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​TOP 10 IN TECH

​a weekly newsletter
Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web repackaged for people to put to good use

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 31, 2020

1/31/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Payback Period. SaaS revenue is painful until it’s not. What I mean by that is that the cost of acquisition for every customer is generally much more expensive than the first payment(s). It takes time to recoup those costs (something called the "Capital Trough”). But how much time? On average (according to David Skok et all) it’s about 17 MONTHS! (Ouch). Tomasz Tunguz takes a look at this metric too and reviews best-in-class for public traded companies and data sources.. Zoom (one of my all-time favorites) tops out at a payback period of about 3-months.
  2. VENTURE: The Q4 MoneyTree report is out (from PwC and CB Insights). Number of IPO’s, down. Funding from Q3-Q4, down, Funding YoY, down. Number of $100m plus rounds, down. Yikes.
  3. PRODUCT: This is my favorite article of the year to date. Scale isn’t just something that happens in sales, it’s requires your Product Team to be ready for Scale Up too. First Round discusses how best to craft product teams at different stages of growth (I love the pre-MVP drunken walk analogy - stumbling around, trying to build something people want).
  4. TESTIMONIALS:  When it comes to trust, people trust people over brands. Chart Mogul have posted an Ultimate Guide to Using Customer Testimonials to Boost Sales, noting that a generic and insincere endorsement is just as helpful as not using anything.
  5. MARKETING - EARN, OWN, BUY: There are a multitude of marketing strategies organizations can deploy that are relevant for their line of business and target audiences from pay per click to content marketing. Bloom list the differences between the three main categories.
  6. SVOD: How many streaming subscriptions is too many? This year we are probably going to find out with a projected massive shakeout on the horizon According to Business Insider here is a report on how this is likely to play out.
  7. TECH TRENDS: Deloitte jump onto the 2020 Trends bandwagon and have released a pretty interesting paper, downloadable as a PDF here, exploring six key trends: Ethics, Agile Financing, Macro Tech forces in Enterprise, Operational Simulations, Human Experience Platforms (such as NZ’s Soul Machines and UneeQ), and Tech Architects. I’m also a big infographic nerd and thought that this visualization of their last 11 years of tech trends is great.
  8. TESTING: Everything is a hypothesis in a startup and testing should be embedded in everything you try towards growth and product. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, Go Practice have some great advice on how to make these experiments run faster.
  9. SMB vs ENTERPRISE: As a startup - which to chase? Firstly this obviously depends on the product being built, but in general, Old School guidance was to start chasing the biggest contract values as soon as possible, which is Enterprise. But according to Craft, more 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.
  10. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a constant arms race, with criteria for optimization in a constant state of flux. Backlink have just updated their guide for 2020 for On-Page SEO (which is a different category than off-page)

POD OF THE WEEK: This is actually a webinar replay. But if you are a founder wanting to understand how other businesses structure stock-related incentives to their employees, watch this ( it’s got a global focus) 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 24, 2020

1/24/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Expansion: OK - this is a total deep dive. Expansion revenue costs pennies on the dollar vs net new customer acquisition costs and also demonstrates that a business can deliver increasing value to customers (and monetize that value!). On average  37% of new ARR bookings is attributable to cross sell/up-sell activities and improving retention or monetization can actually impact growth 2-4x more effectively than improvements in acquisition. (see slides 41-46 for the real nuggets). Tips on how to optimize this via renewal available here. But I really enjoyed reading this working example of what that means to a companies growth and revenues from a product perspective from the company Buffer. 
  2. PERSONALIZATION: As an add-on to above, personalization can reduces acquisition costs as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics Here is a great article from Chart Mogul on the (modern day) personalization fundamentals.
  3. MARKETING: From Kyle Tibbitts - Marketing lessons learned over more than a decade growing startups. It all starts with the Product - 'Great marketing emanates from a great product.'
  4. VENTURE: Tomasz Tunguz takes a look at the health of the US Venture Market as we head into 2020. Even with an increase in scrutiny in 2019, it seems like we are still on a run and sentiment in the valley continues to be positive.
  5. DEV SUPPORT: Your devs are the lifeblood of your tech business, so how best can organizations provide ways to optimize their developer  support? Well check this State of Developer Report  as a resource to get started - Two-thirds of the developers say maintenance of legacy systems and technical debt hinder improved productivity! TL;DR? Devs are problem solvers (but they generally don't want to talk to you) - understanding this should feed into how you design a support system for your products.
  6. PRODUCTS: And speaking of products, want to build them faster? Hiten Shah has a great book for you on his 5 habits. It also has real-life examples of how different tech companies practice these habits.
  7. SEO: This is an oldie but a goody: Want to know how Zapier grew their business leveraging SEO - here is the case study. TEASER: It kinda involves them building 25,000 seperate landing pages (no I didn’t accidentally type to many zeroes)
  8. ONBOARDING: It’s something I’m deeply into right now. This is how ZenDesk do it and ChartMogul have a version to
  9. OKR’s: 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). Heavybit have a great article on steps to get started for the first time within your organization.
  10. SALES: A great primer from our friends at Lighter Capital. Sales cycles, commission rates, models, and metrics all explained (with best practices)

POD OF THE WEEK: Controlled Chaos: The Inevitable Marriage of DevOps and Security. A great podcast that reflects the growing reality that security needs to evolve and become integrated into the development process

BONUS: Need a SaaS Metrics refresher? Chart Mogul got you covered with a weekly course. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 17, 2020

1/17/2020

 
​
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Active Users! An active user is any user who interacts with your platform in some way during a specific time period that you can identify (depends on your business but can be daily, weekly, monthly). Some consider this a vanity metric but here is why this is still important.
  2. SEED INVESTMENT: According to Y Combinator’s investment  history, Seed investors are favoring enterprise startups
  3. ANTITRUST: According to the Aggregation Theory, Tech companies at scale provide a commoditization affect into markets (as they are uniquely enabled by very low marginal costs and high user preference). Think Airbnb and Uber for trust, Amazon and Netflix for choice, and Google and Facebook for advertising. This year much of this aggregation will be put to the test as regulatory clampdowns and anti-trust behaviors will face large scale scrutiny. Business Insider provide a deep dive on what this means for big tech and digital media in 2020.
  4. TRACTION: Another new SaaStr guide, which is basically a curated PDF of Wisdom from SaaStr speakers for gaining initial traction within a SaaS business. Packed full of great nuggets and insight.
  5. SMART SPEAKERS: They are everywhere and all the big players are also heading into cars (on average, US drivers spend nearly an hour driving each day). From Business Insider here is the latest report on Smart Speakers for 2020, forecasting it to be the fastest-growing digital platform ever.
  6. GROWTH (bootstrapped): 5 Sales lessons growing to $150k MRR without salespeople and how they cracked the elusive organic growth strategy.
  7. CUSTOMER SUCCES: Jason Lemkin has said "Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is” and this was back in 2015. Chart Mogul expand on this and explain their approach to a (successful) success management strategy.
  8. MOBILE: AppAnnie just released their annual The State of Mobile report for 2020 which is packed full of valuable data. At a high level the average user in 2019 spent 3.7 hours/day on their device and consumer spend has more than doubled since 2016 (at $120b USD)
  9. DEV-SEC-OPS: Most startups and dev teams have been living the DevOps life for a few years now - but how does a team transition into a one that integrates security into that system? Sqreen write about how best to take first steps. Automation and Cultural permission are key! Also a great presentation here (downloadable slides!)
  10. CHURN: This is real simple (but cringey-because-we-can-relate) list of things to do in order for your customers to hate you.

POD OF THE WEEK: A great synopsis on how modern product discovery and development practices (such as Agile, Lean, Jobs to Be Done) evolved. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 10, 2020

1/10/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: LVR (Lead Velocity Rate): LVR is the lead growth rate of qualified leads per month. This metric provides a clear understanding of a businesses’ future revenue and growth. Setting a goal to increase LVR by 25% will also able you to equally increase revenue generated for your business. 
  2. PZF: a16z contend that the stage prior to Product Market Fit is called PZF (Product-Zeitgeist-Fit). Which is when a product resonates with the mood of the times, which is why first to market is not always the best (Friendster remembers this well). 
  3. $Engineer$: I shoulda kept at it! Software engineers, particularly for tech companies on the top end of town, are earning massive salaries in 2019 - up to almost $1m USD/year at Facebook for a Principle Engineer.
  4. REMOTE WORK (deep dive): In my new role I now support a remote team distributed across 5 countries and optimizing how we work is a skill I’m slowly learning. As referenced in a previous post here is the 2019 report on Remote Work from Owl Labs, from SaaStr an article on why this matters and from Chart Mogul my current absolute bible on ways of working and communicating in distributed teams.
  5. SCALING: The ultimate guide of advice for Scale Up from Jason Lemkin of SaaStr all combined into one downloadable PDF.
  6. ANALYTICS: Being a "growth hacker" is just putting a shiny label on high fidelity analytic mastery. It’s all about the data, not the tools. McKinsey give five pointers on how to make analytics work in B2B Sales.
  7. VENTURE: Early Growth Financial Services are a great service provider in the US to early stage startups and have just released this 101 guide to raising capital 
  8. VIRTUAL REALITY: It’s CES this week, so of course we have to talk about some hyped tech. VR hasn’t exactly made the impact touted by the industry and shipments last year were half of what Business Insider forecast would ship at just 7.6 million units. But 5G is a VR marriage that could change that game and Business Insider look at Telecom’s role in VR value chain.
  9. AIR PODS: I use mine daily and here is a fact that blew my mind; With some (slightly more sophisticated than back-of-the-napkin) maths, Kevin Rooke estimates that the AirPods division of Apple makes more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify COMBINED and will likely outpace Uber in 2020. The obvious distinction here is this is mostly comparing subscription businesses to a stand alone product - but equally this does not include any other Apple Products except AirPods and AirPods Pro’s (such as any of the Beats Audio line).  Bonus Controversial Opinion: I prefer regular AirPods over AirPods Pro’s. Change my mind.
  10. PASSION ECONOMY: No, not that one. A16z describe the Passion Economy as new emerging platforms that allow anyone to monetize their unique skills - ways they can capitalize on creativity. In this article a16z also list 16 key metrics to understand. Cool to know of some Kiwi-lead companies in this space such as Substack and Ponoko!

POD OF THE WEEK: Trying to build an Enterprise ready product? Security will need to be at the heart of what you build. Heavbit have a great podcast here on passing Enterprise Security Reviews. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 3, 2020

1/3/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). From Chartmogul here is the full guide.
  2. PRICING: As mentioned in prior newsletter, it’s never perfect and shoudl always be viewed as a constinulal experiment. Here is a great guide on how to run those experiments. 
  3. STATE OF STARTUPS: Great report of 3,600+ submissions and 190,000+ data points that closes out 2019 from First Round Capital. (Rockier fundraising, mental health, remote work are all key topics)
  4. MARKETIING (deep dive): as we head into 2020 here are some measurement resolutions all marketers should make and Google are forecasting the next big things headed our way.
  5. PLG: (Product led growth). In this new age of PLG hitting it’s stride, here are some tried and true practices for running sales within a PLG organization.
  6. AWS EDGE: Amazon just hosted their Annual AWS conference last month and it contained a bunch of announcements. The big one is centered on the growing need for “Edge Computing” and their agressive push into this part of the public cloud market. It’s going to require some new thinking from an architecture perspective and will be achieved via “Outpost” racks located at local colocation providers and telecom carriers. 
  7. PITCH: From a great friend of the newsletter, Bill Reichert, comes a classic top-10 tale of what not to do with your pitches slides. 
  8. IT'S A ZOO: Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures coined the term Unicorn over 15 years ago. Since then the animal metaphors and taxonomy have expanded. Here is the current list (and here is the additional customer-focused one)
  9. MESSAGING: Great little Reddit post of the most popular messaging apps by Country. The reach of Facebook via Messenger and WhatsApp is absolutely remarkable.
  10. DECADE to DECADE: From Fred Wilson’s AVC site is a double post of what happened in the 2010’s and what he sees happening in the 2020’s
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POD OF THE WEEK: The SaaStr Podcast’s most downloaded episode of 2019: Tomusz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures - a SaaStr drawcard and frequently linked in this newsletter. 

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