Global SaaS Start-Up Community Growth - with Alex Theuma, SaaStock

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Alex Theuma, founder and CEO of SaaStock and host of the SaaS Revolution podcast. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Alex. The story behind the founding of SaaStock, how the SaaStock vision and mission has evolved over the last five to six years, and Alex's insights into the future of the SaaS and cloud industry on a global basis. Alex, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Alex Theuma** (1:09)
Yeah, thanks, Ray. Great to be a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Yeah, I guess my journey has been one of after university 11 years in sales and selling technology and getting into the cloud computing space. And I think before, around 2008, 2009, I was selling enterprise software and kind of got the bug for SaaS back at that time. Our software was actually on-premise software that we were selling, but it enabled SaaS applications. So then I was coming across all of these great kind of tools that I was getting strangely excited about and curious about. And at the same time, I was looking for something entrepreneurial to do. And I wasn't a hundred percent sure what that would be, but something kind of led me to start to write a blog around SaaS. And strangely, it may not have been a good idea, even though it panned out because I mean, two things was one that I'd never written a blog before. And as a writer, I was probably pretty lousy, you know, back then. And two, I didn't know a huge amount about SaaS at that time. It was all very new to me. So if you're inexperienced and not an expert and you're writing a blog and you're not that great at writing, how successful is that blog going to be? But perhaps I kind of recognized those pitfalls, you know, sort of back then. And I quickly kind of turned that into a community driven blog, but I did get experts coming in that contributed original content, which actually put this blog, which was called SaaScribe, you know, kind of on the map and made people aware of the content that we were putting out on the newsletter that we were building. And then I supplemented that with a podcast, The SaaS Revolution Show, which is still going pretty much six years later. And that gave me the opportunity, the podcast to connect with a bunch more influencers and people that are out there in the weeds in SaaS, where I got the opportunity to learn from them and also share their stories through this SaaS podcast, which was one of the early B2B SaaS podcasts out there. Through that, I managed to build this network, build a bit of credibility, build an audience and a community.
And that all led to, what am I doing with this? Where am I going? What's the direction? And I was still working full time at this point for this enterprise software company. And so it got to the point where it was, hey, there could be something here. I love what I'm doing with all of this and building this community. How do I monetize that? And I looked at some different things and the thing that seemed to be the one that would perhaps have the most chance of success and that seemed to have the most demand was running a conference in Europe for the B2B SaaS community. And then I had some question marks around it because again, I had no experience in running events. First time entrepreneur, didn't have huge amounts of money to kind of put something like this on. But pretty much everybody I spoke to said like, this is what we want, like you're the guy to do it. So I kind of fell in love with that idea. I spoke to my fiance who was six months pregnant and kind of sold her. She was the first person I had to sell to say, look, this is what I want to do. And we're going to give up the only income in the house for me to move ahead with this. And once I've managed to kind of convince her, I left the business that I was working for. They were very good about it. I had six months runway and you could say the rest was history. One year later, we ran our first SaaStock conference, which had 700 SaaS entrepreneurs from 34 countries attend in Dublin. And yeah, we took it from there.