Saasu Cloud 2012 Retrospective

Overwhelmingly people loved the conference. The common feedback from the audience was that the speakers were excellent and that it was refreshing to see a software company that didn’t just hard sell.

Photo: Just some of the army of Jim’s Bookkeepers professionally ready to go bright and early.

Our next conference will be a Saasu User conference so it will be multi-stream and deep dive into the technical use of Saasu and it’s supporting applications. We hope to run this toward the end of the year around November or at the latest February. We’ll lock in dates soon.

So how did the day go?

In the morning Pollenizer’s Phil Morle really had many newer businesses in the audience rethinking their strategy. The comments suggested they really liked Pollenizer’s iterative approach to the startup cycle. Rob Nixon then got the audience nicely polarised. Some felt uncomfortable and threatened by Rob’s future for the industry and others could see that change is on it’s way and really wanted to make the shift into his model. Dr Ian Sims then showed us a Debits and Credits rap song that really spoke to the truth that accountants and bookkeepers are rappers, they just rap on the inside. It was brilliant to get a feel for Saasu’s use in the university environment from a progressive educator.

After the break Klaeton Sheehan’s “Saasu Land” song was a great intro back into the late morning session. His story was very inspiring and there was some fear afterwards that lots of people might resign and start e-commerce businesses just to have a taste of his lifestyle. Stuart Cook then talked about how Zambrero’s rapid rise is actually fuelled by a passion to fund it’s charitable works. He also talked about the value created by the combination of Saasu, Cloud Account and OneSaas. This led on nicely to Jodie Coleman from Cloud Account who gave the upfront and honest impression of migrating hundreds of clients to Saasu. We asked Jodie to speak because she knows the tricks and traps and she calls a spade a spade which we greatly respect. We wrapped up with our CTO, Paul Glavich, who spoke about Saasu’s development processes and an offline version of Saasu. This feature may make it’s way into various aspects of Saasu and essentially allows usage where there is no internet for various reasons.

After lunch Stilgherrian shot a security volley across all our bows. He reminded us that security concerns are right across the industry but not just specific to cloud, software or credit cards. After this Corneliu I. Tusnea from OneSaas talked about connecting applications. His speech was comprehensive like the list of apps he now connects to. It really hit home the volume of data synchronisation that can be achieved which at the end of the day is data entry and copying that can be avoided by people and is better done by “the machines”. Jack Delosa shared his vision for having accounting offer their small business clients a better way to raise capital via the MBE Education offering. Last up Alycia Edgar shared her view on how businesses need to unblock their flow. Her new book about Saasu was also launched and we attempted a rapid crowdsource for the book’s name.

Closing out the day Grant Young showed us how you can create really great service results in your business by following a service design approach that looks at the detailed interactions and perceptions your clients have of your business. Will Scully-Power from Datarati then shared his insights sourced from managing some of the country’s biggest marketing automation implementations. He pushed the need to drop the Vanity Metrics like “Page Views” and “Unique Visits” in favour of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) based metrics that speak to the real results for a business from their marketing efforts.

After the awards which we’ll cover in a separate blog post I closed the event by talking about our Saasu culture, beliefs and what we had lined up for the future of Saasu. You can see my slide deck here.