10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 25, 2020

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! It's the last newsletter of this insane year and the perfect opportunity for a retrospective on the most clicked links (by you!) for the year. 2020 hindsight has quite a different meaning these days. . Thanks for your readership and see ya next year.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE YEAR - 1 of 2: Product-Market-Fit. Wait it’s a metric? According to Jeff Chang - you betcha: The best metric for determining quantitative product market fit; SaaS METRIC OF THE YEAR - 2 of 2: All of it! ChartMogul have compiled their (“ultimate") SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet 
2. GO TO MARKET METRICS: Current and pragmatic Go-To-Market benchmarks are presented in this deck from Tomasz Tunguz and the team at Redpoint Ventures. Some good findings from their survey: 1) If SDR/BDR teams hit their numbers, so do Account Executives; 2) Most sales teams ramp Account Executives in about six months; 3) Marketing teams spend 5-10% of a companies ARR.
3. BURNOUT: Anecdotally I feel like I have had more conversations about burnout in this year than ever. I’m glad people are talking about it, but it’s also very much a sign of the times. Check this very personal article from the CEO of Subbly on how he he recognized and managed his own burnout. Great lessons in here for everyone.
4. REMOTE: Nearly all of us are working remotely or WFH. The big tech players in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) are all doing it too and not really looking back too much. So take read of this article from Inc. Magazine (and rip it off): 9 great tips from Googles Remote Work Policy. Ars Technica expand beyond policy and dive into both technical and cultural changes in this article.
5. MARKETING: A SaaS 101 primer.  From the team at SaaStock is 1) a 20-page PDF guide to SaaS Marketing and 2) pulled from their last (non-virtual) conference are 4 of their top marketing Sessions.
6. PITCH DECKS: The self-proclaimed Worlds Largest Pitch Deck creation! Why recreate the pitch-wheel? Alexander Jarvis has compiled a monster collection (139) of funded pitch decks here (including AirBnB, LinkedIn, Intercom, Transferwise, Canva, and Sendgrid).
7. CHURN: This is real simple (but cringey-because-we-can-relate) list of things to do in order for your customers to hate you.
8. CAPITAL: Jason Lemkin lists 11 signs a VC can use to to predict if a venture investment will work out and 10 further hacks to have happier investors.
9. SALES: A great primer on SaaS Sales from our friends at Lighter Capital. Sales cycles, commission rates, models, and metrics all explained (with best practices).
10. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: Customer loyalty drives the success of a business, and the customer experience (CX) drives loyalty. Zen Desk has published their CX Trends Report for 2020 and it's full of great nuggets: 74% of customers feel loyal to a particular brand or company and 52% of customers report going out of their way to buy from their favorite brands.

POD OF THE YEAR: Trello (now part of Atlassian) is well beyond 50,000,000 users. Check this vid-cast from Jason Lemkin and SaaStr on the founders top learnings on getting there.