All the talks from previous Business of Software Conferences from one place. Great SaaS & Software Talks.

If you want to watch previous BoS Talks, you can access all of the publicly available ones from here, listed by year. The more recent talks will link to the video of the talk, a transcript, the speakers slides, any follow up online AMAs and attendee notes. Great talks on building SaaS and software businesses.

Enjoy!

Shawn Anderson & Shane Corellian, Co-Founders, PDQ.com

How does a bootstrapped software company effectively market especially when its founders despise (and, in fact, suck at) sales and marketing? The answer for PDQ.com finally came, in part, from Charles Bukowski: Don’t Try. The founders just started doing what they loved: Talking tech. They offered solutions and suggestions for Sys Admins via content in blogs, KB’s, videos and webcasts. The content was created for people, not algorithms. In this talk, Shawn and Shane share some ideas that worked and some that didn’t…

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Claire Suellentrop, Founder/CMO, Userlist.io

When marketing a product, it’s common for founders to focus on the product itself. “Look at our cool features! We help you do XYZ activity, but better!” This is a recipe for getting lost in the noise.

Instead, capturing your customer’s attention requires focusing on her ultimate motivation (“job to be done”), which is to transform her current life-situation into a preferred one.

After this talk, you’ll understand how the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ theory helps SaaS companies create effective positioning — and a proven, step-by-step process for uncovering your best customers’ ‘job-to-be-done’.

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Greg Baugues, Developer Community Manager, Twilio

Greg Baugues has bipolar disorder and ADHD. He spoke at BoS USA 2013 in an extraordinary talk that has been instrumental in helping start a conversation for many about mental health in tech. Today, he leads the Developer Community team at Twilio. In this short talk, he updates the BoS Community his story, and shares some of the lessons he has learned that go beyond talk, with some thoughts and observations that will help you to support coworkers and others who we suspect might be struggling with their mental health.

Talking is the first step. How can you best support a co-worker who is strong enough to take it?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Matt Wensing, Founder, SimSaaS

Warren Buffett said “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” We’ve all experienced that feeling of immense ignorance as leaders of software businesses. One area of constant anxiety is not really knowing how adjusting or changing one component of our business will impact the whole. Software businesses contain an incredible number of moving parts and variables. How can we isolate and study them? For most of us, it’s a combination of trial and error and learning from others’ mistakes when they’re brave enough to share them. Matt has spent the last 10 years starting and running his own software company (Riskpulse), learning many hard lessons along the way.

This led him to wonder: in addition to stumbling forward and searching for mentors, could he write software to simulate the future of his business? What lessons could it teach him? What could he learn if his computer could run 1,000 different startups in minutes, not years?  What light could a simulation like this shed on the underlying laws (physics) of software businesses? About people?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Bill Janeway, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus

There are few people as qualified to talk about the landscape of software investment as Bill Janeway. On joining Venture Capital firm Warburg Pincus in 1988 he built their IT Investment practice, which focussed heavily on Enterprise Software. It’s fair to say that they were pretty successful, investing in companies like VERITAS and BEA…

In this talk, Bill looks at the state of the software investment market and comments on how the move to SaaS has affected the enterprise market.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Jane Austin, Director of Product Design, Babylon Health

How can good design be integrated into your business profitably? Jane answers the question by considering the ‘anti-problem’, sharing 10 ways designers and business people can guarantee their behaviours and activities will ensure they never see eye-to-eye, their efforts will be wasted and everyone involved will know it is not their fault. You will probably recognise most of these techniques in action in your own organisation… Watch, and learn how to integrate design into your team effectively.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Why don’t customers get, buy and love your product?

This guest post was written by Caroline Brown, co-founder of The Scale Partnership, a Cambridge UK-based positioning and marketing strategy specialist.

“Positioning is the cough medicine talk. You only go because it’s good for you.” So began April Dunford’s prescription at the Cambridge, UK launch of her first book, Obviously Awesome, hosted by Business of Software.

So somewhat ironically, ‘positioning’ itself has a positioning problem. But how do you know whether your product – or indeed company – has nailed it or nosedived into a viper pit of a positioning? And why does it matter? Isn’t growth hacking where it’s all at, anyway?

In short, no.

Mikey Trafton, CTO, Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas

There are 3 reasons your team isn’t doing what you want them to do, says Mikey Trafton.

1. They don’t know what you want them to do
2. They aren’t motivated to do what you want them to do
3. They’re not capable of doing what you want them to do

In his 3rd talk at Business of Software, Mikey picked up from where he left off at the end of his previous talk ‘How To Recruit A Badass Team‘. You’ve hired a great team, but you need to learn how to manage them. Mikey is here to help you help your employees succeed with processes, tools, advice, and war stories from his experience as an entrepreneur.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

It’s a tale as old as… computers.

Imagine the scene – you are a bright, tech-savvy entrepreneur and you create a tech product. You know it’s brilliant – it’s clever, it’s complicated to build, it’s simple to use, in the history of time no one has ever made something so brilliant as this.

And yet… no one wants to pay you for it. It’s the curse of the tech founder – clever product, no sales. We see this time and time again – tech founders who make incredible technology but struggle to take it to market effectively. Maybe this quote hits close to home for you?

If it is a curse though, the good news is, you can break it!

An old colleague saw this on the first page of April Dunford’s book on Product Positioning.

She laughed and said,

“That should be called Cambridge Disease, the inability to articulate why anyone should care as much as you about your clever technology.”

Perhaps a bit harsh, the fact is that almost every company struggles with positioning.

If it is a disease though, the good news is, there’s a Cure!