1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Product-Market-Fit. Wait it’s a metric? According to Jeff Chang - you betcha: The best metric for determining quantitative product market fit.
2. MARKETING: In early-stage start-up land, often time marketing is an after-thought. The Founder Coach lists seven things he wished he knew about Marketing early on and HeavyBit have a great article and video on early-stage positioning - one of the best things you can do starting out. Not sure how you rank? Go take the Tomasz Tunguz Marketing Scorecard.
3. SALES: McKinsey discuss strategies companies can leverage to boost the resiliency and sense of urgency of their sales teams to try to recapture lost revenues. Also you o
4. SDR RAMP: According to past studies, time to ramp for an SDR averages about 3.2 months. From Saleshacker here are some tips and tricks to make this ramp time as effective and successful as possible.
5. PRICING: Ah! The ever continual experiment of never-quite-right. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare and Point Nine Capital has 9 awesome pricing strategy experiments - including just straight-up charging more, try that one asap. Jon Lemkin also asks - what’s better, monthly or annual pricing? (TL;DR - the answer is yes!)
6. CAPITAL: We’re two quarters into Covid and from a VC lens, Tomasz Tunguz observes that the Seed, Series B, and Series C markets are all down (37%, 23%, and 29%, respectively) and the total number of rounds are also down across the board. VC’s are currently well-funded still, but holding tight to those purse strings. Which is interesting as Jason Lemkin points out - Many SaaS Companies are beneficiaries of the pandemic, in usage and growth, which means, hypothetically, that VC’s portfolios (even factoring in the attraction of certain industries such as Travel Tech) should be thriving. 
7. ADJACENT USERS: This is one for your Startup dictionaries. From the Andrew Chen (a16z) blog is this article that that uses Instagram’s growth to describe the concept.
8. ENTERPRISE: Another bookmark for me! A comprehensive page dedicated to SaaS businesses targeting enterprise, from how to sell to how to build for the high end of town.
9. OKRs: Objectives and Key results. 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). But are they for you? Check this SVPG overview, then head over to Heavybit who have a great article on steps to get started for the first time within your organization. 
10. MANAGEMENT: IMO - one of the hardest (and most rewarding) parts of running a Startup? Managing the people. I’ve bookmarked this one post, it’s one I’m going to re-read a lot - 9 people management principles. TL;DR - just read it!

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POD OF THE WEEK: Finding Product-Market Fit in the new normal, with Des Traynor from Intercom

BONUS: Looking to accelerate your career? Andrew Chen from A16z just announced that applications are now open for the Reforge 2020 Career Accelerator Programs across a whole bunch of operator roles - cross-functional growth, marketing, and product. Apply here. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NDR. Net Dollar Retention is an important metric in the new world of Product Led Growth (SEE #2 BELOW). It’s used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase does the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like. 
2. VENTURE:  The 95 page CB Insights MoneyTree Report Q2’20 is now out with some optimistic news. The number of deals is up (1,374 for the Q compared to 1,336 last Q) and Seed rounds have seen gains after a long (pre-pandemic) decline. On the other side of VC town, the number of quarterly mega-rounds (rounds worth $100m) also hit a new record (69). Other notable metrics - M&A activity dropped significantly - 120 exits compared to 155 in Q1’20.
3. SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY: Security should be part of your dev cycle but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky.
4. WEBSITE: I was on a local cafe’s website earlier this week trying to check out the menu ahead of a meeting and the site was terrible, resisting all my efforts to access a menu (something I’m sure, beside an address or phone number, is the reason people would seek it out) so I thought of this article from Smashing Magazine this week, asking the question “Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors”? TL;DR - remove the noise and focus on the jobs you want the website to do.
5. BRANDS: Just how much does brand matter in B2B?….put your bias away as it's apparently a lot according to this article and this one. Need to get started or run a branding review? Check this article on how to get started.
6. PITCH: Now you have your brand sorted via the above post. It’s time to sort the pitch. This is part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed 50 pitch decks and analyzed 4 UX techniques to find out.  TL;DR Delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
7. CHURN: In our current comic climate, crisis-driven product churn is a legitimate thing as most businesses are practicing austerity by default. As I’ve mentioned quite often in the past acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining an existing one. Creating a culture of customer retention is one of the best things to do, especially during a pandemic. This article discusses ways to make that happen.
8. GROWTH: To complement the article above on retention - as well as focusing on customer retention, now is also the ideal time for a startup to prepare for growth by getting data, CRM’s, processes, and lead get all in order.
9. DATA: I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation”, well OK fine, I do have more to say: The opposite of that is also a truth to hammer home "You Cannot run experiments successfully without being data-driven”. We all overestimate our experimentation skills AND our Data collection skills.
10. FREE-ER: It’s not necessarily a time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy? But it’s probably a good time to think about more free as a sales strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and Online Payments. 

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POD OF THE WEEK: A great discussion on what the future of B2B marketing may look like. Great insights in customer experience automation vs. marketing automation, changes in Go To Market and positioning/story.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Cohort Analysis (free Cohort Analysis template!). GoPractice have a Product focused article on how to forecast key product metrics through cohort analysis and The Startup take a look at this metric from a VC Due Diligence perspective.
2. 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.
3. DEVELOPERS: This is a really in-depth report from Stripe on the fiscal benefits of developers (They calculate it at $3 trillion GDP globally) and it also highlights the opportunity costs of bad code and technical debt - something that NZ startups such as RayGun and Codelingo are trying to help solve
4. PRODUCTIVITY: OK, real talk - now that we are all WFH and Remote Work is here to say, we have eliminated commutes, limited lengthy meetings, and small talk. This means that you have freed up a lot of time to tackle real tasks, right? Well according to the New York Times companies such as Cisco and Microsoft agree and have actually observed a productivity bump. Whoop! But there is a downside. According to this report, Work-life integration is hard - 40% of people surveyed experienced Zoom Mental exhaustion and this article from Forbes expands on some of that WFH negativity
5. GDPR: Do you have customers based in Europe (or that are even European Citizens)? You need to understand GDPR. Consent Cookie Walls are no longer compliant FYI. Lucky for you (or you Devs) the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) just published this GDPR guide for developers. Covering what needs to be considered at each stage of a project to ensure it adheres to GDPR guidelines (and also offering best practices and great tops and thematic files).  GitHub version here for all you hardcore GitHub users.
6. CYBER: Fun fact: 80% of hacking-related data breaches involve stolen or reused credentials (you can check here if you have compromised email addresses AND, more importantly, any of your Passwords breached). CB Insights have just released a new report on CyberSecurity Trends for 2020 and beyond (downloadable PDF). Threats are on the rise so it’s a compelling read/must read for any Tech based startup. Luckily for us there are a bunch of companies addressing password-less verification, privacy by design, and decentralized digital identities.
7. CAPITAL: If you haven’t seen this yet, bookmark away. This is a Tech Crunch directory of the most active and engaged investors in the VC industry today (perf reviewed - so ones recommended by founders).
8. PRODUCT: As this article (and accompanying podcast) points out -  all product work is not created (and executed) equally. Part of the problem is a singular approach is not the right strategy as there are different kinds of product work, each with their own processes, measures of success, and strategies.
9. SALES: Of the remote kind are now the norm. Managing and coaching a distributed team takes a modified approach. This article from Forbes comes a great article for anyone managing a sales team of seven methods sales leaders can use right now to coach remote teams.
10. PR: To me PR is kinda like SEO - I know I need it, but I don't get how to make it work effectively. ChartMoguls’ ears must have been burning with my commentary as they released this article late last month on PR for SaaS -  just at the time I needed to read it.

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POD OF THE WEEK: I first heard Hiten Shah talk at a HeavyBit event a couple of years ago and have been a fan since. This podcast is a good example of his quality commentary - covering his experiences over the last 20 years in tech.

Welcome to the Benchmark special! I’ve been asked for this a few times and I’m on the road this week. So this is a compilation of benchmark data reported from across the webs….

1. SKOK: David Skok is a legend in the SaaS world and I have written about his work extensively in the past, as well as convincing him to speak at events. His 2019 annual report in partnership with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) is here - comprehensive benchmarks for any SaaS business. 
2. EXPANSION Acquiring customers Isn’t enough for long-term success, expansion strategies are pragmatic growth practices that any good SaaS company needs to get a grip on as 37% of new ARR bookings is attributable to cross-sell/up-sell activities. Here is what good expansion looks like. OpenView Partners have gone to town to benchmark this metric with an extensive Expansion SaaS Benchmarks report. Product Led Growth businesses lead the pack!
3. RETENTION. To compliment #2 above, retention is deeply related to expansion in regard to sustainable growth, and here is what good retention goals should be benchmarked against and how to optimize them.
4. CAC: This one needs nuance, so the David Skok report referenced at #1 has broken it down into blended, new, up-sell, and expansion. Median blended is every $1 of ARR generated costs $1.14. Net new is almost double ($1.34) of up-sell ($0.78) and 3x expansion (sitting at a neat $0.50). This chart alone highlights why having a customer-focused strategy is critical for growth. 
5. GROWTH: Median organic ARR growth for the year surveyed (2018) was 36%. Thus is across 424 SaaS businesses distributed globally (but 2/3 of which were US-domiciled). This rate is pretty evenly split across different contract size businesses - so there is no obvious relationship between ACV and growth. Companies surveyed average median ARR of $8.7m 
6. MARKETING AND SALES: Hubspot continues 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 week's summary here. Chorus.ai is doing something similar by benchmarking sales organizations (daily!) across their user base. A recent Tomasz Tunguz summary can be found here.
7. GTM: 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. David Skok also observes that the primary mode of Sales and Marketing efforts remains Field Sales based, with Inside Sales taking a very close second strategy for smaller businesses (under $10m ARR)
8. 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.
9. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: It’s a weird open secret that a lot of B2B SaaS businesses generate a significant amount of revenue from implementation and deployment projects, often captured as revenue from Professional Services, due to deployment and configuration complexity. So what are the revenue benchmarks for a SaaS Business to captured revenue through professional services? On average it caps out at 11% of all annual revenue with Enterprise focused businesses but even at the lower end of town it’s still 5% of revenues with SMB focused businesses.
10. SPEND: Figuring out how to optimize marketing spend and growth rate is a key question and this study doesn’t show great benchmarks - the percentage of revenue in pretty much equals percentage growth out, but with an ever-increasing range of outcomes as spend increases per business. More solid benchmarks are with the Sales vs Marketing spend ratios which stay at about 2:1 regardless of market-facing strategies (although Mixed is a bit of an outlier). 

POD OF THE WEEK: Of course it’s going to be How to Succeed at SaaS with David Skok
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BONUS: INFLUENCERS - Across multiple forms of media, influencer ads spark a greater emotional response and stick with users for longer than non-influencer ads do. Want more? Here is the 2019 benchmark report for influencer marketing. Influencer marketing spend is projected to hit as high as $15 billion globally by 2022.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Landing Page Metrics - you may not need 25,000 landing pages like Zapier does, but a well designed and personalized landing page can make a huge impact. ConvertKit lists the 5 key metrics for measuring the success of landing pages (and how to track them). To back that up, IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
2. WEBSITE: To compliment #1 above, optimizing the user experience (especially on mobile) can significantly boost the bottom line of a business, for example, improving site load times by just 0.1 second can increase conversion rates by up to 8%. Check this page from Google to review your site (and also your competitors sites) to see how you measure up and review what changes can be made.
3. WOMEN IN TECH: A Female Founders Fund survey investigating 111 companies found 20% of women-led companies expect increased revenue next year. Doesn’t sound great? Well that Covid for ya, as this metric is in comparison to the average of 12% of all companies expecting increases in revenue.  500 Startups also looked into the disproportionate (and negative) effects of coronavirus on female and minority founders.
4. MARKETING: I love some good alliterative guides, so here are the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion). It seems so basic in hindsight, so get all hindsightful and read the article, which does a really good job of making it all sound so obvious.
5. GTM: 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.
6. NO-CODE: Welcome to the world of no-code. Technology infrastructure is becoming so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps, and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of code written.  Last week AWS legitimized this practice into the main-stream and entered the no-code world, launching the beta version of Amazon Honeycode, a tool that makes it possible to build web and mobile applications without coding. 
7. PITCH DECKS: 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).
8. DATA: FYI/PSA - the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is going into effect in 2020, which means that businesses (esp SaaS ones) need to comply with a new set of provisions designed to protect the privacy of California consumer data - find more on the requirements here.
9. CHAOS: OK - hear me out on this one: There has never been a more significant time for a different way of thinking about change in modern organizations. Digital Transformations are important, strategically. But the mindset needed requires a certain kind of improv style to get there - as the systems in place that are needed 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...
10. EMAIL: DEEP DIVE. When it comes to outbound marketing, email works best. Yes, organic search is consistently the biggest source of traffic (Driving up to 68% of all traffic). Email accounts for less than 5% of traffic, on average, but has an incredibly high ROI, upwards of 3,800%!!! Digital Olympus has a great guide on effective email outreach (HINT: This takes time and effort!), Andrea Bosoni gives an IRL story about how he worked hard to improve email open rates and Gong provide a bunch (43 to be exact) highly effective Call-To-Action templates you can use in email campaigns. 

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POD OF THE WEEK: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield talks about competing with Microsoft, the future of work (now we are all using his app), and managing all those notifications.

BONUS: To compliment