SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK
Product-Market-Fit. Wait it’s a metric? According to Jeff Chang - you betcha: The best metric for determining quantitative product market fit.
Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 31, 2020
MARKETING
In early-stage start-up land, often time marketing is an after-thought. The Founder Coach lists seven things he wished he knew about Marketing early on and HeavyBit have a great article and video on early-stage positioning - one of the best things you can do starting out. Not sure how you rank? Go take the Tomasz Tunguz Marketing Scorecard.
SALES
McKinsey discuss strategies companies can leverage to boost the resiliency and sense of urgency of their sales teams to try to recapture lost revenues. Also you o
SDR RAMP
According to past studies, time to ramp for an SDR averages about 3.2 months. From Saleshacker here are some tips and tricks to make this ramp time as effective and successful as possible.
PRICING
Ah! The ever continual experiment of never-quite-right. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare and Point Nine Capital has 9 awesome pricing strategy experiments - including just straight-up charging more, try that one asap. Jon Lemkin also asks - what’s better, monthly or annual pricing? (TL;DR - the answer is yes!)
CAPITAL
We’re two quarters into Covid and from a VC lens, Tomasz Tunguz observes that the Seed, Series B, and Series C markets are all down (37%, 23%, and 29%, respectively) and the total number of rounds are also down across the board. VC’s are currently well-funded still, but holding tight to those purse strings. Which is interesting as Jason Lemkin points out - Many SaaS Companies are beneficiaries of the pandemic, in usage and growth, which means, hypothetically, that VC’s portfolios (even factoring in the attraction of certain industries such as Travel Tech) should be thriving.
ADJACENT USERS
This is one for your Startup dictionaries. From the Andrew Chen (a16z) blog is this article that that uses Instagram’s growth to describe the concept.
ENTERPRISE
Another bookmark for me! A comprehensive page dedicated to SaaS businesses targeting enterprise, from how to sell to how to build for the high end of town.
OKRs
Objectives and Key results. Pioneered by Google a few years back, OKR’s have emerged as a part of the suite of modern product and company best practices (that include Lean, Agile and Jobs-To-Be-Done frameworks). But are they for you? Check this SVPG overview, then head over to Heavybit who have a great article on steps to get started for the first time within your organization.
MANAGEMENT
IMO - one of the hardest (and most rewarding) parts of running a Startup? Managing the people. I’ve bookmarked this one post, it’s one I’m going to re-read a lot - 9 people management principles. TL;DR - just read it!