SaaS Stock

After 17 years selling enterprise software for a Russian company, Alex Thuma hit his 30s and had a reckoning: he didn't want to spend his life selling other people's products. He was fascinated by the emerging SaaS wave—companies like Slack, Twilio, Box, and Evernote—so different from the clunky on-premises software he sold. In 2015, he started a blog called SATScribe.com to explore this world and share unbiased, vendor-neutral perspectives on SaaS. The blog had limitations: Alex wasn't a great writer and lacked deep SaaS expertise. But he recognized these constraints and solved them creatively.

Instead of building alone, he reached out to influential voices in the SaaS community—Jason Lemkin, Owen McBabe, Mark Roberge—and pitched them a simple idea: write original content for a young blog with no traffic. Remarkably, they said yes. Within three months, SATScribe grew to 30,000 monthly visitors. Alex followed the blog with a podcast called "The SaaS Revolution Show," interviewing key figures in the industry from his bedroom.

By 2015-2016, Alex had built an audience of engaged readers and listeners. He then started hosting free meetups in London, which attracted 120 people from across the UK. The response was electric: people were grateful to finally have a SaaS community space. After running eight meetups across London, Dublin, and Berlin, attendees repeatedly asked him the same question: "Why don't you start a conference in Europe?"

Alex was reluctant. He'd never run a conference and wasn't attracted to the event business. But he was desperate to be an entrepreneur, and here was his audience literally asking him to solve their problem. In early 2016, he decided to commit. He set ticket sales to begin in January 2016 for a September event in Dublin.

On day one of ticket sales, Alex deployed scarcity and FOMO tactics. The result was modest but validating: 37 tickets sold, generating approximately €13,000. These came from his newsletter subscribers, meetup attendees, and people he'd directly spoken with. Over the next nine months, he employed classic event pricing strategies—early bird, regular, and late bird tiers—creating revenue spikes at each deadline.

The breakthrough came from speaker recruitment. Alex researched how to build credibility for a first-time event and learned that high-quality speakers drove credibility and word-of-mouth. He had spent 12 months building his online presence, so when he emailed established figures like Christoph Janz (Point Nine Capital investor) and Dez Blanchfield (who happened to be based in Dublin), they recognized his name. They knew his blog and podcast. They saw he was genuinely trying to build community, not just grab attention. They said yes.

Once Alex locked in respected speakers early, he showcased them on his website and referenced them in marketing emails. This created a halo effect: other quality speakers wanted to join, and potential attendees saw the credibility and bought tickets. By September 2016, SaaS Stock Dublin attracted 700 attendees—roughly 50% from his email list and 50% from speaker promotions and word-of-mouth.

The nine-month sales cycle was grueling. Alex worked until 11 p.m. most nights, sending emails, creating content, managing social media, and doing whatever might move the needle. It was grinding, relentless hustle.

The first event generated £350,000 in revenue, but Alex made critical mistakes that cost him approximately £60,000-70,000 in losses. On the night before the event, he realized he wouldn't hit his revenue targets. He hadn't slept well. The problems: poor budget planning, underpriced sponsorship deals that lost money, unclear partnership terms that left him footing the bill for expensive booths, and a tendency to always choose the most expensive option instead of the least.

Despite the losses, the event was a qualitative success. Attendees gave glowing feedback. Alex learned hard lessons about cost management and pricing, but he had validated that in-person conferences could work.

He doubled down. In 2017 and 2018, he ran larger Dublin events, growing to nearly 4,000 attendees. But he faced a cash flow problem: one event per year meant spiky, lumpy revenue. He decided to expand globally—launching events in the US (San Francisco), Latin America, Asia, and Australia. In one aggressive push, he expanded into all these markets simultaneously.

This expansion was premature. Growth consumed cash faster than it generated it. Deposit payments for multiple venues hit the business at once. The team of 24 people worked under immense strain. Some suffered burnout. The processes and systems weren't in place to execute five events well. While revenue grew, profitability declined. Alex later reflected that he should have entered one market at a time, with proper systems in place.

By early 2020, SaaS Stock was a multi-million pound global events business. Then COVID-19 struck. In March 2020, Alex watched 150 conferences cancel in a single week. Revenue dropped to zero overnight. He had a 24-person team and zero income, with no clarity on when in-person events could return.

For a moment, he considered that a pandemic might destroy everything he'd built. Then he shifted into survival mode. He mapped seven potential pivot ideas with his team and chose the one with the fastest path to revenue and value: online events.

Within two weeks, the team built SaaS Stock Remote from scratch—new branding, website, sales deck, and pricing. They launched with a new value proposition focused on "Adapt, Survive, Thrive" rather than scaling and growth. This resonated. Within two weeks of launch, they got their first revenue. It doubled the next month and tripled the month after.

Two weeks after launch, SaaS Stock Remote held its first event with 2,700 attendees across two days. They partnered with new sponsors like Front, Right, Carter, and Zoom Info. The online format opened up a truly global audience. Most importantly, online events proved far more profitable than in-person conferences.

As of the podcast date (later 2020), Alex remained optimistic about in-person events returning, but he was also convinced that hybrid events—combining in-person and online—would be the future. The flagship Dublin event remained beloved, but the regional events might go online permanently to reduce costs and travel burden. SaaS Stock Remote became a permanent product, not a temporary pandemic pivot.