When Monterro asked us to create a hardback, B2B SaaS bible

The client

Monterro, a hands-on growth investor specializing in Nordic B2B software companies.

The crux

Monterro’s annual Software Summit is a big deal—over 500 key players from the Nordic B2B software community come together for incisive talks, strategic advice and high-level elbow-rubbing.

The 2022 event was also Monterro’s 20th anniversary. So they wanted to ditch the typical landfill swag for something special, memorable and unique that marked the occasion and left attendees mouthing “åh, fan vad trevligt!” to each other.

The result was a beautifully glossy hardback playbook that distilled twenty years of SaaS-growing wisdom (also known as its M.Fusion offering) into practical, exhaustive and thoroughly readable advice for its customers.

The angle

Monterro’s M.Fusion offering is founded on an eye-watering amount of industry experience. So we decided to approach this book like a B2B SaaS ‘bible’—all the pragmatic, practical, and actionable advice you’d ever need to grow your software business. To that end, we used the eight focus areas of M.Fusion as the building blocks for the book’s structure. These were: People, Capital, Product, Strategy, Expansions, Operations, Acquisitions, and Exit.

To mirror Monterro’s get-your-hands-dirty philosophy—and maximize reader value—we turned each chapter into a clear, bold, practical lesson inspired by each focus area.

Operation: Collaboration

Printed books are very different beasts to their digital cousins. Fortunately, this wasn’t our first…book rodeo.

We knew from experience we needed open dialogue and continuous iteration between copy, design and artwork teams—to ensure messaging, illustration and layout all worked in harmony, in service of a reading experience that kept readers turning pages.

That wasn’t just to make the product as good as possible. It’s because U-turns and oversights are extra painful with physical books. Once we ask the printer to pull the big “MAKE BOOK” lever, there’s no turning back.

So before we started production, we pulled all the disciplines together and mapped out all the hard-to-see implications that our decisions would create.

Take something as simple as length. Longer books are more expensive to print. They’re also heavier for attendees to carry around all day (and more likely to get ditched on the train home). So you might choose a lighter grade of paper. But that impacts the printing method, which itself can influence specific design decisions.

There are dozens of factors like this to consider. We love projects like this—not just because the end product is beautiful, but because the process demands exactly the kind of cross-discipline collaboration we love.

The finished article

After many working sessions, a few late-night food orders and no small amount of caffeine, the team finalized the 150-page book bang on schedule. The result? 1,000 gorgeous, hardback copies delivered to Monterro’s Software Summit. You only get anecdotal engagement metrics with physical books, but here’s a good one: none were left behind. Stay tuned for next year’s ask.

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books printed and distributed

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