Join us for a candid look behind the scenes at run.events, the platform that has become essential for many event organizers worldwide who want to manage their events efficiently. Taking the road less traveled, without relying on outside funding and with a dedicated, compact team, was what formed run.events into its current state. Our reliance on the robust Microsoft Azure public cloud platform (we'll share why we eliminated the last two AWS services from our architecture only a few weeks ago), a focus on user experience, and the integration of automation workflows have been the foundation of what run.events is today, enabling us to serve a global audience. In this session, we'll share the architectural, developmental, technological, and emotional challenges encountered while building the platform. We'll discuss the good and not-so-good decisions. We will discuss how our first European Collaboration Summit taught us that standard Azure load testing isn't always sufficient, leading us to scale our Azure SQL Server to the max to get through the event (which we did!). We'll also talk about why you should be in Microsoft for Startups program during the initial development and early go-to-market stages of building a SaaS product, and how being in that program has saved our money and our skin. :) To wrap up, we'll provide some insights into where we are now, the challenges we're currently facing and how we're addressing them, our ideas for the future, and how Microsoft taught us that a bug in production is not the end of the world.