Bootstrapping a SaaS conference: lessons from SaaStock's founder

Executive overview

Building a conference with no brand, no audience, and no capital is a genuine bootstrapping challenge. Alex Thuma built SaaStock from a blog into one of Europe's largest SaaS conferences by sequencing community first, sponsors second, and tickets third.

The core insight: sell sponsorships before you sell tickets — sponsors fund the event; tickets fund the growth.

Building the foundation before launching

• SaaScribe blog launched 2015; recruited expert contributors without pay
• Podcast followed three months later; still running eight years on
• Local meetups came next; face-to-face demand confirmed appetite for a larger event
• Early podcast guests and blog contributors gave credibility to approach sponsors
• First sponsor commitment (Chart Mogul) came from a casual conference conversation — secured verbally, then followed up once date and venue were confirmed
• Competing sponsor (ProfitWell) closed one month later; 35 sponsorship deals total in year one
• Revenue split was roughly 50/50 sponsorship and tickets in year one

Getting to the first event

• Tickets went on sale in January after Christmas; 37 sold on day one
• That spike validated demand and gave runway to build for nine months
• Cash flow was tight — deals closing end of month were the difference between making payroll or not
• Lost approximately £60,000 at the first event; spent the event looking terrible from a sleepless night
• Within 30 days of the event, rebooked ~£100,000 in repeat sponsor revenue
• Doubled attendance year on year from there

Large vs. small events: the trade-offs

• Attendees at every size — 700, 1,500, and beyond — say "this is the perfect size, don't grow it"
• Introverts and non-networkers can find large events overwhelming; the noise and scale create a "where do I start?" problem
• SaaStock counters this with smaller embedded formats: day-one workshops of 50–60 people, pub crawls, CMO/CFO/CEO dinners
• The bootstrapper stage seats ~150 — deliberately intimate inside a large event
• A side-event ecosystem of ~20 independent events now runs around SaaStock in Dublin; loses some sponsorship revenue but adds gravitas
• Large event pro: optionality — attendees build their own agenda across stages, workshops, and content tracks
• Preparation matters more at scale; at 150 people you can wing it, at thousands you need a plan

Programming content attendees actually need

• Post-event customer calls surface what worked and what didn't
• A steering committee of VCs, bootstrapped founders, and operators meets regularly to identify topics and speakers
• Post-event surveys ask attendees their biggest current problems; recurring themes drive the agenda
• AI and generative AI added as explicit topics in 2023; some comparable conferences ignored it entirely
• The goal: solve real problems attendees are facing, not just showcase growth stories

War stories

• Patrick Campbell gave a 20-minute talk using only the word "churn" — bold art piece, divided the audience, not repeated
• Speaker dinner ran to midnight, then on to a nightclub until 3:30 AM with speakers presenting the next day; one speaker vomited at the side of the stage; another turned sober permanently after that night