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!

Laura Roeder, Founder/CEO, MeetEdgar

Laura Roder is a signed-up member of the Bootstrapping club. Her Social Media scheduling SaaS MeetEdgar is proudly bootstrapped in a market that has some very well-funded competitors – Hootsuite alone has taken nearly $300 million in funding. Why start a business when your biggest competitor has so much cash to throw around?

Laura is convinced that being small and bootstrapped is an advantage when your competitors are big and funded. In this talk from Business of Software Conference Europe 2018, she explains some of the advantages with examples from MeetEdgar. Bootstrappers, be encouraged – there’s room for you in the market, however much money your competition has!

Video and Transcript below

Join us on Thursday 14th November for a live online Q&A with Rich Mironov on Product Roadmaps & Prioritization

The roadmapping process is almost always broken. Roadmaps are met with frustration and boredom in equal measure. That’s Rich Mironov’s experience of working with Silicon Valley software companies for 35+ years.

Different voices in the company want different things. Sales need that one new feature for a big client, and they’re sure will only be ‘a few lines of code’. The executive team wants to know why you’re not getting more done. Support has hundreds of ‘good’ ideas from customers that they want to see. How do you manage expectations across the company, and create a product roadmap that prioritizes the right things while uniting your organisation?

Join us for a Q&A with Rich Mironov, product coach, seasoned entrepreneur, and author of ‘The Art Of Product Management’, who will be walking us through some tactics for designing a roadmap process that works.

Bruce McCarthy, Founder, Product Culture

Wouldn’t it be great if no one could argue with your decisions? How awesome would it be if you could cut through politics, opinions, and circular arguments and have a clear way to prioritize? In this talk Product guru Bruce McCarthy arms you with his battle-tested approach to prioritizing your most critical initiatives that will increase your organization’s focus by increasing confidence in your prioritization decisions.

Learn the method that Bruce used to focus his team on the few critical things that resulted in the sale of his company for $125 million. He’ll cover:

• Why prioritization is important
• What’s broken about prioritization
• Benefits of clear prioritization
• Methods of prioritization
• Scorecard deep-dive
• Success stories

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Rich Mironov, CEO/Founder, Mironov Consulting

Your product roadmap is not a model, an algorithm or an artifact, it is an ongoing political process that requires careful management of the relevant stakeholders. One major challenge is that your stakeholders DO NOT WANT the same things. To make a Roadmap useful, you need an allocation model and a selling strategy that helps you: understand; manage the expectations of; deliver value to people across the organization who prioritize very different things. Rich explains some approaches to help you understand and manage a roadmap’s stakeholders so that your products and customers are prioritized over the requirements of other stakeholders.

Video, Q&A, Slides, & Transcript Below

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