SaaStock 2022: Was it worth it for me to go to Dublin?

I participated in SaaStock this week. Now I'll open up all the numbers regarding it and whether it was worth it for me to go to Dublin!

I had already bought tickets to SaaStock while working at Advance B2B. But when I decided to leave and launch my own business, I gave the tickets back.

I didn't buy new tickets until this August.

The main reason I wanted to join SaaStock was to:

1) Get new customers

2) Network with SaaS founders & Venture Capital firms

3) Learn

As a starting entrepreneur, the investment of joining SaaStock was quite big for me:

• Around 1000€ for the tickets
• Around 300€ for flights
• Around 100€ for transportation
• Around 300€ for food & drinks
• Around 70€ for accommodation (I got this one cheap & crashed my old colleague's Airbnb.)

We could have used this money for a lot of different things but decided to use it for SaaStock.

How did I prepare for participating SaaStock?

If you want to get the most out of an event, you need to prepare for it. For me, the preparation for SaaStock meant 2 things:

1) Posting to LinkedIn about the topic and making sure people will recognize my yellow hoodie! (That worked extremely well!)

2) Start discussions with people joining SaaStock & suggest meetings with people using the networking app Brella.

Here was my strategy for getting those meetings:

I combined content creation with that since I wanted to produce a lot of content from SaaStock. I send quite similar messages to everyone. Here's what it looked like:

The reply rates were relatively high for those.

I did one super personalized follow-up message if the person didn't reply. That typically did the trick.

I suggested around 30 meetings and eventually ended up having around 20. (These were the meetings from Brella that were scheduled beforehand. Additional to these, there were a lot of other meetings!)

One big part of making sure that people would join the agreed meetings was to send a message each morning to the people I was meeting with. Just a simple confirmation, mentioning the hoodie and where we agreed to meet:

But what happens after the event – that's crucial

This is something that most people don't use enough time on. You must follow up with people to get the most out of a seminar like this.

I am doing it basically in a few steps:

1) Sending LinkedIn connection requests to the people I met.

2) I prefer sending short video follow-ups to the people met (wearing the yellow hoodie, of course!)

3) Continuing to engage with people who might be great customers/partners / VCs in the future.

Producing content from the event

I chatted with Vainu's Founder, Mikko a few weeks before SaaStock, and he shared with me the idea of interviewing people during SaaStock, so I decided to do this.

I bought a microphone set and did a lot of interviews.

I think there were a lot of great learnings from networking with these people. I also got good content for our social media. We will be posting a lot of it on our platforms in the coming months!

With some of these people, I also agreed to do a full-on podcast episode in the future.

This is for sure a thing that I will continue to do in the upcoming seminars.

Here you can see a few examples of the interviews I did. Super simple & Autenthic. Nothing fancy.  

So that's my take about getting the most out from and event like SaaStock. I will definitely go next year as well!