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​TOP 10 IN TECH

​a weekly SaaS 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 May 29, 2020

5/29/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: For the UX/product people, this one is comprehensive: 20+ User Experience (UX) Metrics Every Product Manager Should Measure
  2. GROWTH MARKETING: Want some solid pro-tips on growth marketing ideas that just plain work? Here are a bunch collated from Intercom - a lot is centered around being user-focused and if you don’t like that one, try this: Notion’s marketing secrets for those of us with small teams.
  3. AUSTIN: Not gonna lie - I’m a fan of this city…..and so are Tech Companies - there is a vibrant tech and VC scene down there in the Lone Star state. Crunchbase takes a look at Austin with a VC lens, which experienced record venture funding levels in 2019 - $1.84 billion - although 2020 remains obviously a little uncertain. 
  4. SALES: Strategies for a sales team come in many forms (all of which have a LOT of acronyms) - so which one is your team? Take a look here at this quick reference guide.
  5. THE SERIES A: Another great experiential story. From a VC perspective, the Series A funding round is a stamp of approval. A legitimization that product-market-fit is evident and that there is a venture-backable market out there for the Business to target. From the PointNine Capital blog comes the story of how PlayPlay managed to raise their €10M Series A (broken down into a digestible 9 point play).
  6. PR: Getting the elusive positive article in a relevant and respected publication can be absolute gold for any startup. But it’s hardly ever a focus/priority for founders.  Check this article - Startup PR for Dummies - to digest everything a startup needs to understand on how to pursue great coverage (TL;DR it all starts with a great story).
  7. B2B MARKETPLACES: Earlier this year I referenced the Marketplace 100 from a16z. A ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies and  what might be next. This has a heavy Consumer focus - so what about B2B?. This article discusses current opportunities and challenges for B2B Marketplaces (such as Cargo.one, Alibaba, and Amazon Business).
  8. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: (Positive) Customer relationships are at the core of every SaaS and subscription company. Negative experiences lead to churn that has a direct impact on the bottom line (duh!). Getting started isn’t as obvious as that last sentence though - check this Profitwell article on how to get started with a solid customer success strategy.
  9. EXPANSION: Up-sell and Cross-sell are well-documented strategies for expanding revenues (especially in this newsletter). Expansion into new markets is another tactic and goParctice go into detail on how to launch successfully in new (tangental) markets.
  10. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: How does a company know that they have achieved product-market fit? Andrew Chen from a16z calls this as a 5% conversion rate from free-to-paid, or 3X CPA to LTV ratio, or just a clear path to $100k MRR. Salesforce.io has an even more in depth deep dive that is also a 56 page Google Doc on how to find Product-Market Fit in the most capital-efficient and time-efficient way possible.

BONUS: We’re all Zoom Pro’s now - so from FYI comes a jam packed page full of all the stats you could imagine from Zoom.

POD OF THE WEEK: How to adjust outbound sales to this challenging professional climate with Jason Bay. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 22, 2020

5/22/2020

 

Feel free to share the knowledge outside of your bubble via this social distancing platform!
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: The Nag Metric. This one is fun (but not for everyone). A call to action within a site or customer journey is kinda like a parent trying to get their kid to clean up. It just gets a bit naggy after a while. This can impact your brand/NPS over time or just irritate people into churn. The Nag Score - outlined in detail here, is an attempt to quantify this.
  2. LEADERSHIP: With the rise of COVID-19 across all of our business and personal lives, leadership and strategies for operating through these uncertain times has become heavily discussed. This article on the topic resonated hard for me - centered on the idea of a Human Centric CEO. Not just because it’s not just the right thing to do, but because the author believes it will inevitably lead to healthier organizations. Also - for fun. In these unprecedented times Leadership/Execs have ramped the use of the word “unprecedented” on earnings calls.
  3. ONBOARDING: Onboarding success is often de-prioritized with scrappy fast-growing business but giving customers all the tools they need to succeed with your product is the best way to ensure that they stick around. Profitwell review the importance of good SaaS onboarding and discuss steps to create an awesome program. Userpilot also have a great tactical complimentary post here on the best customer onboarding software options for SaaS companies.
  4. VENTURE: From Gabe Kleinman of Obvious Ventures a great article positing that the entire VC industry needs a reset, making a strong case that VC's are missing out on the most transformative ideas of our time (opposed to incremental ones) and PointNine ask from another angle - If entrepreneurs can come from anywhere, then why do all VC's look the same? There is a reasons why the (kinda) parody site VCStarter Kit exists you know.
  5. PROFIT: There are myriad opinions on how well software companies perform, especially in public markets. SaaStistics analyze this across two article. The first asks the question 'Are Software Returns Really That Good?’ TL;DR - heck yeah. The second one asks - cool! So which ones are the best? TL;DR Shopify…..but also Zoom!
  6. LEGAL DOCUMENTS: In startup land there is a long tail of legal documents that need drafting just to run the business. Here are some great resources for free legal documents so you can stick to the mission: Avodocs - 3 free per month. Cooley Go has a library of documents for the US and UK, from Penn State Law School - a startup Kit bundle and for those of us in NZ, Simmonds Stewart has a comprehensive library of agreements and templates.
  7. INSURTECH: From CBInsights is the (PDF Download) Q1 2020 report on the insurance tech sector. Optimism and confidence are on a COVID-pause with a 54% dive in funding from last Q totaling $912M across 96 deals.
  8. SALES: Cold calling and email is increasing as a tool during our new sales regimes but these methods historically have very low response rates (1.48% for cold calls and 1% for cold emails). Jason Bay has some methods to optimize response rates and Gong has some recommendations on cold calling.
  9. MARKETING: Here is a relatively new phase for my SaaS dictionary - buyer intent data. I have posted all kinds of articles in this newsletter on Marketing strategies and tactics - but there is never a one-size fits all channel for a company. So how does a business find out what are the best marketing channels for them? This article suggests that everything needed to answer that questions is already within the data a business generates every day.
  10. AAS: Made you look. From my buddies at VentureBeat is a validating post on why ‘as-a-service’ business models will likely reign in a post-pandemic world. (But these will not be the “growth at all costs” pre-pandemic ones).
​
POD OF THE WEEK: “Jobs to be done” isn’t a phrase, it’s a methodology for getting stuff done - listen more on the concept here.  

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 15, 2020

5/15/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Another cheat week here - this time it’s Metric Reviews. If you have a desire to build a data-driven organization, there has to be rigor and discipline built around it. Sachin Rekhi has a great article discussing why metrics reviews should matter (TL;DR decision-making, inspection, intuition)
  2. VIDEO GAMES: One of the bright spots of this pandemic is the rise of the video game sector. In particular live-streaming viewership. Video game live-streaming viewership was already climbing before the pandemic, but is expected to accelerate significantly over the next few quarters. Platforms such as Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer are all seeing significant increases according to this report by Streamlabs and Business Insider has a deep analysis of the sectors year ahead in this report (downloadable PDF!)
  3. SAASTR: if you missed the virtual SaaStr Summit last month, don’t sweat it. I got you covered - replays here and slides here. 
  4. EDGE: Edge computing has been around for a while. But given the rise of remote work and sudden digital transformation requirements, the ability to process data fast will become an important tool in many projects and initiatives. CBInsights gives the 411 on Edge Computing (and why it’s useful) in this article. 
  5. MARKETING AND SALES: Hubspot continue to benchmark Pandemic-times data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates and more (aggregated from their global customer base of over 70,000 companies). It’s an incredibly useful tool as a benchmark to measure your business against. Explore all the benchmark data here or check this weeks summary here. Chorus.ai are doing something similar by benchmarking sales organizations (daily!) across their user base. A recent Tomasz Tunguz summary can be found here.
  6. WHAT TO SAY: For outbound messaging, how can you make customer communications effective, balancing business objectives with empathy, authenticity, and value for the recipient during these times? Here are some great templates from Close.com and Wordstream have some great copywriting guidelines in the time of Covid.
  7. MARKET SIZING: The dreaded slide on everyones pitch deck. Whats the size of the market. TL;DR if the market is not huge, same with your startup. Understanding the nuances of TAM, TOM and SOM is a great way to get started understanding market sizes as it applies to your business and the business problem your startup solves. 
  8. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is some serious sorcery and an unavoidable topic, especially if discoverability and content marketing are part of your business strategy. The key basics of wining at SEO though come down to solid Keywords research  and Moz have released a great little guide. Bonus complimentary article (repeat post) here is also another guide on how to use SEO to boost branded keyword rankings on Google 
  9. SALES: Of the B2B kind are based on true value delivered to a business. This founder breaks down their learnings of selling b2b into some concrete advice to pass on to others.
  10. CRISIS ADVICE: FirstRound Capital have a comprehensive 8-part series on how founders can navigate tough economic times. This is bookmarked for me for sure!
​
BONUS: Founder.University is a free two-day course on June 1-2 from Jason Calacanis and Co that is for startups that have products in market, but pre Series A funding. Apply here.

POD OF THE WEEK: To complement #10 above from First Round Capital via Invest Like the Best, The Past, Present, And Future Of Seed Investing

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 8, 2020

5/8/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Retention. Long-term retention is the foundation of sustainable product growth. Retention is viewed differently in different industries. Gaming companies have 1, 7 and 30-day retention rate metrics, and user pilot have a conference (you may have missed it already if this is no longer Friday for you) on how to  increase customer retention within b2b SaaS.
  2. GROWTH: SaaS Businesses have been on a bull market for over a decade and it’s all been about growth and not necessarily profits. A16z make the case that to weather this pandemic storm and the new future, SaaS companies should be focused on efficient growth strategies and metrics. NfX compliments this discussing teh new rules of the historic tension in SaaS of Growth vs Profitability. 
  3. CASH: Adding another layer onto #2 above. Startup Genome has uncovered a very pragmatic growth vs Profitability metric globally: 41% of all global startups have less than 3-month cash runway (and this is a pre-Covid-19 metric)
  4. FINTECH: Great report from Business Insider - their analysis of how the Coronavirus pandemic will impact global fintech funding. It’s pretty bleak - Fintech funding was down from $11 billion in Q4 2019 looking to close at just $6 billion in Q1 2020. The bright spot in this sector being digital investment and savings platforms businesses will still manage to see increase investment demand, while alt lender businesses will struggle.
  5. SUBSCRIPTION: Consumer and Business Subscription businesses have been seeing success over the past few years - recurring revenue-based business models being able to leverage digitally enabled, pay-as-you-go tools and have seen a 350% for the past seven years. So how are these businesses being impacted by COVID-19? According to this report from Zuora - most of them are actually doing OK - 53.3% not seeing any impact to be exact. But almost a quarter (22.5%) are actually seeing their growth numbers accelerate.
  6. GROWTH: I love myself a good transparent (warts and all) SaaS growth story. This one is a keeper from Tom Hunt on how ConvertKit took a very wobbly path over 5 years to eventually unlock $1.7m MRR.
  7. WEB VITALS: Optimizing a User Experience is key to the long term success of any service or product. Google is all over this and just launched Web Vitals, a program that offers developers guidance about user experience. It’s benchmarking very Google based metrics: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
  8. FORECASTING: Very much front of mind for many of us right now - how the heck do I forecast through uncertainty? (my head is nodding!). Chartmogul has a great article with some motivating advice for you. 
  9. STATE OF CLOUD: One of the sessions I attended every year at SaaStr was the Bessemer Venture Partners, State of the Cloud Report. It was a fantastic deep dive into micro and macro trends, forecast and predictions. This year SaaStr was Covid-Cancelled but don't worry - I found the Cloud edition (you’re welcome).  This is a Three-part publication. So set aside some time, grab some coffee and check it out. TL;DR - teh future of work is remote, privacy debt is the new technical debt, API universe will drive innovation across industries.
  10. SQUADS: A couple of years ago a really inspiring and memorable (you know in one of those cute handwritten animation styles) videos circulated describing the Agile Squads that Spotify employs in its apparently cooler than cool Utopian Developer department. Well, guess what, sorry to burst your Spotify bubble, but they abandoned it. (How Agile of them)…. In this port mortem assessment, the biggest key failure was such a SaaS-based one: It was solving the wrong problem.
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BONUS: Virtual festivals are everywhere - and here is one for Sales people: Sales Enablement Collective coming up May 12-15.

POD OF THE WEEK: How to adjust outbound sales to this challenging professional climate from Jason Bay at Predictable Revenue  

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 1, 2020

5/1/2020

 

  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: PQL: Product Lead Growth is a relatively new SaaS strategy and there are all kinds of metrics that tie into this new category - Product Qualified Leads (PQL) being the lead indicator that the PLG stray a company is investing in is legit.
  2. EMOTIONAL HEALTH: This global pandemic is an emotional storm for many. FirstRound capital has some great tips and insight on how to weather this crisis emotionally. This article is designed for team members and managers. First Round also says many of these emotions are good for your career.
  3. WRITING: Clear thinking can really help generate something relevant to say, good content has never been more important to grow a business, so take some time to read through Julian Shapiro's complementary article to the one I listed last week on writing well.
  4. EXPERIMENT: No one knows but everyone has all kinds of advice of how to operate your business now. The best path to real truth is though experimentation. Fareed Mosavat (Slack, Instacart, RunKeeper, Zynga) has some really great advice on how to run good (and bad) experiments.
  5. GROWTH: Building a system for growth is a system mashup of marketing, product, and good monetization - everything is interrelated.
  6. SALES: Last week I referenced the State of Deals 2020 Repor. Some great insights in there on how complex and cumbersome deals make closing very hard. Well here are some great tips from the same team (via SaaStr) on what to do about bridging that buyer-seller gap.
  7. VENTURE: In a pretty significant signal to the VC World, Y-Combinator has changed its own investment program, investing in its portfolio companies now on a case-by-case basis (it used to be every company) and reducing its investment size from 7% to 4%. This is not necessarily a Covid/Economic slowdown related. But just a sheer volume problem of the y-Combinator beast.
  8. LANDING PAGES: What makes up a good landing page in 2020? Unbounce list 20 of the best for you to review. I also gotta add the extreme end of town - Zapier - who have 25,000 landing pages. 
  9. LAYOFFS: The overall economic numbers from Q1 are in and not looking good, the tech sector is also feeling the brunt of this measured by layoffs on this site. The third tab is the hopeful one, listing companies that are still actively hiring.
  10. MEMES: Ever wonder where all the suddenly came from for 5G and Bill Gates? Memes and social networks have become weaponized, deepfakes and bot armies are only just starting to gain real traction across your beloved social networks. How will we fight disinformation (especially state-sponsored ) and propaganda now and in the future? CB Insights takes a deep look at disinformation via this report.


POD OF THE WEEK: Product Lead Growth primer - how your product is the new SDR (which is why this weeks metric of the week - PQL matters).

BONUS: In addition to # 9 above…..Who’s hiring right now? Some awesome people with a descent amount of time have made this incredible list (google Doc) 

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