SaaStock, a software-as-a-service conference that began life in Dublin but which has since gone global, is to move the remainder of its 2020 events online.
Conference founder Alex Theuma said that even with Covid-19 restrictions easing, the company was not confident that mass gatherings would return to normal by the end of year.
It also said that even if they did, “coronaphobia” meant that most people would not be comfortable attending conferences for some time.
SaaStock held its inaugural event at the RDS in Dublin in 2016 with around 700 attendees. The flagship three-day conference, which attracts most of the leading players in the SaaS space, now attracts about 4,000 attendees each year.
In addition to the flagship Dublin event, the conference is also now held in North and South America, Australasia and Asia.
The company is set to hold its first online event, SaaStock Remote, next month. In addition, it has now decided to hold its three remaining 2020 conferences, which were due to run in Dublin, Sao Paolo and Singapore, remotely.
“We had a storming first month of the year, easily beating our records for the past four years. But then things started to plateau as the quarter progressed and in March we recorded no revenue at all due to Covid-19.
“We quickly decided to hold a world-class online conference because people are still as keen as ever to connect. That was SaaStock Remote, which was revenue generating very quickly,” said Mr Theuma.
“We thought that if we moved our LATAM event into the second half of 2020 that it and the Dublin and Asia events would all be fine. But there is still so much uncertainty at the moment that as things have progressed it just made more sense to shift all our conferences online this year.”
Speaker line-up
Mr Theuma said while SaaStock was disappointed about having to host its events remotely, one key advantage was that with so many people being stuck at home during lockdown, SaaStock has been able to assemble what he believes is the best speaker line-up to date for Dublin.
Previous speakers at SaaStock's event here have included Qualtrics chief executive Ryan Smith, Vidyard CEO Michael Litt and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor. Keynote speakers for this year's conference include Rahul Vora, chief executive of Superhuman, Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru and Peakon co-founder head Phil Chambers.
With the move online comes a discount for attendees to the events, while SaaStock Dublin will physically return to the RDS on October 11th to 13th, 2021.
