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Someone once said that “The study meeting is not complete until you write a blog.” Even though this isn’t a study meeting but since I had the chance to participate in the SaaS Conference Tokyo 2017, here is my report about that event.
About SaaS Conference Tokyo 2017
This conference has been held annually since last year by Mr. Hiro Maeda, the famous venture capitalist. Invited speakers include those who are working at SaaS startups in Silicon Valley and Japan.
This year, the slogan of the conference was “Start from zero to 10 billions of ARR,
SaaS Conference TOKYO 2017
Why I was there?
Unprecedentedly, our company HDE, Inc. had become
Starting
Starting with Mr. Hiro Maeda’s greeting speech with his hot passion for this conference.
How to create worldwide level marketing team
The session started with Ms. Meagen Eisenberg @MongoDB CMO. The earlier part was her presentation, the latter part was Q&A session facilitated by Mr. Hiro Maeda. This year, most of the sessions were organized with such style. It was very useful for me to attend these Q&A sessions since Mr. Hiro Maeda asked various questions that I also wanted to ask the presenter.
I learned why and how should startups create their web page, how to invest with
Of course, they are using MA, CRM tools like Marketo, Salesforce, etc.. In MongoDB, sales
In addition, she studied in Waseda University about 20 years ago, by any chance we were
Zero to One of SaaS business
The true
His tasks had
I think that is SaaS Native company because they are using the words “Churn Rate”, “ARR” and “ARPA”, etc. as an indicator of management.
Salesforce in Salesforce -How to construct and educate the sales-
The next one is from two sales managers from Salesforce.com Japan. Each in charge of different sales team: Inside sales and direct sales. They talked about how to organize sales team named “the Model”. Actually, I had once heard about this model, and our company’s sales team model referred to this model. However, they talked more deeply about recruiting, assessment, sales career path, incentive plan, etc..
Their group strategy was 7
The Key of huge ACV
A session by Mr. Suzuki, CEO of PLAID. PLAID is providing the service “KARTE” that
The question from Mr. Hiro Maeda, “If you could go back to the starting point, what should you do and should not do?” He answered, “Only concentrate one service.” He thinks the development of the mainstream service had to be postponed due to other services, and there are parts left as negative assets.
Anyway, what a tremendous ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) transition it is!
How to set the SaaS price
This session is about how to set the pricing in SaaS by Mr. Patrick McKenzie. He has been lived in Gifu prefecture in Japan. Anyway,
He said Japan has significant potential for SaaS market, few competitors furthermore it’s super difficult to enter the Japanese market due to culture differences and Japanese language.
The road to achieving 2.5 billion yen
The last talk was given by Mr. Lawrence Coburn from DoubleDutch. This session was the only discussion. He said if you could achieve the ARR, Triple ->Triple ->Double->Double->Double each year it would be successful. But for me, it’s triple, triple trouble, the last session, no slide, English.
He said what his failure is that he could procure $ 8 billion and he spent a bit of money.
Lighting Talk
We were given a chance to give
Reception party
The reception party was held at the restaurant near the conference venue. However, there are fewer people than I expected. There were lectures in the party. And I could meet some business friends. Among them, I met Mr. Murata. He is a junior from my high school club (not a direct junior) and he is now running a company, AI Travel as a CEO. His service is a booking system for flight ticket, hotels for a business trip. If you are interested, please contact him.
Summary
Most of the companies that presented at this conference were born as 100% SaaS native company. So I think there are a lot if a difference between our company and them. And I could confirm it becomes common to use the terms “Negative Churn Rate”, “ARR” that we used to use in our company.
I could learn so many things from this conference, including several topics about marketing, sales team building, assessment, education, how to grow as a SaaS startup companies. I think it was worth for paying 6,500 yen.
I hope next year we can make a presentation at the conference. We will do our best.
Reflection, memo
This time I was listening to the talks while taking notes on PC, but without power supply, the battery couldn’t sustain. Therefore, latter parts of the conference I had to take handwritten notes which were too difficult for me to do so.This is why there are lesser contents about the latter part of the conference mentioned in this article. (It’s just an excuse.) I have to consider this problem for the next time.
I had to take about 1 week after the conference to finish the blog. I hope I had prepared in advance so that it could be finished a bit more quickly.
This time, I had to prepare LT, so I participated without preliminary research. I should study the services created by the speakers a little bit more and wished I would be able to ask questions if possible.
