SaasTok

Alex Thuma started SaaScribe, a community-driven blog for SaaS founders, in 2015—not because he was an expert, but because he saw a gap. "I'd never run a SaaS business myself," he explains. "So instead, I recruited people to write content for us without charge." Three months later, the blog took off. He launched the SaaS Revolution Show podcast, which is still running eight years later. Then came the local meetups—one drew 120 people from across the UK, all traveling for face-to-face conversations about SaaS. That's when attendees started asking for something bigger.

In late 2015, at Web Summit, Alex met Nick from Chartmogle, a metrics platform for SaaS companies. In a casual conversation, Alex mentioned he was thinking about building a SaaS conference in Europe. Nick said: "If you do it, we'll sponsor." Alex didn't forget. Once he had a date, venue (Dublin's RDS), and website, he went back to Nick with specifics. Nick came through—a 12,000-euro commitment. Within a month, Alex closed another major sponsor: Patrick Campbell from Profitwell, Chartmogle's competitor. "Effectively, from there, we were customer funded, bootstrapped from that point on."

When tickets went on sale in January 2016, the audience was ready: meetup attendees, newsletter subscribers, podcast listeners. "The first day, we sold like 37 tickets," Alex recalls. "I saw this spike of revenue and was like, great, people actually do want this thing." That gave him runway for nine months—though there were several months near the end where he genuinely didn't know how he'd make payroll. "Then suddenly you get a deal in at the end of the month and like, oh, I can feed the family."

Alex's sales background (11 years in enterprise software) proved crucial. After leaving that job with a pregnant partner and zero household income, he had no choice but to make it work. He pursued sponsors first—not as a deliberate strategy, but because that's where the leverage was. By the first event, he'd closed 35 sponsorship deals. Revenue split roughly 50/50 between sponsorships and tickets. The timing was brutal: he had to line up next year's sponsors immediately after the event ended. In the 30 days after the first conference, he rebooked about 100,000 pounds in repeat sponsorship revenue—enough breathing room to plan for year two.

The first event lost money—about 60,000 pounds. Alex didn't sleep the night before and may have had a panic attack. But attendees loved it and immediately asked: "When's next year? Double the size." So he did. Year-on-year, SaasTok nearly doubled in size.

Alex learned to think about scaling without losing intimacy. SaasTok deconstructs itself into smaller experiences: SaaS City (a one-day accelerator with 50-60 person workshops), the Bootstrap Stage (150-person track), the Accelerate Stage, the expo, and dozens of side events now organized by the community itself. He surveys attendees post-event to identify their biggest problems—fundraising, AI, product-market fit—then programs the next conference around those themes. He assembles a steering committee of VCs, bootstrapped founders, and operators to advise on speakers and topics.

One bold experiment: Patrick Campbell spoke for 20 minutes saying only the word "churn," with good slides. Reactions were mixed; attendees didn't love it. It was art, not advice.

SaasTok has grown from a one-off event in 2016 to a large-scale multi-stage conference. The October 2024 event (16-18th) will take place in Dublin. Alex built a team to handle programming, sponsorships, and operations—reducing his own workload from a 12-month grind per event to a six-month cycle. He's learned hard lessons about speaker dinners (staying up until 4am with speakers before their morning talks is not responsible), but the event has become a pillar of the SaaS community—so much so that 20+ side events now orbit SaasTok, creating a broader ecosystem. Alex remains active in speaker recruitment and strategy, but he's no longer doing everything himself. The blog, podcast, and meetups that started it all remain part of the SaasTok DNA.