This overview is part of a series of track spotlights we are doing. You can read up on Rocket Fuel, our brand new track, SaaS.City, Growth and Scale.

This is the SaaStock track devoted to the early days when the dreams are big, the naivety unsheltered and the possibilities limitless. Most things that concern the minds of growth and scale founders are a far away abstract notion at this stage. What matters now is focusing on a couple of fundamental things like customer research, asking the right questions and relentlessly searching for product-market fit.

Learning to say No is one of your most important skills here.

If you are in the early days, these are a few sessions from our traction stage you are not going to want to miss. 

Nine steps to better user onboarding

James Gill shares lessons learned over years of experimenting with product onboarding, including examples of companies who are doing it right. From setting expectations on your marketing site, to breaking down your signup flow, to empty states in your product, James highlights key steps to help you onboard new users successfully. GoSquared have onboarded 10s of thousands of successful users, and also helped advise thousands of other companies on how to onboard new users into their own products. This talk consolidates these learnings and delivers in an entertaining and informative way.

James is the design-obsessed CEO of GoSquared – a marketing and sales software platform driving growth at over 1,000 successful businesses around the world.

F*** customer feedback

As your SaaS business grows and you gain more customers, the demands on your product increase dramatically. Building the wrong things has an impact on growth & valuation but in a sea of opinions, ideas & half-baked feature requests how do you know what to build next? Should we ignore customer feedback or is there a better way?

Hannah Chaplin is the CEO at Receptive – a SaaS company helping other B2B SaaS businesses build winning products by collecting & acting on product feedback.

You’ll land where you’re headed: Building a financial plan which helps you manage your business

A good financial plan tries to describe your operational activities and derives the financial implications out of it. As an investor who likes enterprise type products, we often work with less marketing and more “sales funnel” driven models. I’ll explain how we start by modeling the sales force, ramp up and efficiency, implement assumptions on sales pipeline, customer retention and upselling to come to MRR, the necessary KPIs and an integrated cashflow forecast.

Markus Grundmann got hooked on startups when he joined one during the .com boom. After the bust, he worked in R&D teams at SAP and IBM, then later ventured into consulting. As a consultant, he focused on remodelling technology organizations within German blue chips. He is investing mainly in SaaS businesses since 2011 and is a Partner at SaaS VC fund Senovo. Among others, he has backed the teams behind Falcon.io, tado, Dedrone and Quantilope.

Seven marketing lessons learned from building two successful SaaS startups

Get hands-on advice on how to build marketing from scratch and what to prioritise in your startup including lead gen, sales & marketing alignment, whom to hire and when. Gain insights into marketing strategies and processes that drive revenue, learn what to prioritise and work within budget constraints.

Lidia Lüttin is the VP of Marketing at Happeo, a B2B SaaS startup, providing a digital workplace platform that brings together intranet, collaboration, and social networking into one unified solution. At Happeo, Lidia is scaling marketing and driving the international expansion. Prior to Happeo, Lidia was CMO at Bynder, where she grew the marketing team from 0 to 23 people, and built up an inbound demand generation engine that sourced 80% of revenue and helped growing ARR to 8-digits.

America First, the Irish way: Capital, counsel and connections

Deciding to target the US market first is not easy, but not impossible. Maeve Kneafsey shares her experience of entering the market covering the journey and their favourite hustles along the way. She proves that even with a small amount of funding, it’s possible. She will share:  

  • Why the US is still the land of opportunity
  • The best low/no cost tricks to bootstrap your way into Silicon Valley
  • Finding and making the most of Accelerators
  • Winning supporters (your champions)
  • What “paying it forward” really means
  • Lawyering up
  • How VC’s can give you more than money
  • Secrets from the SaaS ecosystem
  • Knowing when to network and when to not

Maeve Kneafsey, Co-Founder and CEO of CloudKPI, is a serial entrepreneur with 4 startups to her name. She co-founded Ireland’s first dedicated digital marketing agency in 2001 (Amas, exit 2003). She went on to found and successfully build digital strategy and analytics agency Elucidate over a 15 year period before launching her first SaaS Fintech solution, Marketfinder.

In 2016 Maeve and her co-founder Brenda Jordan made their first move into the US market which resulted in CloudKPI launching an analytics solution to automate the formulation of cross-business data-driven insights.

Building my SaaS startup – from $0 to $10K MRR in one year – without leaving my day job at Buffer

In 2017 Maxime Berthelot started PixelMe with his friends Tom Benattar and Jérémie Doucy, as a side project. One year on, it’s still a side project but it has achieved $10K MRR. In this keynote, Maxime shares all the steps, tips and tricks they learned from their year of experimentation. If you’re wondering how to start your side project this is where you’ll get some great takeaways!

Maxime is Product Manager of Growth at Buffer and Co-Founder of PixelMe. Max, along with his co-founders, have done an incredible job of validating and launching their concept to the world — their approach to generating interest and initial signups is a textbook example of a low-budget growth strategy for B2B. If you’re thinking about launching something new — whether a side project or a full-scale startup — there’s a lot you’ll learn from this story.

You can see the full agenda for all talks that will be on the Traction stage as well as all other tracks.