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TOP 10 IN TECH
​a weekly tech 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 April 29, 2022

4/28/2022

 
1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: PQL: Product Lead Growth is the new SaaS strategy de-jour. All kinds of metrics tie into this new category - Product Qualified Leads (PQL) being the lead indicator that the PLG strategy a company is investing in is legit.

2. ONBOARDING CHURN: This is the sibling to the post above, as abandonment can signal poor onboarding. Here are 3 reasons why users abandon the onboarding process (identify verification, slow onboarding experiences, and being asked for too much data). Appsee has another 8 reasons in this article (adding Privacy and Ad clutter to the list).

3. WEB3: There is a whole new bunch of vocabulary to learn if you don't want to be seen as a big square at all your Web3 parties. Check this Twitter thread from @MishadaVinci, which covers all of the highfalutin' terms.

4. CUSTOMER SUCCESS - Quota: this is an expansion of celebrating CS's contribution as NRR and CAC payback referenced in #1 above. I have referenced AE and SDR metrics and quotas in past newsletters. But what about quota expectations in renewal and cross-sell/upsell within a Customer Success Team? Tomasz Tunguz takes a look based on a report a couple of years back from Gainsight. Most Customer Success Managers can handle between $2-$5M in ARR and between 10-500 accounts (but it varies based on segment/ACMR).

5. a16z: Watch out Y-Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz has apparently been stealthily piloting their own early-stage accelerator over the past year and went public this month with what they are calling "a16z START". They are offering early-stage founders up to $1 m in venture capital! Not sure how much equity that will require, and a16z will be accepting founders on a rolling basis.

6. PRICING FEATURETTE: Last week's article on pricing pages was a popular post, so I'm doubling down with more this week. Optimizing Pricing is hard, and it's never (ever) perfect. a) If companies decide to have a pricing page on their site (which is that whole other topic I mentioned last week), Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, lays out some thoughts on what makes a good pricing page. b) McKinsey gets technical, outlining how to leverage big data to make better pricing decisions. c) Want to look at competitor prices? Computers have a great article on conducting a high fidelity competitive pricing analysis project.

7. PODCASTS: Podcasts will make up nearly 20% of Spotify's US ad revenues by 2024 - whoa! In dollar amounts, that will be $400 million. This is just as well as fake artists are a problem these days on Spotify. Podcasting is a massive business now, with an estimated 120 million podcast listeners in the US last year. Podcasting is forecast to be a $94.88 billion industry by 2028. According to this Annual Report from Edison Research, growth is also corollary to Smart Speaker ownership in households.

8. VIDEO: According to this survey, the use of video Aids 95% Of Enterprise B2B Buyers in Conversion - read more (and how it does this) here.
9. BENCHMARKS: Bessemer VP has a playbook for us all (and a slide deck) describing how to scale your business from $1 to $10mm ARR. Significant benchmark data covering all the classics: CAC, retention, growth, etc.

10. CASE STUDY: Category creation! I know we all want to be up and to the left is one of those Gartner/Forrester Quadrant reports. So watch this presentation on category creation from Neo4 and how they did it, and here is another version from Gett.

POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #9 above ( but with the added challenge of doing it without any outside capital), how FastBridge scaled from $0 to $10m in just four years. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 22, 2022

4/22/2022

 
1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ARRR! "Pirate Metrics" was first proposed by 500 Startups; the great thing about this acronym based grouping of metrics is that it can be applied to non-software products or services as well as traditional SaaS: 
2. DECENTRALIZATION: With the Web3 hype going mainstream, the movement from "big-tech" Web 2.0 to a decentralized Web3 can seem a little bombastic. So here are some specific models and principles of decentralization that are a little more palatable. 

3. METAVERSE: Are you Meta-Curious? What's the Web3 hype all about? Look here at Hackernoon's top 5 Metaverse projects to explore this year. Fun fact: None of these projects are from Facebook/Meta (but who knows, one or two may likely be theirs by year-end....)

4. ATLASSIAN: If you didn't notice, earlier this month, Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc.) was down for many people, like, for evvvvverrrr! And I don't mean a few hours. I mean, WEEKS! Here is how that shit-show (technical term) went down. (TL;DR, Atlassian accidentally deleted all of their customer's stuff and had a hard time restoring it in bulk!). The article also highlights what Atlassian customers are saying now. 
5. MARKETING: SaaS Marketing comes in so many flavours. The team at MKT1 have evolved a framework and org chart of the different marketing flavours you may encounter in SaaS. Along with a description of the roles underneath (and some recommendations of who to hire based on stage). This complimentary article takes it a step further on using marketing to get results.
6. EMPLOYEES: Here is a great question: How many employees should you have based on your ARR? David Sacks has a great slide from his SaaStr presentation on optimal SaaS Org Charts - Series A is 40-50 at 1m ARR. Yup, that's only $20-$25k ARR per employee - the full report here expands into what roles you should hire and what the org chart looks like.

7. SALES: From Predictable Revenue is a little eBook for your files covering Sales Development Methodology (includes a Playbook).

8. NOMADS: I travel on a plane for the first time in 2.5 years next week, and for many of us, the world is slowly unfurling from our Covid seclusions, and Travel is desirable again. A lot of us are also operating under a remote-work new order. Did you know that some Countries (21+) have Digital Nomad Visas for remote workers that let travellers stay longer than more traditional tourist visas? (Antigua, Barbuda, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius). Learn more about the specific rules and requirements for those countries here. If you are serious about creating a remote workers Company Policy, watch this webinar replay.

9. PRICING: FastSpirng has released a new SaaS pricing page report for 2022 - you can read more here (I also like to highlight the great debate of whether SaaS companies should even have a pricing page on their site, but that is a whole other topic). Interesting highlights: Product Led Growth seems to be the strategy for leading companies, and only 36% of companies highlighted their most popular plan.

10. CASE STUDY: WhatsApp. Fun fact of which I contribute Zero daily: 7 Billion Voice Messages get sent on WhatsApp PER DAY! With 2 Billion users, some people are very chatty. Check here for more stats. To reach this kind of volume, good design is a crucial component. So take a read more on how WhatsApp achieved that here.

POD OF THE WEEK: It's been quite a couple of weeks if you are Twitter, the Twitter Board, and/or Elon Musk. So get up to speed (and insider gossip) with the team at the All In Podcast (Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg)

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 15, 2022

4/12/2022

 
1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CAC PAYBACK: CAC is also a measure of cash profitability per customer, and CAC Payback calculates how long it takes for a customer to become cash-flow positive. Here is how to calculate it (and why it matters). When benchmarking this metric, it's evident in SaaS that the negative cash trough is long! According to this survey, new customers, on average, take 2 years and 2 months to become profitable. This really highlights what will be a deepening dependency on Capital to fuel a SaaS company's growth.

2. CHAOS THEORY: Digital Transformations are important, strategically. But the mindset needed for these changes to happen requires a certain kind of improv style to get there - as the systems in place that are required to change or pivot are usually very complex - change IS chaos. So take some time to read this article to understand more of what this is about - I also aspire to have the title of "Chaos Manager" one day...

3. RYAN BRESLOW: Ryan is the founder of Bolt and is taking zero prisoners this week on Twitter with three SIGNIFICANT threads calling out Stripe for the Fast fiasco and Sequoia Capital for acting like the Mob. Read more on his view on Stripe's impact on Fast (which was a direct competitor to Bolt) here and his teardown of Sequoia here. Finally, wrapping both of those threads up is the third Thread for founders on how to protect their companies from Hostile Takeovers (such as allegedly what happened to InstaCart by Sequoia).

4. INVESTORS: Looking to build a list of non-Sequoia investors for your Cap Raise? Check this new fresh list of 65,000+ Venture capital, Private Equity Firms, Angels and Family Investment Offices contacts.

5. ESOP: Employee Share Option Plans are an excellent idea to incentivize and retain great staff. Not yet figured out your employee stock ownership plan? Check this cheat sheet, or here's a video version if you prefer to watch it. Obviously, working out the dilution factor of an ESOP is an important metric to know - so check this page for more on that. Finally, here is a 9-part video post of the most common questions about startup options.

6. ESOP BENCHMARKS: Fast follow from above here to this wonderful site that has compiled a set of benchmark data, comprising over 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe sorted by Seed or Venture stage.

7. PRICING: Getting pricing right is a big deal because a 1% increase in price can generate up to an 11% increase in your profits, so check this article on a data-driven framework for SaaS packaging and pricing to optimize that increase in profits.

8. WRAP-UPS: Add this to your tech dictionaries. Daily standups may no longer work in our new mashed up work-from-anywhere team environment, but Wrap-Ups are the new asynchronous, remote, WFH workaround. Possible fit? Take a read here of how to try them out.​

9. EXPERIMENTS: Every path toward growth and revenue is a hypothesis in startup land, so read how to run a growth experiment (in 4 easy steps!). Testing versions of things is something to embed across your company and culture as you experiment towards growth - it's why failure is key to not failing. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, get started with this refresher and then this Step-by-Step Guide. Go Practice has some great advice on making these experiments run faster.
10. CASE STUDY: Complimenting #9 above. On the extreme end of A/B testing is booking.com which often runs over 1,000 tests simultaneously! But here is the payoff: That flywheel enabled Booking.com to compound at healthy growth rates while maintaining ~30% EBITDA margins and scaling Google ad spend to approximately $4 billion per year!

POD OF THE WEEK: From the SaaS Revolution Show - Andy Whyte, CEO of MEDDICC (quite the acronym: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion and Competition), discusses how to get ahead of complex SaaS sales.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 8, 2022

4/8/2022

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NRG - Natural Rate of Growth. Now that I've slow-burn convinced a bunch of y'all to go all-in with Product Lead Growth (PLG), it's time to reference the metrics you need to know. It requires us to get halfway through this article before that becomes clear. But hey - it's worth the scroll. With Natural Rate of Growth (NRG), the assumption is that a PLG business has an organic, self-service growth engine at the core (as they are built to attract the end-user). Keep reading as the article comes complete with benchmarks towards the bottom. Hungry for more best-practice PLG metrics? I got ya!
  2. TRUST (Customers): People trust people over brands when it comes to trust. Chart Mogul has posted an 'Ultimate' Guide to Using Customer Testimonials to Boost Sales, noting that a generic and insincere endorsement is as helpful as not using anything. It's also possible to take it a step further by leveraging those frothiest of customers into a referral channel.
  3. ZERO TRUST (Security): Trust is also a platform play, so expanding on the above and giving you an emerging phrase for your cybersecurity dictionaries - heck, it's even an Executive Order for the US via President Biden. With the widespread shift to #WFH life in the past couple of years, successful IT and security teams have leveraged Zero Trust initiatives to address some coarse-grain and fine-grain access control challenges. This is all happening at the edge because that is where we all are these days, and perimeter/fence based protection won't work. Identify based and zero-trust strategies and architecture are where we need to be, so start with this primer on Zero trust from ZDNet and move here with this State of Zero Trust Security report from OKTA for the APAC region.
  4. PRODUCT TRUST: From my buddy, Ryan Koonce, this is the third part of the Trust deep dive this week, this time focused on product and how to build in-product experiences. Users are judge-y based on every interaction they have with your product. So if you provide experiences that are ineffective, annoying, distracting, or irrelevant, they could churn yours for another <Cough> <Evernote>.
  5. VALIDATION: I'm sure you have heard this repeatedly: validating a product is a make or break part of a startup's scale-up process, especially at the early stage. But how do you do that properly? Check this list of techniques and tools (it all starts with Market Research) - and get more into that starting here (with free templates!)
  6. CRYPTO: Gemini's new Global State of Crypto report highlights the significant changes happening to the Crypto market in 2021. Regulation and Eduction still make up the headwinds of the industry's future: $30 billion VC investments deployed in 2021 ($10 m of which was just in Q4' 21). 41% of those surveyed purchased crypto for the first time in '21, and inflation was a primary driver for Crypto adoption last year (which is indicative of what may be in store for the inflationary year that 2022 has been so far).
  7. CRYPTO DEVS: The sibling to #6 above Tomasz Tunguz also noted this week that only about 0.07% of devs globally work in Web3, but they have managed to create about $2 TRILLION in market cap (and that's only counting the top 100 valued projects). So who are these people, and what are they doing? TL;DR They are young and using (soon to be not) niche languages.
  8. INFLUENCE MAPS: I enjoyed this read earlier this week. The opening paragraph got me, as this week I really unlocked the power of a vertical monitor and literally said both statements ("This is amazing!", "WTF?! Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?"). Well, guess what - this kind of discovery in the behavioural design field is called the "Influence Map" Framework, which is super obvious (in hindsight 😊 ).
  9. USAGE BASED PRICING: I may have mentioned this in the past, but only 41% of SaaS Companies priced by seat in 2021. This reflects the evolving tech/SaaS landscape but is it for your business? Tomasz Tunguz asked the same question earlier this month (in his second appliance in this newsletter this week) and boiled it down to 3 questions to ask.
  10. CASE STUDY:  Blast from the past on how OKTA made category creation happen before possibly torpedoing everything earlier this month, so here is another SaaS security company, CrowdStrike, where Jason Lemkin takes a closer look via his "5 Interesting Learnings" series - they are currently at 1.7 Billion in ARR and growing at 65% YoY with $100k ARR ACV and 120%+ NDR.


POD OF THE WEEK: Great video (with outstanding notes) covering content creation and marketing strategy at the early stage: How to Earn Trust, Manage Risk and Build Momentum.

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

4/1/2022

 
  1. 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.
  2. 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 Mogul on 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. INFLATION: Super interesting 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).
  9. 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.
  10. 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.


POD OF THE WEEK: Starting the month with a brilliant video covering all aspects of failure and resiliency - and how to get back up when you get let down (feel free to forward this one around).

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