Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 1, 2022

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

This is for all you CEOs: The 20 top metrics tracked by CEOs of enterprise software startups, all sorted by Finance/Cash-flow, Sales/revenue, and Marketing functions.

PERSONALIZATION

SaaS marketers are turning to personalization more and more to increase their conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels. Great article here from Chart Mogulon the (modern-day) personalization fundamentals. As a teaser: Personalization reduces acquisition costs by as much as 50%, and 87% of companies see a lift in crucial growth metrics when they employ personalization.

SMB vs ENTERPRISE

As a startup - which way to chase? Firstly this obviously depends on the product and market size. Still, in general, the Old Skool guidance was to start chasing the most significant contract values as soon as possible, which is Enterprise. But according to Craft, newer school thinking is to focus on SMB, which has been a sleeper category, as sales velocity is a better strategy than chasing contract size.

PITCH

Want to compare how your Pitch Deck compares to others? Here is an absolute MONSTER of resource links for you (and your pitch team). Pitches from AirBnB, Uber, Shopify, other lesser-known startups, and some famous flameouts (such as Fyre) are on Billion-Dollar Pitch Decks and Pitch Deck Hunt. A cool approach on OpenDeck lets you search by Category/funding year. If you want to see a breakdown/analysis of pitch decks, then take a look at Alexander Jarvis - he has over 500 decks broken down by the good and the bad things people do. Added Bonus here - this tweet from earlier this month has stuck with me - Katelyn Gleason observes that no real generation-defining startups have been founded since 2014. I've racked my mental Rolodex of startups - and I think she is right. Can you think of any? Wordle doesn't even count, as it was initially created in 2013.

ADOPTION

Adding on to #2 above, this is for all you founders that have scaled, winged it, found PMF, hacked it and are scaling up: It's time to get serious about incremental gains to growth metrics, Adoption/Uptake being a big one that can make a massive uptick in growth. Behavioral Science is here to help you out with that.

MLP

For your tech dictionaries - that's Minimum Lovable Product). MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is OK, but what if no one likes that flavour? FirstRound capital uses the analogy of burnt pizza - pointing out that the fastest and cheapest functional prototype could produce a poor or flawed version of something that people may actually love. UxDesign takes a more focused path on MLP: focus on the outcome, not output.

DECENTRALIZATION

COVID, the rise of Web3, increasing quality of global startup communities - all factors playing into the future of tech trends and shifts in the geography of tech are indicative of a less SF/Silicon Valley-centric tech industry. Hot off the press: 48% of all Tech Unicorns are located outside the US.

INFLATION

Superinteresting article from Tomasz Tunguz as he reviews and compares Stock inflation and deflation across the lifecycle of traditional and newer Startups. Traditional Web2 startups are pretty inflationary compared to FANG Stocks - which have all run massive Deflation efforts over the past decade. Then the more recent Web3 Startups with issued tokens (to a surprise to mostly no one) diverge wildly with significant inflation rates (25% compared to 5% in Web2).

WORDLE

I love this game. I also love the spinoffs: Worldle, Heardle, and my favourite, Nerdle. But Wordle has crazy growth triggers built-in; its growth is no accident, and that growth design breakdown is outlined in this article.

CASE STUDY

I got mobbed by Monday.com ads, and I eventually evaluated their product for use (so they worked), and we are actively using the product today. They currently have a market cap of almost $7b. They are publicly traded, so we get some excellent insight into their growth numbers: Their SEO metrics get covered in this Twitter thread, and Jason Lemkin always has some good observations on their growth metrics, including a crazy 91% YoY growth rate(with only a 34% customer count increase). This is all thanks to their upmarket moves discussed in #3.