Unless you’re living in Fiji, Barbados, Tuvalu, or some other exotic, far away place, you’ve probably been affected by the recent outbreak. You’ve canceled your spring holiday plans, and you are now stuck at home with the TV remote at a close distance or Netflix at a convenient place in your bookmarks bar.
Social isolation and distancing is what is required of us to stay healthy now, but that doesn’t mean we should stop growing and improving our skills as product marketers and founders. Your SaaS business needs you more than ever now.
To help you keep yourself busy (or distracted) and use that lockdown wisely, I’ve put together a list of 19 online conferences, summits, and webinars that you can binge-watch from your livingroom’s couch.
So let’s dive in!
Conferences and Summits
SaaStr Summit Online
SaaStr, the popular SaaS event, just announced that they’re going to host a free online summit on 22 April. The summit’s slogan is “Bridging the gap”, as the event is going to be entirely focused on how to run a SaaS business in these turbulent times.
Plenty of C-level executives from companies like Slack, Zendesk, and Zuora will speak at the summit. Needless to say, it’s one of the must-watch conferences on this list.
MicroConf on Air
You’ve been circulating the SaaS community in the last few years you’ve undoubtedly heard of MicroConf — the world’s most popular conference for bootstrapped SaaS companies and brainchild of Rob Walling, the co-founder of Drip.
MicroConf was supposed to take place in Minneapolis in April, but they postponed it. Fortunately, Rob announced today (18 Mar) that they’re going to run MicroConf on Air — “a daily livestream with conversations, Q&As, and hang-outs focused on non-venture track founders.”
To stay in the loop with MicroConf on Air join MicroConf Connect — the digital extension of MicroConf and subscribe to their Youtube channel.
ProductLed Summit
ProductLed summit is organized by Wes Bush, a really smart guy that you can learn a lot about free trial/freemium driven SaaS growth. The summit is jam-packed with talks by acquisition, activation, and retention by world-class product people like Matt Bilotti, Product ad Drift; David Darmanin, CEO HotJar; Justin Bauer, Product at Amplitude, and more.
You can even get a 48-hour free all-access pass to all replays! And also, Wes is donating 100% of the All-Access Pass proceeds to the Coronavirus Relief Fund. Improve as a product marketer, and help beat Corona, what’s not to like?
BLaaStr
BLaaStr is a virtual SaaS conference. You can watch all of the recordings for free by joining the Facebook group. The conference covers a wide range of SaaS marketing related topics like how to make SaaS websites that sell, how to position your SaaS, and how to generate 10-20 SQL (sales qualified leads) a week for your SaaS.
YC Startup School
Although not a conference, Startup School is an online resource chock-full of video lessons for early-stage founders. It’s an 8-week online course by YCombinator on how to start a startup. Luckily, all of the previous lessons are recorded and available for free!
SaaStock — Virtual Conference
SaaStock is one of the biggest SaaS communities and events for founders and marketers. What started as a flagship conference in Dublin has grown into 4 conferences and dozens of meetups across the globe.
The physical conferences have been postponed, and you can find the updated live calendar here. Luckily for us, SaaStock is also going to host its first-ever Virtual Conference this June. So make sure to keep an eye on their updates!
B2C Growth and Innovation Virtual Summit
This is another jam-packed virtual marketing summit with over 40 sessions from speakers like Noah Kagan (Chief Sumo at AppSumo), Emilia Chagas (CEO at GrowthHackers.com), Nir Eyal (author of Hooked), and many more. It’s going live on 30 Apr, don’t miss it.
Business of Software
Business of Software is another popular physical conference that is going online this year. The conference will be hosted as a live streaming event on 23-24 March. Join speakers like SaaS positioning expert April Dunford, the VP of Growth at Deliveroo, and the VP of eCommerce at GoCompare in this 2-day online event.
The Customer Validation Conference (Defunct)
The Customer Validation Conference is a free online conference consisting of 25+ on-demand sessions. It’s an agile-oriented conference that will help you hone your pre-release customer testing strategies and see how immediate product feedback can help drive actionable recommendations for your next product release.
Midwest Digital Marketing Conference
MDMC is a broad marketing conference that covers topics like SEO, email marketing, B2B marketing automation, Facebook ads, content marketing, and more. The original physical event is now being converted into an online event that will consist of 2 parts:
- LIVE 2-day virtual summit Wednesday, May 20th and Thursday, May 21st
- MDMC20 On-Demand Digital Experience, where the sessions and panels that were going to take place in-person will be available on-demand online for 1-year.
Commerce Now ’20
CommerceNOW, happening on June 10-11, is an online event focused around digital commerce for SaaS and online businesses.
This year’s line-up features industry experts like Trevor Hatfield, Aleyda Solis, Talia Wolf, and leading companies including Microsoft, SEMrush, Dropbox, and many more.
The event is free to attend!
Gainsight Pulse Everywhere
The most popular Customer Success conference is going online, too. It’s also completely free. Needless to say, you should mark this event on your calendar, especially if you’re in customer success.
5-Day Hyper-Growth Summit
This is a 5-session long, a session each day, event by Lloyd Yip — a high-ticket SaaS sales pro. The event covers topics from finding product/market fit to closing more sales to scaling organic leads.
Webinars
Thriving in Tough Economic Times With Content Marketing
It’s a challenging time for marketers right now, especially if your marketing strategy for 2020 relied heavily on in-person events, training, meetups, and conferences.
Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, is hosting a one-time free webinar on March 19th, to talk about shifting to an online content strategy, and providing a detailed overview of her “GRAP” framework.
The webinar will address how to set content goals, what to research, how to build authority online, and also some tactical promotion strategies. The webinar will focus primarily on driving inbound traffic and leads to your site, with a specific focus on SEO strategies.
How to Work Remotely as a SaaS Company
Wilco de Kreij, a founder of UpViral, a good friend of mine and a super successful SaaS entrepreneur, hosted a live event on his Facebook page to show us how to work remotely.
Wilco has been running online businesses remotely for the past 8 years and currently spearheads a team of 35 people spread across the globe. I’ve been a part of that team as well, and he knows his shit 🙂
Watch the webinar to learn what tools they use to effectively run a remote team, how to stay connected with each other from a distance, how to make the most out of this situation, and how to respond to a crisis like this?
Sales in a COVID-19 World
Germain Brion, SVP of Global Sales at Chargebee, shares his learnings with us on how to maintain predictability in the sales process during these uncertain times.
Thrive, don’t just survive the Stackapocalypse
Without action now, your current marketing stack will unravel and throw your team into a panic.
You also need to start thinking of how you are going to cut costs in your organization today. Your marketing budget will dry up, and you need all the cash you can KEEP.
Get the facts on what tools you can cut, how you can get rid of them in style and what is gonna give you the most bang for your buck.
Make sure you are prepared for these changes so while others fail, you can thrive.
In this webinar, Dan McGaw, CEO of Effin Amazing, shares his take on the stackapocalypse —a perspective helping businesses thrive during these rapidly changing times.
Pivot, Don’t Panic
Very thorough webinar by the father of customer success in SaaS Lincoln Murphy. He covered the recent trends he’s observing in the SaaS market, what his clients are doing, what’s working (and what’s not!). Definitely a must watch.
How to Create a Holistic Marketing Funnel Automation
If you plan to transition your company from high-touch, in-person sales, to a self-serve onboarding model, this webinar created by me will give you the foundational understandings you need.
It shows my 6-step process on creating a holistic marketing automation strategy:
- Choose the lifecycle funnel.
- Choose the metrics that you want to track at each step of this funnel.
- Map your lifecycle customer journey.
- Outline the specific events and create an event tracking plan
- Write the copy for your messages.
- Implement an up-and-running marketing automation strategy with live Flows in Encharge.
User Onboarding Emails — Examples & Best Practices
In this webinar that we hosted with the awesome team at Userpilot, I’m sharing some of the best practices for crafting onboarding emails that convert trial users to paying customers.
Watch the webinar if you want to learn:
- What are some of the most effective types of user onboarding emails that improve the trial Conversion Rate. With real examples from Encharge customers and other successful SaaS companies.
- Answers to the most pressing onboarding questions that SaaS businesses in the audience had. Like “how to figure out my critical value moments if I have a complex tool?” or “what is the perfect trial length?”
The “New Way” To Acquire B2B SaaS Customers At Scale
Pedro Cortés, another good friend of mine, is your SaaS landing page wingman. His step-by-step framework will help you nail down your SaaS positioning and convert more website visitors to trial users. Now is a good time to revisit how your website performs and improve that vague message with something more specific that gets people to try your tool.
What I’ve missed?
That’s it for now! I will update this list on a regular basis as soon as I find a new summit or a webinar that helps SaaS marketers, especially in the current situation.
Have any suggestions for me? Please drop the links in the comment section here or send me an email at [email protected]
Also, please make sure to share the post with your fellow SaaS marketers, so we can beat this damn pandemic and grow together in this time of turmoil.
