Thread by @jasonlk

3 weeks after SaaStr Annual 2021, I think I've learned IRL events will be more important than ever before ... but with some significant caveats:

My learnings: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽

1/ Marketers + Sponsors really want to run the field events playbook

And ... channels are ever-more saturated, and marketers have ever bigger budgets that have to deploy

The >top< events have buyers attending

So if your prospects and customers are there, you want to be there

2/ Top speakers still want to connect with their audiences IRL

I wasn't actually sure this would be true post Covid

But top speakers want to connect with their customers, prospects, partners, potential hires (especially)

They now want do digital events AND the top IRL events

3/ Attendees still want to come -- but the bar may be higher here

Will folks fly to see recycled content they can see on YouTube? We'll see

Will folks fly to see other folks they need to see IRL when we're all working from home?

The answer seems to be Definitely

But

4/ Will subscale IRL events still matter, post-Covid?

We'll see if top-tier attendees, in a distributed world, want to travel to subscale and second-tier events

It's different than when everyone worked in SF together

Maybe

5/ What will be the role of digital events after all this?

Almost everyone is seeing a drop in engagement and sign-ups from digital events after 15+ months of endless mediocre digital events

Does anyone want to join yet another identical digital event?

Some further learnings here:

saastr.com/10-learnings-f…