If you ever need an excuse to visit Dublin (as if the pubs and the charm weren’t enough), SaaStock Europe 2024 made a compelling case. Packed to the brim with founders, investors, and SaaS enthusiasts, it was a whirlwind of innovation, insight, and validation for our team at Tinkery.
It was our first time attending the event – Jorge and I flew low-cost just the morning the event was starting and spent a couple of days full of meetings, really good chats and quite some fun (especially at the social events organized by @ Intercom and @ Notion Capital).
What struck me most was the great balance between investors and founders. According to their site, there were more than 4’000 attendees, a third of which were founders, and about 600 investors – not a bad mix! I had no expectations whatsoever, other than the feedback I had received from past attendees, and wasn’t sure what kind of crowd we were going to meet at the RDS. Ultimately, it wasn’t just one of those conferences where startups are pitching into the void—there was real, meaningful dialogue happening. For us, it wasn’t just about handing out business cards but having genuine conversations with investors and other entrepreneurs who get what we’re building. It was certainly an exercise of business model validation, which helped us (once again) confirm that Tinkery is filling a real gap, and addressing important pain points that RevOps, marketing ops and CX ops are all facing alike.
And speaking of pain points, there was a clear pattern among the SaaS solutions present. I felt most attendees were either in one of three camps:
- Helping sales teams prospect and sell more effectively, mostly focusing on outbound.
- Improving marketing campaign quality—more leads, better targeting, higher ROI.
- Simplifying the “last mile” of customer interactions—streamlining checkout and billing to make purchasing easier for customers once they’ve decided to buy.
This was all incredibly useful, of course. But it was surprising (and somewhat validating) to notice how few solutions were tackling business productivity. Almost everyone was focused on client acquisition or post-sale efficiency, leaving the broader, equally important problem of how teams actually work with data largely untouched.
Which brings me to Tinkery. While plenty of companies were solving issues around lead gen or billing, there was no one quite addressing the challenge that we’re laser-focused on: how commercial operations teams (sales, marketing ops, RevOps, and beyond) can better manage their data, get smarter insights, and make better decisions faster. Not just making the data look pretty in a dashboard, but contextualizing it, providing meaningful structure, and letting it evolve with the business. Tinkery is solving a problem that still isn’t being directly addressed at these major SaaS conferences, and that’s pretty exciting.
To top it off, the quality of attendees and speakers was excellent. It’s not often you get such a concentration of SaaS-focused people, which makes it easy to connect, learn, and leave with a good list of action points. And of course, Dublin is always a blast—there’s something about the city that makes even work trips feel a bit like a mini-vacation, despite the intensity of all of it.
If you’re building in SaaS, SaaStock Europe is definitely worth a visit. It’s more than likely that we will visit again next year – this time, more focused on growth than on building. Until then, if you’re interested in what Tinkery’s up to and how we’re tackling business productivity for commercial teams, click on the ‘Contact us’ or ‘Get early access’ buttons above!
Fun times, great connections, and plenty of Guinness on the side.
