5 Reasons why Europe deserves it’s own SaaS Conference
Europe, whilst it may be fragmented, is pretty darn huge. More than twice the size of the US in fact at 742.5 million people. Not all in Enterprise software, i’ll admit that. But the SaaS ecosystem in Europe is growing. I’d even dare to say booming right now.
Now, I might live in a SaaS bubble, with a keen eye on European SaaS Startups, but I truly believe some of the best SaaS tools are coming out of Europe at the moment and i’ve been thinking for a good while that Europe needs a SaaS conference.
Enter SaaStock 2016. There’s a ton of reasons SaaStock 2016 is happening. I wrote about why we built SaaStock in this post, which covers the origin story and the problem I’m trying to solve by putting on Europe’s premier B2B SaaS conference.
Outside of the reasons given within that post, there’s just a ton of reasons as to why Europe deserves it’s own SaaS conference. I felt I had to share 5 more with you.
5 More reasons why Europe deserves it’s own SaaS conference
1. Europe is home to north of 24,000 software companies!
Now consider that only just over 1892 are considered SaaS Startups. And consider that SaaS will be the predominant delivery model for software. There will come a time over the next few years. I don’t know when exactly, but we’ll be looking back at those numbers and they will have traded places. Hopefully SaaStock can play a part in that. *source Dealroom
2. Europe is producing some of the best SaaS companies on the planet.
Zendesk was borne out of an apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark and recently posted impressive financial results of $208.8million for FY15 with a BHAG of getting to $1 billion by 2020. (yes they took the common path to move HQ to San Francisco, but we lay claim to the origins)
Anaplan, the excel killer, was created in a converted barn in North Yorkshire, UK and within a period of 2 years, grew sales from $10 Million a Year to $10 Million a Month. They’re also called a San Francisco based startup, which is true as they have an office there, but they were born in the UK.
Intercom founded in California……but by four Irishman and has it’s R&D HQ in Dublin, the second home of SaaS.
Typeform is probably the biggest SaaS Startup to come out of Southern Europe and could one day become the biggest SaaS Startup to come out of the whole of Europe. Started because a Toilet company in Barcelona asked David Okuniev and Robert Munoz to build a lead generation form. The form they created was inspired by the film War Games and the rest is history. 8 million Typeforms were completed last year.
3. We go big/global from day one
MOVE Guides founded in London, UK, actually had to go Global from day one given the nature of its business. With its talent mobility cloud which solves the problem of making it easier for companies to co-ordinate moves for talent that is moving to another country. Co-ordinating moves across 200 different companies, CEO Brynne Herbert thought about going global from day one through the 3 C’s of Consciousness, Culture and communications. Read more about that in this interview
Workable, Founded in Athens Greece, Nikos Moraitakis quickly opened up offices in geo regions that had highest numbers of it’s target customer SMB’s. That meant opening shop in London and Boston to target the 5 million SMBs in the UK and 22 million SMBs in the US. A strategy that has paid off as more than 60 % of Workable’s customers are coming from the US. Workable has raised $34.16 Million in 6 rounds to help with their aim of going big, going global and being the number one Application Tracking System in it’s category.
4. We go to a lot of great tech events but SaaS Conf is missing from the calendar.
More than 630K people attended 25k meetups in Europe in 2015*. And Europe hosted two of the best tech global conferences in the world in Web Summit(42k attendees in FY15) and Slush (15k). But what about the SaaS Conferences in 2015 in Europe? Zero. *source- Atomico State of European Tech 2015
5. Europe has 30% of a big ol’ global SaaS market (probably)
The global SaaS market is forecasted to be $106 Billion dollar market in 2016. Citing old data, as that’s all i could find, the US had 34% of the global Software market in 2012 but 60% of the SaaS Market. Now assuming that’s still true, i’m guestimating that Europe probably has around 30% of the global SaaS Market with 10% going to the ROTW. With a possible $31.8 Billion SaaS Market in Europe in 2016, it’s about time Europe deserves its own saas conference.
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