Nov 4th, 2021 marked the first SaaStanak meetup. It was a rusty bar in the Trešnjevka neighborhood in Zagreb. 16 people (including me) showed up.
I was a sales rep for ChartMogul back then, so my plan was to host the meetup, chat up some folks, and walk out with some fresh leads I could sell to.
I did 0 sales in that group. But I made a bunch of new friends.
Perhaps if I had focused on sales as much as I enjoyed hosting the event, SaaStanak wouldn’t be a 3,000-person community today.
A community that celebrates its 4th birthday today, and a business edging towards 200k€ annual revenue in 2026.
Meetups are simple, if no football is involved
If Croatia hadn’t ended up 2nd place in their group at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the SaaStanak meetup in Infobip wouldn’t have flopped (we had 80 signups).
I had to book the venue a month in advance, and Infobip gave me two options: Dec 13 or 14th. The World Cup was in the winter of 2022, and I looked at the brackets trying to avoid Croatia playing the same day (because where I’m from, nothing else matters on those days).
My bet was on Croatia winning its group and later playing the quarter-finals on Dec 14th. I was wrong.
The football gods decided Croatia would play Argentina on Dec 13th, and I had 60 no-shows that day.
I had dragged Alex George to come from Belgrade for less than 20 people in the audience. It felt like back to square one after a year of hosting meetups. I said fuck it, this is the last one.
But you know who was there? Igor Kranjčec and Tina Horvat.
We bumped into each other for a while and they became friends. A bit later, they became my two most trusted colleagues in making SaaStanak the success it is today.
A flat tire and friends in Belgrade
A couple of weeks before what I considered my biggest debacle in Infobip, Point 9 hosted a meetup in Belgrade in Tenderly‘s offices. ChartMogul is a P9 funded company, and I wanted to branch out and meet SaaS folks in my region. Plus, I really like Belgrade!
So I set course in my old Alfa 147, and fate clearly wanted me to have a hard time. Midway, I saw fumes from my rearview mirror and felt the car stalling, only to realize I had a flat tire.
By the time the kind gentlemen at a repair shop in Županja had changed my tire, I’d almost given up and driven back home. But I wanted to be in Belgrade that night.
And I’m glad I did, because at the meetup I met Milena Milić – the “startup mama” of Belgrade, who, together with Tenderly Co-Founder Miljan Tekić is responsible for countless events and a buzzing Serbian founder community called Garaža.
So we partnered up for a big show, and together we organized Garaža x SaaStanak Revenue Day 1 in June 2023.
It was an opportunity to invite my then-boss, Sara Archer, to come to Belgrade and see what I’d been up to side-hustling while working in sales at ChartMogul.
And Sara loved the city! And she’s coming back soon, next week, to our SaaStanak special Ladies edition 🙂
This event was also a chance for me to finally meet Faris Šehović. Back then, he was a Sales Director at Orgnostic, a SaaS business out of Belgrade that got acquired by Culture Amp a year or so later.
And like Ana Butara, whom we got to meet through a SaaStanak meetup at Treblle, Faris became a core part of our team of conference hosts at SaaStanak 2025. Both, together with Igor and Tina, are responsible for our speakers being relaxed and their best selves on stage.
A pint of beer and the courage to ask
Emboldened by our newsletter growing to 900 people (acquired through event signups), by the end of 2023 I decided it might be a time for a step up. In a spur of confidence, I booked a nightclub in Zagreb as our conference venue for SaaStanak 2024 – a two-day event on Jun 11-12th, 2024.
It was December 2023 when we hosted a meetup in Productive, and I’d already started the rumours of a SaaS conference planned out for the following year. Tomislav Car, the founder of Productive, pulled me aside and said, “I heard you’re planning a conference.”
I replied, “Yes, do you like speaking on stage?”
He just laughed and said, “Do you know who I am?”
And that’s how we booked our first speaker. We only later agreed on Productive sponsoring our conference party, but the first one to actually sign on the dotted line and pay us a sponsorship fee was Vedran Cindrić from Treblle.
I’ve done a lot of sales pitches in my life, but if Vedran knew how scared I was walking into his office to pitch him a sponsor slot for SaaStanak 2024, he’d probably laugh his ass off.
The deal was simple: a conference booth, premium sponsor branding, and lanyards. “Gotta have the lanyard,” Vedran said. And just like that, SaaStanak 2024 was set in motion.
I was so lucky that Jan Varljen, the co-founder of Productive, spent an afternoon drinking pints with the Paddle guys in Dublin in October that year at SaaStock – and later introduced me to Bianca Dragan and Glyn Lewis. They liked what we were building, decided to sponsor it, and sent Andrew Davies to speak.
Paddle, Productive and Treblle are our backers to this day. I guess the moral of the story is that a couple of meetups, a pint of beer, and the courage to ask is sometimes more than enough to create something meaningful.
An outbound email leading to home
It was the summer of 2022 that I found myself strolling through the beach at Amadria Park in Šibenik, thinking how it might be an awesome venue for a conference. Back then, I was excited about snatching the revenuedays.com domain and thinking that a conference, an awards ceremony for the best SaaS salespeople in Europe, and a kickass party would make for a great event.
(I also bought saaspresidents.com and saaspresidentsclub.com that day… I know, I’m a stereotypical indie hacker founder.)
So when I got outbounded by Amadria Park following the success of SaaStanak 2024, I actually didn’t even remember this anecdote – until I booked the first sightseeing of the venue.
It’s an absolutely stunning venue, and I thought: “The Zagreb conference hosted 300 people. We could break 500 in Šibenik easily.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Destination conferences are a different beast. For a lot of our existing community, it was simply out of reach.
What happened was that we were back to 300 – the conference didn’t grow, and I felt like I’d lost years of my life trying to break even on that event.
But what actually came out of it was probably the most unique tech event in Europe. Four conference stages, six side events, 300 attendees fully hosted in a single vacation resort. A “summer camp for SaaS people”, as my friend Kinga Edwards put it. It was an entirely different product.
SaaS people from all over Europe spent 3 days nerding out about SaaS, practically hanging out for whole days on end.
I remember coming back from the SQ Capital & Productive “Church of Scale party” at 2 AM, walking into my hotel, and seeing Jonathan Wuurman, Elise Marengo and a few others, three wine bottles on the table, and a heated argument about some SaaS shenanigans of the week.
The following day, a bus took us to a wine tasting event organized by Chris Gannon and his Captivate Talent team, whom I met way back at SaaStr. Chris took his family to the conference, so Tina came up with a fantastic idea: a special little badge for his daughter, Lily.
By day 3 we’d wrapped up the event, the whole team was dead-ass tired – then the salvo of LinkedIn posts came rushing in.
And it all just clicked. This is the event I want to be invited to. And we, as a team, made it happen.
And 4 years and 45 events in 15 cities
I left out the whole part where I drove 40,000 km in 6 months, but suffice to say, we made a SaaS tracksuit, worked with communities in Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia to put on more meetups, and produced a trap music video while doing it.
I am having fun. I have a feeling my team is enjoying it as well. And judging by the interest for the Šibenik rerun at SaaStanak 2026, it seems like more people want to join in.
There’s an insane number of people I can thank for the opportunity to do this. I just hope I can return the favor when the time comes.
So, should you host a meetup or join one?
No. Stay home.
Unless you want friends you can call on, business partners that help you grow, and stories you won’t shut up about.
Love you all, and hope to see you in Šibenik next year – our blind bird sale is still ongoing, so grab the ticket and don’t whine to me about discounts later 😉
Leo
