Aug 25, 2022 · 41m · top-founders
How much revenue do Jason and SaaStr make?
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview with Nathan Latka, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin breaks down the unit economics, operational strategy, and twenty-seven million dollar revenue architecture behind scaling the world's premier SaaS community and conference. Lemkin provides rare transparency into event production costs, lean staffing models, venture investing trade-offs, and lessons learned from severe operational setbacks.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 21.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 6.0 Guest teaching 7.0 Guest disagreement 1.7 Nathan pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 22:10 Venture capital is a hunt, not a boring job
Jason sharply rejects Nathan's suggestion about being bored, emphatically arguing that top-tier venture capital is an aggressive sales hunt for decacorns.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 26:40 Hypothetical $180M buyout challengeNathan confronts Jason with a specific, high-stakes buyout offer of $180M upfront cash from a company like Chargebee to see if he would sell.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 31:34 The severe cost of operational lies in event managementJason gives a brutal breakdown of how unverified contractor commitments caused a $10M date loss and teaches the necessity of deep operational literacy.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 15:36 Nathan validates direct mail merge conversion metricsNathan demonstrates firsthand mastery of email sales dynamics by sharing his exact 95% conversion data on personalized plain-text mail merges.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introducing Jason Lemkin and SaaStr Event Cost Breakdown | 6 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Nathan digs directly into SaaStr's operational costs and tent budgets. Jason willingly breaks down the $10M total production budget, educating Nathan on why outdoor custom builds are dramatically more expensive than turnkey hotel venues. | |
| SaaStr Scaling History and Building Early Community Traction | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Jason explains how community building in 2015 succeeded due to greenfield white space in SaaS content compared to the saturated market today. Nathan listens and prompts for actionable growth mechanics. | |
| Post-Pandemic Event Challenges and Lean Agency Operational Model | 5 | 8 | 2 | 1 | Jason details the post-pandemic decay of event management talent and explains his lean agency model running $25M revenue with only 10 full-time employees. Nathan recognizes and praises the exceptional revenue-per-employee metrics. | |
| Agency Sourcing and Email Conversion Marketing Dynamics | 7 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Jason explains that 90% of ticket sales stem strictly from price-increase single-CTA emails rather than social media. Nathan displays strong domain expertise by validating this dynamic with his own 95% mail-merge email conversion stats. | |
| Event Revenue Breakdown and Sponsorship Model Dominance | 6 | 8 | 1 | 1 | Jason breaks down SaaStr's revenue streams into $20M sponsorship, $5M ticketing, and $2M media. He schools listeners on how large-scale enterprise events inevitably skew toward overwhelming sponsor monetization. | |
| Venture Capital Track Record and Alternative Career Reflections | 5 | 7 | 3 | 3 | Nathan questions whether Jason missed out on building a multibillion-dollar VC fund and presses him on age. Jason pushes back forcefully on the idea that VC is boring, explaining the high-stakes hunting mindset required for decacorns. | |
| Evaluating SaaStr Market Valuation and Strategic Community Equity | 7 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Nathan presses Jason on a realistic valuation for SaaStr using ShopTalk's $150M sale as a baseline comparable. Jason contemplates what monetary multiplier an engaged community commands over a standard trade show. | |
| Acquisition Perspectives Founder Burnout and Event Production Lessons | 6 | 8 | 2 | 2 | Jason recounts painful lessons from contractor failures and lies costing millions, emphasizing that leaders must intimately understand every spreadsheet cell. Nathan explores his organizational compensation structure and agency accountability. | |
| Scaling SaaStr to $100M and SaaStr Annual Preview | 7 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Nathan proposes M&A strategies centered on acquiring content syndication systems to overcome creator bottlenecks. Jason explores the trajectory of scaling SaaStr to $100M and previews the upcoming annual conference. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Lemkin: SaaStr Annual base operating budget exceeds $10M
“The total turn on the lights budget will be just north of ten million to turn on the lights.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Annual spends $1M to $1.5M on outdoor tents
“Tenting is well over a million dollars, approaching a million and a half dollars for an outdoor event”
Lemkin: First SaaStr Annual cost roughly $200,000 to produce
“We spent about 200 grand to produce a one day low end event in the Regency Ballroom on SF.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Annual year two lost money despite $3.6M revenue
“The second year we ended up doing 3.6 million the second year. And I can, and the breakdown was about 50 50. But everything broke and we lost actually lost money that year, even though we went from 400 K in revenue on 200 K in cost. We lost money in the next y…”
Lemkin: SaaStr Scaled Early Attendance Exclusively via Unpaid Organic Content
“Second year, we didn't even, I didn't even have a list like we have today, like you and I have today. It was just word of mouth. It was just blog posts and tweets.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Annual Will Reach Over 10,000 Attendees in 2022
“We could not, I mean, we'll have over 10,000 this year.”
Lemkin: Post-COVID event talent decayed, making large events much harder to run
“So it's much harder to do events than it used to be because the infrastructure decayed during COVID and the human infrastructure decayed. You cannot, if you go interview a hundred folks to be your VP of events, you'll be lucky if two can produce a large scale …”
Lemkin: SaaStr generates $25M in revenue with only 10 employees
“We have only 10 employees doing twenty-five million of revenue, okay?”
Lemkin: Bootstrapped SaaStr for seven years without taking a salary
“That's for me, that's seven years of no salary bootstrapped business until finally it clicks.”
Lemkin: 90% of SaaStr attendance comes from single-CTA emails
“90% of our attendance comes from a single CTA email.”
Lemkin: Price increase warnings are the only event marketing CTA that converts
“Prices going up. That's the only CTA that works, too. Nothing else works. Prices, discounts don't work. Great speakers, you know, nothing works but prices.”
Lemkin: SaaStr has 120,000 subscribers on its email list
“We only have a 120,000 people on our list.”
Lemkin: Half of SaaStr ticket revenue comes in the final 60 days
“Half of all the revenue comes the last 60 days, but we market it 12 months a year.”
Lemkin: SaaStr generates $27M total revenue, with $20M from event sponsors
“It's roughly, it's probably more, actually, it's probably more like 27. So it's roughly five million from tickets, which we can chat about, two million from sponsorship of podcasts and newsletters and twenty million from event sponsors.”
Lemkin: Scaled conferences flip from 50/50 ticket-sponsor splits to sponsor dominance
“Everyone starts off in the beginning. If they're trying to make any money, like half the money from tickets. And if they're lucky, half the money from sponsors and they sort of have to torture the sponsors. And a lot of the sponsors don't want to come or they …”
Lemkin: More Than Half of Founders Are Miserable After Selling
“Some founders are great
Going fishing in Cabo and doing whatever, but others, I would say more than half are miserable after selling their company.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Sales Reps Target $4M-$5M Each, Top Rep Hit $27M
“We have five sales folks. The average salesperson's goal is to do four to five million in bookings. We have one sales rep that's done twenty-seven million already.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Lost $10M in March 2020 Due to Venue Booking Blunder
“So we lost the dates. So that was supposed to be February, 2020, which we would have pulled off, but because it was March, we lost ten million dollars because of the issues in March of 20, 20. That was a ten million dollar mistake from a lie.”