3,510 founders. The reset year.

SaaStock Europe 2022 ran October 17–19, 2022 in Dublin — 3,510 attendees from 1,801 unique SaaS companies. It was the reset edition: the 2021 free-money bubble had unwound, the layoffs and hiring freezes were starting to land, and the question on every mainstage panel was what to do about it. The lineup answered with three distinct registers — the operator playbook, the bootstrapped counter-narrative, and the European category-leader case studies.

Des Traynor (Co-founder & CSO, Intercom) opened the operator track with the framing the conference would orbit around: "2021 was the best of times — and the reality is, we weren't all geniuses. We were the guy in the river who thinks he's a great swimmer, not realizing the current was doing all the work. The tide went out and we all found out who was swimming naked." His talk on reacceleration — finding new engines of growth inside an existing business — set up Dave Kellogg's most-watched SaaStock keynote in the entire YouTube archive (2,855 views). Kellogg, having run companies through the 2001–2002 and 2008 recessions, walked the room through what does not work in a downturn (the "Excel-induced hallucination" of nudging funnel conversion rates by half a point) and what does.

The bootstrap stage was where the counter-narrative played out. Patrick Campbell (Founder & CEO, ProfitWell / Paddle) made the case that bootstrapping is the new dominant strategy — bringing the data that competition has multiplied 16× in ten years, that CAC has risen across every channel, and that the founders who learn to win without venture capital are the ones who will keep winning when the venture taps slow further. Nathan Latka (Founder & CEO, Founderpath) followed with the 100 fastest-growing bootstrappers all past $5M ARR, broken down by the tactics that work at 0→$1M, $1M→$3M, and $3M→$5M. Zeb Evans (Founder & CEO, ClickUp) gave the operator companion: ClickUp grew to 6 million users in five years, bootstrapped for the first three of them, and the founder argued that the discipline of having no money was what built the product right.

On the category-leader track, Avi Meir (Co-founder & CEO, TravelPerk) explained how a business-travel SaaS founded in Barcelona in 2016 crossed $100M ARR through COVID — which "demolished the travel industry" for two years before TravelPerk emerged as the European market leader. Dan Westgarth (COO, Deel) walked the room through the race to $100M ARR, Mohannad Ali (CEO, Hotjar) shared the path from bootstrapped to $40M ARR and the acquisition by Contentsquare, and Kieran Flanagan (then CMO at Zapier, formerly SVP Marketing at HubSpot) explained why HubSpot bet big on media. SaaStock Europe 2023 returned to Dublin the following October as the largest SaaStock to date with 3,521 attendees from 53 countries.