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!

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!

Peldi Guilizzoni, Founder/CEO, Balsamiq

In 2018, Balsamiq celebrated its 10th Birthday – an impressive achievement for any SaaS company. Founder Peldi has attended Business of Software every year since 2010, and has 5 BoS talks to his name. In his talks Peldi updates the BoS Community on the story of Balsamiq, and the ups and downs that come with running a growing, bootstrapped SaaS company. They are archetypal BoS talks: honest, full of insight, and give you a peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of a successful SaaS company.

In this talk from BoS USA 2018 he shared another honest update about his worries in Balsamiq’s milestone 10th year. On realizing he’s still too integral to the business, Peldi started the ‘Winter 2018 Injected Turbulence Project’ – delegated product design and engineering management, deleted Slack and witter from his phone, and stopped watching their internal wiki.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Tendayi Viki, Author

Innovation is hard. It takes more than a clever idea to make a business. Tendayi Viki works with entrepreneurs in startups and large corporates who are looking to innovate. Here he presents 8 business model questions to consider when attempting to innovate, followed by a Q&A with some great questions about innovating in a large corporate.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

David Barrett, Founder/CEO, Expensify

Growth is often measured in terms of market share, customers or revenue, with the onus on marketing and sales to grow the business. Expensify however, has become the fastest-growing ERP software in the world not by growing the sales or marketing teams, but by developing a uniquely user-driven product. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Expensify Founder/CEO David Barrett shares his insights on building product-led growth, and what it means to create a product so engaging that it can spur and maintain its own growth organically.

Video & Slides below

Nilan Peiris, VP Growth, TransferWise

No marketing channel scales infinitely. That’s the message Nilan opens his talk from BoS Europe 2018 with. So how do you build sustainable marketing to keep your business growing sustainably? Drawing on past experience working with early-stage startups and as VP Growth at TransferWise, Nilan gave a three-pronged talk on the subject:

• Learnings from running Marketing at early-stage startups
• Optimizing for Word-of-Mouth at TransferWise
• The Economics of a Mission-Driven Business

This talk is full of stories and marketing tips from the first 6 years of TransferWise – highly recommended!

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Carl Ryden, CEO/Founder, PrecisionLender

Carl Ryden has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conferences for a long time. His company PrecisionLender has been seeing incredible growth over the past few years, providing a huge amount of value in the banking sector. In this talk, Carl talks about how PrecisionLender use AI to offer a valuable service to their customers, and what he sees as the future of AI.

Video, Slides, & Transcript below