Top 10 in Tech A WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 28, 2020

2/28/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: LTV/CAC. The ratio of Lifetime customer value versus customer acquisition cost is one of the primary metrics that companies use to measure efficiency (3 is the magic number) - but this article is interesting as it gives 4 reasons (from an advertising lens) as to why LTV/CAC is not a great metric for early startups (and what to use instead). HINT: It’s payback period…...
GROWTH: I’m a sucker for good growth stories, especially at the earlier stage of the spectrum, so here is a good one from Lemist on how they grew from zero to $1m ARR in less than 2 years (and without any funding). If you don't like this one, try this user-focused growth story from Autopilot (who went from 0 to 2,000 customers in 18 months)
CASE STUDIES: Are super valuable at early-stages as a company needs to demonstrate to the market not just their credibility but both the business value and the technical context of the product. Heavy Bit have a great guide on how to craft that first customer case study and Uplift provide 6 best practices to be using in your story.
SALES DATA: To get a really efficient revenue engine running, the fidelity of the data you are collecting before analyzing in the sales funnel is critical. Once you have that cold hard data, check the following article for (step-by-step) how to perform a sales analysis.
SEO: Always an unavoidable topic, especially if discoverability and content marketing are part of your business strategy. Here is a great little guide on how to use SEO to boost branded keyword rankings on Google with plenty of relatively easy things to tackle and in addition copyblogger has written a great article on how to get more traffic with SEO.
CRYPTO: Not something I mention much as, optically, we still seem to be in a Crypto-Winter, but behind the scenes a lot is going on (and behind the scenes of those behind the scene is where it’s all happening).
CONVERTIBLE LOANS: They are kind of debt, until they are not. But Convertible Loans are a quick way to access money quickly via an interested investor. Point Nine Capital describe in detail what is involved in a convertible loan and what to look out for.
CADENCE: Disruption is such a cliche word, but one thing that differentiates a disruptive force in any industry is simply the cadence with which that force operates. TL;DR: Cadence IS the advantage. Agile ways of working were pioneered by the tech industry ya know. For fast execution to work, fast strategy is necessary - here is BCG’s take.
MARKETPLACES: They don’t get enough attention in this newsletter, so time to change that a little this week. Earlier this month a16z introduced the Marketplace 100. A ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies. AirBnB tops the list and the next 3 down are all food delivery services - will be interesting to see if any of that consolidates next year. They also have an accompanying article talking about what might be next for marketplaces.
SECURITY: From an investor perspective, there is an ever-increasing value seen in good security practices when evaluating startups. Particularly when evaluating mid-market and (especially) enterprise technologies. From Heavbit here a couple of great articles discussing this in detail - from what investors are looking in a teams response to security to how to pass those awkward, friction-inducing Enterprise Security Reviews….and also how to get started.

POD OF THE WEEK: To compliment #9 above, from a16z: Metrics and mindsets for retention and engagement as marketplaces and other platforms evolve over time

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 14, 2020

2/14/2020

Happy Valentines Day - in the words of Anand Sanwal. I love you.

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: MRR (monthly recurring revenue). In a surprise statement to no-one, this is the most important metric a SaaS company has. But MRR is a nuanced metric with a few flavors and this is something that everyone needs a deeper understanding of. There are different ways to calculate the metrics and once nailed, can then be leveraged to easily forecast where you are going as a business and which types of MRR are performing best.
PLG: Successful Product Led Growth companies are everywhere and in order to get anything done, it requires Pirates, Shepherds and Sherpas within a team or organization. In the PLG vs non PLG world - the roles of salespeople is very different, it’s Sherpas vs Shepherds.
MANAGE vs LEAD: Not all great leaders are good at a managing (and vice versa) - especially in product teams. Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering at Reddit discusses this and how he leveraged leadership to grow his team by over 200%.
VC: What's the hottest new sector for VC’s? Automakers, as in they are talking all kinds of tech investments. Crunchbase take a look at this sectors prolific growth over the last two years with VW and Toyota leading in terms of spend. From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology.
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 its 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.
MARTECH: Whats the best marketing tech stack for your business? Here is what the Team at Wunderkind recommend. They say it’s perfect and I have to admit - it’s not bad.
REVENUE MANAGEMENT: This is the system of setting prices and adjusting them based on supply and demand (thanks for the infographic Chargify). In SaaS , which is all about predictability, this is really important, with RevOps being a new category of practice within maturing SaaS companies.
SECURITY: Back-of-the-napkin Math tells us that about 88% of all SaaS is now sitting on public cloud. But building on a major cloud provider’s platform doesn’t make your products secure. This is a great video and transcript hosted by HeavyBit covering the core tenets of modern cloud infrastructure security
FINTECH: Let's see how this plays out with Europe going full Brexit this year. According to this report (in handy PDF format) from Innovate Finance, global fintech funding declined in 2019 compared with the year before ($35.7 billion, down 28%), but in a clear win for the region in comparison to the US, European fintechs, lead by the soon to be estranged UK ($4.9 billion, up 27%) scooped up more in funding (total $8.5 billion, up nearly 50%).
COMPENSATION: Betts Recruiting release a compensation guide every year and the 2020 version is now out. It covers salaries of some of the most important roles at high growth (mainly tech, mainly sales) companies. Big take home: The Tech industry is very lucrative still and average tech account executive saw a salary increase of more than 4% last year (beating inflation). Also, in order to hire those same executives, companies were willing to offer starting salary increases of 9%.

POD OF THE WEEK: With new hires, onboarding and ramping are incredibly important for a startup to master. The Startup Chat discuss this in detail, especially on how to get this right for the first 90-days.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 7, 2020

2/7/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Let's bring it up a level this week - and talk about the metrics that matter. I discovered this article in LinkedIn and it’s great! Keeping things simple, Evan Kerr from Georgian Partners focuses in on efficiency and repeatability. Two significant hallmarks of a modern SaaS business.
MARKETING: Five SaaS based marketing strategies explained by ProfitWell: from Freemium to Social.
INTELLIGENCE: The fidelity of the data you get is critical to get to the insights that are relevant and actionable for your business. New Zealand own TouchPoint group gives 5 tips to drive towards that juicy actionable stuff.
VC DISRUPTION: Super interesting questions being asked in these articles, centered on the question “Has the Venture Capital Industry become so big that it needs to be disrupted?”. This all started with an article in the New Yorker (which can also be listened too - so also made it into the Pod of the Week), which also prompted Tomasz Tunguz to explore the same question, pointing out that some VC Firms are turning to debt as a non-dilutive financing alternative, especially as startups are staying private longer and supply/demand pressures are more skewed than ever.
SALES: From the infamous words Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: ABC - Always Be Closing. You can have all the prospects in the world, but they don't amount to much if no-one is signing. So here are 15 great closing techniques you can adopt into your sales processes and strategies.
DATA: This article from Go Practice is really thought provoking about the use of data and a) How it can be manipulated to create vanity metrics and b) How bias can really play a role in not just the fidelity of the data, but the fidelity of the intelligence gathered from it.
YOUTUBE: Brands seem to be sticking to YouTube through it tumultuous year loosing consumer trust. According to eMarketer 56% of US marketers used YouTube in 2019, (up from their initial estimate of 52%). By 2021, they are now calling that figure to reach 59% and the YouTube parent company (Alphabet) just released their earnings report earlier this week, where they disclosed details about YouTube's advertising revenue in its Q4 earnings - $15 billion in ad revenue, growing 36% year-over-year (YoY) and accounting for almost 10% of the company's total revenue!!
ONBOARDING: Good onboarding is one of the best things a SaaS company can invest in, as it impacts product activation and adoption, which in turn improves retention, and decreases churn. Userpilot nail this report (and this accompanying infographic) on onboarding observation taken from over 1000 B2B and B2C SaaS companies (Teaser facts: 86% of B2B and 76% of B2C had freemium offerings, only 29% used product tours.).
ENTERPRISE: Thinking of selling into enterprise? It’s a lucrative market - but the company and the product need to be ready for the requirements of selling into this segment. Here are some great tips on readiness from Sales Hacker.
PLG: It’s been a couple of weeks since I referenced something about Product Lead Growth - so it’s time for more. ProfitWell have a great article on how to become Product Lead (leaning on HubSpot’s transition into PLG as a reference). As always I highly recommend checking out OpenView’s Product Led Growth Maturity Grader - this tool is designed to give feedback on how far along an organization is on the PLG maturity spectrum.

POD OF THE WEEK: Why read an article when you can listen to it? From #3 above is the Audio version of the New Yorker article posing the question that, "is the current state of the VC Industry worth the risk?"

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