it's a great experience. And we want that to come back if we can, but it's still uncertain if we can or not.
Speaker 2 00:21:08 I think one of the big questions of anybody that goes to online conferences or that runs them is, is engagement. And that intangible kind of like hallway track and having drinks, and especially in Dublin, you're like, how have you guys tried to counter the lack of that in an online setting?
Speaker 1 00:21:24 Yeah. You can, in some ways, and you just can't in others. Right. And so I think what we certainly what we learned and through the discussions, you know, when we did the first event, uh, it was speaking to like, um, you know, we use a pop in and speak to the founder, Johnny, uh, from hop in there and it's effectively, we have to treat this as not a replacement frame person, right. It's not unlike the like replacement, it's a different experience, right? People are going to get different experience and you can't recreate, you know, necessarily bumping into people, you know, in the hallways, you know, you don't, you don't have like you having Dublin, you know, that opportunity to have a chat with Patrick Campbell, you know, on the expo, uh, who for, or, you know, steady FTE or someone. Right. And just to bump into these people across Dublin, and you're going out for dinners with small groups of people.
Speaker 1 00:22:15 Like these are the things that you can't really do. However, I mean, certainly with the technology. Um, and again, like with hop in, I mean, one thing that they, they they've done from a networking side of things. So effectively, if you look at what value is online and via kind of like hoping kind of bringing in, right. There's the opportunity to kind of learn from the content that we put on. So that's the remains. And actually maybe in some ways it's an, it is, you know, you're sitting at home, there's no distractions. Uh, you know, you're not the back of a huge kind of hole with a lot of ways and you know, the speakers really far away and you can't see it, you've got the speaker, you know, uh, looking at you in the eyes almost right. You can't see you, but looking at you and you might be able to, you know, take a lot more kind of out of that, then, you know, we, we have the kind of the network and side of things will happen, have done with their networking tool is effectively a call it a bit like chat roulette, you know, but for business to recreate that serendipity, you know, bumping into random people effectively, you know, you can go into the networking area, press connect you with somebody randomly, and you might then get paired with somebody that, you know, you joined with a smile on your face because you know that person, or it might be somebody that you don't know, then you've got five minutes to kind of like, you know, speed network with them.
Speaker 1 00:23:39 And that's what they're, they're, they're sort of prying. And then we've got the expo. And again, it's very different experience. That was the things that we're looking at for me online is where we, you know, we do a pub crawl in Dublin and we're looking to recreate that online, online. So you you'll have to attend to figure out how are we doing? And, uh, and additionally, um, I think one of the great things about Tasktop and Dublin is that, yeah, you run the conference so that during the day, but then there's still as much value sometimes even more, you know, doing the evening where it spills out to the dinners and then, you know, the parties which are hosted by our various partners. So we're going to be doing some networking events in the evening. Again, it will be online, but what we'll look to do is try to recreate some of that Dublin magic, but to do that online as well. And yeah, these are some of the things that we're looking at. So we know we can't, we create, you know, in person and it's going to be different, but what we're looking at doing is still connecting people, trying to bring, you know, smiles on their faces, uh, you know, as we do it, um, they can learn, they connect and they can have great time at the same time. So it's going to be that way.
Speaker 2 00:24:55 You mentioned that you're, you're moving from kind of a single global conference to breaking them up a little more regionally. Now, what kinds of things do you, are you hoping will, will kind of be a benefit of those smaller, more regional conferences? Like where are you, will you be able to folk, I mean, timezone zone obviously is one, and I know you're breaking it up over multiple days in the same time zone, but what other kinds of things are you hoping to achieve with that move? Cause I, I look at it and say like, it's online, everybody should be able to access it all at the same time. You could have an eight hour conference, but so I'm intrigued of what, what you think the, like the potential benefit and the goal of, of these regional online conferences.
Speaker 1 00:25:32 Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of benefits, right? Certainly if we look at the benefit to that community, uh, for instance, that regional community, one of the reasons that we, we, we actually, so we have the global conference in Dublin, but we were doing the regional conferences in person as well. So we are continuing to do that, but doing that online now. Uh, and therefore, so if we have like SAS remote or EMEA online, you know, in October, which was a replacement for the Dublin one, yes. Anybody from across the world can attend that. And in general, you know, the content for that it's applicable SAS founders, right? So if you have a satisfying up from Brazil or your Assana from Singapore, you know, that content is relevant because of what you're learning is applicable to your business. Right. But what we're able to do with the regional events is we kind of give it more thought leadership, you know, opportunities to, uh, to regional founders that perhaps wouldn't necessarily be on the global stage and they get, they give a more kind of local perspective.
Speaker 1 00:26:36 So for instance, with SAS, which is happening on a, on the 1st of September, most of the Brazil is a huge country, right? And actually it's the will be the majority, uh, makeup of the audience for SAS. And they've got quite a good sassy in there. I've been of going there for the last sort of few years, attending various events. And we run an event in there, a person there last year, and now it's online. They've got a number of companies that are doing, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 30 million ARR. And they're all focused within that market. They're not sending in the U S they're not sending in Europe. They don't need to be because Brazil was a huge country. And so they do things differently and therefore some of the stories that they can tell. And so maybe all the stories they can tell about scaling their business or applicable to that market and how they practice that market, what they're doing in that market.
Speaker 1 00:27:24 And often on a global event, you know, um, and you get, and we have, you know, like the CEO ZoomInfo, or, uh, the CEO of Clary or whatever, and, you know, you get these us entrepreneurs and perhaps sometimes it's a bit more us centric kind of viewpoint that they have, but actually by doing it regionally, we can have a LATAM centric viewpoint. We can have an AsiaPac centric viewpoint. So from a content where we're delivering content that matters for SAS businesses, that in some ways can still be applicable to all SAS companies, but he's much more focused on that region. Uh, and there therefore is more benefit to those founders from that region, um, from that respect. And then additionally, like to us, there is a benefit to us in that we have a, a network of partners that really kind of fund sat stock through, you know, sponsorship, right?
Speaker 1 00:28:18 So we get paid through sponsorship or people buying tickets, moving online, you know, the ticket price, I mean, ticket prices, plus your prices, the drops, because our costs have dropped. So we, we put that back to our community. And so we certainly have raised prices and the prices are very low to attend those events. Uh, our partners, some of our partners are active, very used to regions, and they may want to, uh, if we're doing an event in, uh, Asia Pacific, they may be interested in that an immediate event. And therefore we can have a group of partners that we know that are interested in the Asia Pacific region, and therefore will, uh, you know, we'll get sponsorship for that. And therefore we're getting revenue for that. And therefore we can create an event that serves that community and plus generates revenue for us. So people are interested in these specific market segments of markets sort of make sense.
Speaker 1 00:29:14 So if we do a big global one often again, I mean, one of the challenges we found with festival remote without being a global event on U S partners, many of them were only selling in the U S right. And then European partners, you know, it's, they're looking for certain demographics and if you're doing one big global online event, how many people are coming from, you know, from Northern Europe? And you're like, well, I think you know this much, and it's kind of, and to promise that partner, that you're going to get this many people from Northern Europe, but if you're doing Latin America only, we can say, well, a hundred percent of people from Latin America, you know, almost anyway, uh, you know, we'll be in attendance. And so it's easier from a sponsorship setting perspective. So, you know, say what sort of audience and talking about if it's going to be the
Speaker 2 00:30:00 Hmm. Gotcha. Gotcha. That's interesting. I'd like to kind of circle back to, you know, March, March, April, kind of, when you were looking at that kind of what was coming and made the decisions that you made as a team and kind of how that whole process went. And I know it's probably tough to generalize, but, but maybe kind of try to pull out some things that you all did well or kind of thought through, and maybe some things you didn't do well that, that other folks that are listening that maybe aren't conference event conference companies, but, but are founders and have to pivot and have to deal with the shit that we all get some days that you think you might be able to say, we did this good. We definitely screwed this up. Uh, you know, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1 00:30:39 Yeah, yeah. Thinking about the things that we did well, things that helped us through these one was that we acted fall. So we're using the methodology, uh, you know, as a business. So in terms of when we are expressing our, our rocks or our OKR, you know, we are, um, uh, what we did sort of back then, uh, and maybe the timing was right, because in terms of the beginning of the quarter that we knew that we kind of had to pivot. So we, we had all kinds of cool to the planning day, which we did online via zoom and using Miro. Uh, and we were able to kind of collaborate and we had the exact team on the first day and then the whole company, or on the second day, and on the first day of that quarterly planning day, uh, we, you know, a large part of that was obviously, you know, selecting, what should the com what should our priorities be?
Speaker 1 00:31:34 And it was actually very clear that, you know, the priority was that we needed, you know, to, to choose this online conference. And so we had one single goal for that quarter, which was SAS dot Ramon. You know, we had the single revenue goal from that. And then during that fully planning day, we worked out in terms of what were all the priorities, you know, per department we needed and what were the tasks of those department. And so we worked in breakout groups on zoo, uh, to kind of, you know, work on these and then put them up on to, uh, you know, uh, we're using a platform called Alliance if I manage our tasks and priorities. So basically within 48 hours, once we sort of presented that to the team the next day and got, and gotten input, you know, we had our plan for the next 90 days.
Speaker 1 00:32:20 Our single focus, you know, is, uh, is SAS dot remote. And everybody in the business is working on that. And everybody has a role to play to kind of work on that. So that was one thing that worked really well. So we were sort of fast in planning. Uh, and then we were fast in execution because then we were working in the kind of sprint methodologies across various teams. And so each team would then do that, you know, there's per sprint retros and say, this is, this works, this didn't work. Uh, and we were able to change tasks. So for instance, again, having that adaptability, something that we saw initially was that our positioning was I think, role for, to promote. And, uh, you know, we chosen the kind of positioning effectively. We'd taken the, the, the in person conference and we put it online.
Speaker 1 00:33:06 And then we, we, we had a tagline and said, stop, you know, love online. Right. And then after, after a few weeks and looking at this, and I was like, Oh, first of all, you know, this strap line really, like, what does it say to anybody that doesn't know what that stuff is? If you don't know the livestock, then, like, you don't know what the answer is, right. So it's not, it's not great positioning. And then it's talking about us, but it's not talking about what value that we're offering to people. So, so we, we adapted, we, you know, I took some learnings from, uh, some other events that I was attending. And then we changed the strap line and positioning to offer discussions internally to adapt to the alive and thrive. Uh, and from that, that much more of that resonated much more to what was happening globally and what was happening to our community.
Speaker 1 00:33:52 And people responded much better to that. So that, that was our ability to find of, you know, see that what we've done initially, wasn't really working, uh, and then, you know, have some discussions internally and kind of change that. Um, so, so that, that was good in terms of, uh, we also, I think, you know, um, you know, changed our pricing as well. Like, you know, getting feedback and seeing kind of what works and what didn't work. We having, you know, your backs against the wall and, you know, going through the crisis, you know, for the first time, you know, for us and for everybody in the scene, you know, never been through pivots, I've never been through a global pandemic, right. I've never been through, you know, the company, uh, you know, in trouble. Uh, it's amazing what that can do for motivation. Right.
Speaker 1 00:34:41 And I probably like, we were very transparent. So again, transparency in these situations, I think it's super important. And, uh, the team sort of, you know, really appreciates it that, and I saw, uh, perhaps the best motivation I've ever seen, you know, from the team during, during that period at, to kind of help us achieve that goal when everybody was driven. And it, it did take a couple of weeks after we launched, you know, we were having conversations, but we hadn't generated any revenue. And so people's motivations were starting to dip and like, you know, Hey, we're not having conversation, but nobody's buying, but then trust the process. And, uh, and a lot of like, you know, I, I think motivational management that, but, uh, but we did have a process in place to kind of trust it and it did come, which also great.
Speaker 1 00:35:35 But yeah, I mean, having that motivation, having everybody owning a responsibility, which will work towards that one single goal, I think it was like super key for us. And there, wasn't this sort of these distractions now, as we go into this quarter, you know, we do have like a couple of, not everybody is focused on the same goal. So we have a couple of people that have some different goals and actually then we have, we also, you're seeing perhaps slightly different, um, uh, I think, uh, different responses and different, uh, I think sort of results really in, in terms of, you know, what we saw in last fall, so different levels of motivation across the business. So there's still challenges to buy in and sign out, but I could definitely, um, you know, advocate for you, you know, having the main thing, you know, being the main thing and everybody working on the main thing and not having, you know, different kind of like side projects and so on and too many things going on. Right. So having one goal, a quarter having fewer priorities as possible, uh, you know, per quarter, and then everybody working on those, you know, that definitely was, uh, was beneficial.
Speaker 2 00:36:50 That's cool. I would imagine for a lot of us, there's just some kind of let down at this point, too, right. It's like, we all worked so hard to get through that, you know, March, April, may timeframe. Now it's over, we're faced with kind of whatever, whatever we're faced with right now in terms of business and coronavirus. And yeah, I think a lot of us are just kind of tired right now, so I can imagine that's what you're seeing a little bit.
Speaker 1 00:37:12 Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. I think, you know, everybody gave everything, you know, and then do a lot of conversations about after that and, you know, not having the same energy, but you know, for the rest of, we've got another three events where we've just given everything for the last 90 days and that event all over again. So three, you know, it's a big ask, so we will be seeing that issue. And it's something that we kind of try to manage and that, that has impacted know resolve initially, as we've been slow off the Mark, you know, this quarter, we're going to pick that up again now.
Speaker 2 00:37:47 Cool, cool, Alex really interesting story. I think I've learned a lot, uh, that's applicable to everybody, whether you're in the events space or you're not, I think as a, you know, a founder story and, and kind of story of perseverance and adaptation and pivoting, it's, it's super interesting. Um, thanks for being so candid and sharing everything about what you guys kind of have been through and where you are. <inaudible> dot com for folks that want to check out more about the events and kind of whatever form they're taking. Uh, and is there a place for folks to follow you online personally?
Speaker 1 00:38:16 Yeah. I mean, I try to be active as much as I can on space Alex Duma, or find me on LinkedIn. I would say there are my two most active platforms, unless you want to see photos of what I eat on Instagram. Probably not
Speaker 2 00:38:33 Cool, Alex, thanks so much. Yeah. Thanks for
Speaker 3 00:38:36 The most part.
Speaker 0 00:38:37 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, that over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
