Where it all started.

SaaStock Europe 2016 ran on a single day — September 22, 2016 — in Dublin. 643 attendees from 302 unique SaaS companies, a Welcome Party the night before that drew 371 founders and an After Party the night after that drew 168 more. The notable companies in the room that day included inSided, Growbots, Teamwork.com, Algolia, and ChartMogul. It was Alex Theuma's first event and, in retrospect, the beginning of what would become the largest international gathering of B2B SaaS founders in the world. 35 sessions were filmed; the three most-watched talks in the entire SaaStock YouTube archive — across all editions in the company's history — all came from this single September day.

The runaway talk — Patrick Campbell (Founder & CEO, Price Intelligently, later renamed ProfitWell) on lessons learned from working with 3,000+ SaaS companies — became the most-watched SaaStock keynote ever recorded. 146,886 YouTube views and counting. The thesis was a counterintuitive one for a SaaS founder audience in 2016: most growth problems are not sales or marketing problems. They are retention and monetization problems. Campbell's data point: a 1% improvement in acquisition improves growth by about 3.5%; a 1% improvement in retention improves growth by about 7%. The top-quartile companies — by retention and monetization quality — grow three to four times faster than the bottom quartile, not because they have better salespeople or bigger marketing budgets, but because they hold onto their customers better and they charge appropriately.

The second-most-watched SaaStock keynote of all time also came from that day: Christoph Janz (Co-founder & Partner, Point Nine Capital) on stage with Nick Franklin (CEO, ChartMogul) for "8 DOs and DON'Ts for SaaS Startups" — 47,688 views. Eight operating rules anchored on a single counter-instinct for early-stage founders: focus on one metric (MRR), understand your churn before you scale anything else, and don't raise too much money too early. The third-most-watched SaaStock talk in the archive — 37,224 views — was Bastiaan Janmaat (CEO, DataFox) on building an outbound sales strategy in 60 days. The four-step playbook he walked the room through became one of the most-referenced SaaStock frameworks of the next several years.

Patrick Barnes (Co-founder & CEO, Advocately) brought the counter-intuitive growth keynote — "From 0 to 100 trial signups per month, without content" — that ten years later is still earning views on YouTube. His framing was honest: this isn't a killing-it story, it's one tactical move that took Advocately's signups from zero to 100 a month, executable by next Friday, without writing a single blog post or learning SEO. David Cancel (CEO, Drift) followed with a customer-success keynote anchored on the one change that compounds retention the most. The customer-success metrics panel drew 12,356 views in its own right — the canonical CS track moment that every subsequent SaaStock would expand on.

Peter Coppinger (Co-founder & CEO, Teamwork.com) brought the home-team story. Two struggling web developers down in Cork who almost packed it in — and a few years later were running a $12 million-a-year SaaS business serving 22,000 companies. "I am a terrible CEO," he told the room, "because I love programming." It was the template for the European bootstrapped story that every subsequent SaaStock would expand on. SaaStock Europe 2017 returned to Dublin a year later — more than doubling in size to 1,364 attendees.