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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 August 28, 2020

8/26/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: VALUE: A value metric is what a company charges for - in modern SaaS that can be per block of users, per transaction, bandwidth, etc, etc. Aligning that pricing value to the value a customer receives is the trick! (that needs tracking). Why does that matter? Well according to Profitwell, who studied about 4,000 companies, the corollary is serious growth (companies using value metrics are growing at double the rate than those companies not using a value metric) AND reduced churn. 
  2. COMPETITION: Of course you will always be asked for Market Sizing in a pitch, but how well prepared are you for questions about the competition? (Pro-tip - saying you don't have competitors is red-flag). Read this article from Search Engine Land that outline the steps you can follow to get some quality competitive analysis research in. Pro-tip 2 - as we are all tech people here - do not underestimate the power of G2, product hunt,  or Capterra to set your research foundations.
  3. GOVERNANCE: Mark Suster (from Upfront Ventures) has started a series on his Medium Blog covering StartUp Boards. With a follow up article (which I think is very relevant to NZ startups) which shows a board structure based on stage! He also provides a blog post AND a 43 slide presentation on Managing Startup Boards with really interesting (for founders at least) continuous integration/agile approaches to management.
  4. USERS: Convincing users (that are not friends and family) to adopt, and pay for, your product at the early stage is a significant milestone. Check this impressive post from Lenny Rachitsky on what he learned unpicking that for some of todays tastes growing B2B businesses.
  5. SALES EMAILS: Sweet - a power point deck for y’all. This is from Predictable Revenue on the four pillars they think constitutes a quality sales based email campaign. TL;DR less is more. FYI - there is a resource page at the end of quality helpful additional resources.
  6. GROWTH: No matter what all the fancy decks you look at with envy tell you - revenue is NOT linear, like ever. When it comes to solving revenue growth problems, most will jump on the get-more-customers bandwagon. But read this article, centered on MRR as a representative of growth, but asking "what things can a SaaS company do to grow without adding more customers?" TL;DR: 1. Reduce Churn, 2. Upsell/cross-sell, 3. Charge more.
  7. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: This is all about preserving as much revenue as possible over time (post purchase) - complementing the post above,  take a (deep) read of this extensive guide for building great customer success teams - it’s not just about limiting churn, but also a department and practice to convince existing customers to buy even more from you. As Jason Lemkin said back in 2015: "Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is”. Want a working example? Chart Mogul expand on this and explain their approach to a (successful) success management strategy.
  8. VC IPOs: Pitchbook’s report - Index of Venture-Backed IPOs for Q3 2020 is out. Big (but maybe obvious) key observations: the performance of the newer companies differs radically across factors including sector, size, business model, and market cap - all add up to higher performance (and reward)
  9. SEO: Discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy.  Moz have a great little guide and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute. But how does SEO work if you are part of a larger enterprise? The basics of wining in this category are summarized in this report from DeepCrawl.
  10. FRICTION: Every SaaS business process I look at seems to have areas of friction and when it comes to SaaS products, user-based friction becomes a critical aspect to understand and solve. This article breaks user-friction down into 3 types (emotional, cognitive and interactive) and provides tools to help understand and solve for each different type.


POD OF THE WEEK: CASH. Pretty much every SaaS founder: Long term prospects look promising, short term cash sucks. From Hiten Shah and Steli Efti comes a great podcast on How to Improve Cashflow During a Crisis. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 21, 2020

8/21/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: USER ADOPTION - measuring which new users could turn into paying customers (and which are going to drift away). Everything you need to know is in this article - it’s a comprehensive and a very deep dive (because these metrics differ between businesses and between cohorts of users).
  2. MANAGEMENT: Favorite/hardest part of a startup?…...Unlocking the potential in your people. Managing a team (and being good at it) is an incredibly hard art and a perishable skill. Take a read of this collection of people management principles with a nice little TL;DR list at the top.
  3. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: A lot of SaaS businesses require flat fee based Implementation and deployment cost charges, often captured as revenue from Professional Services. This amount naturally increases with customer size (and complexity) capping out at an average of 11% of all revenue at Enterprise size customers. So why do it? Well according to this Pre-COVID survey $$$$$ -  the number of apps in use has increased by 68% for large companies and 43% for small and mid-size companies since 2015. 
  4. SALES: Managing remote sales teams? From the team at Close comes a great read on how to leverage your CRM to keep coaching sales teams remotely.
  5. FINTECH: CBInsights released their State Of Fintech Q2'20 Report - it’s similarly bleak to the Q1 report from Business Insider I mentioned a few newsletters back with CBInsights reporting the number of deals continued to drop (397 compared to 452 last Q, which was already down significantly from Q4 2019). Total dollars invested though is up - ($9.3B compared to $7.95B last Q) - but mist of that was dues to mega rounds ($100m and above)
  6. API: You’ve probably heard of them - but what the hell do they do and why should I care? An API is a simple code interface that helps two applications communicate without having to know the details of the other application here is a non-technical explanation if you want more.  According to this report from Pandium the average SaaS company has an average of 15 API-based product integrations and some of those integrations can be a serious driver of revenue.
  7. SPEED MATTERS: I write this newsletter during my weekly morning coffee - I prioritize speed and appreciating the content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (But big shout to Grammarly who I outsource all that too) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, they obviously make speed a priority for their tech stack - Speed is very much a UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is my favorite great speed-focused tech company, who (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience solutions.
  8. ONBOARDING: Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates. From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality. I also love me a good working example, so take a look at this onboarding teardown from the Product-Led Institute.
  9. GROWTH: Using Zoom and Twilio as examples (both also notable product led) a16z make the case that the new era of enterprise go-to-market requires growth-plus-sales - which is just a fancy-pants way of highlighting the evolution in customer buying behavior for high end B2B. Great read.
  10. DATA: You like Data Lakes? Tomasz Tunguz presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes last month, the link to the slides is here. This is technical stuff but highlights are data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments. Which means these data systems need to be meshed (that's the Lake!) - and the tools exist now to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.


POD OF THE WEEK: Want to build a sales culture that attracts, and retains, top performers? How to build a culture that attracts top performers with Justin Welsh. 

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

8/14/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: All of it! ChartMogul have compiled their version of the “ultimate" SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet 
  2. COMPENSATION: Ready to hire some salespeople for your team? Read this post from Jason Lemkin on how to construct a framework for the first SaaS sales compensation plans. Then (shameless-plug) - check my deeper dive articles on SDR and AE compensation benchmarks.
  3. 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 as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization.
  4. CONTENT: Just like Sales, at the early stages, the creation of content also sits with the founders. I’ve put together a nifty 3 step guide from FirstRound Capital: Step 1. How to position your startup, Step 2. how to write well, and Step 3 top tips for telling stories.
  5. INVESTMENT: When taking on money from investors, they often request a very specific kind of share from you - preferred stock (or "preference shares" in the article). Here is what this means and why.
  6. PRODUCT: This one is for all you product managers. Lenny Rachitsky has curated a list of templates and frameworks for Product Management (there are also a bunch of others in there too) - definitely a bookmark-able page!
  7. WEBSITE: Do you have a pretty high churn rate from your home page or landing pages? Maybe you have a trust problem. This article outlining the Trust Pyramid is very much worth a read but TL;DR A website must meet users' basic trust needs before a visitor can be expected to engage meaningfully. With the Trust Pyramid, there are 5 distinct levels of trust-based engagement, each with separate design requirements.
  8. SALES: Hands up if you like cold calling! To quote the opening from this article "Cold calling is like a neat suit. It gets the job done and it never goes out of style”. But read it! It’s a seriously comprehensive guide to getting cold calls done successfully!
  9. ENTERPRISE: SaaS in the Enterprise is so hot right now! But it’s hard! This article equates it to riding up and over a rogue wave - it’s a bit extreme but to add pragmatic layers on top of that dramatic metaphor Enterprise SaaS margins are experiencing significant downward pressure as commoditization and competition pressures increase.
  10. REVENUE GROWTH: This one is from the archives as I consider it one of the best presentations at SaaStr Annual - it’s from Mark Roberge of Stage 2 Capital and Harvard Business School. Providing a handy step-by-step guide to revenue growth (downloadable PDF!)

August 07th, 2020

8/7/2020

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - ARPU: Average revenue per user (ARPU) is one of the most important measures needed to understand the quality of revenue SaaS companies generate and how that quality can shift over time. This article and Animal: ARPU chart is really informative to help determine how to validate the right-size of customers (with their animal totems).
  2. INVESTING: Jason Lemkin lists 11 signs a VC can use to predict if a venture investment will work out and 10 further hacks to have happier investors.
  3. CONTENT MARKETING: Heavy Bit makes the case that now more than ever is the time to double down on content. Also, spot quiz hotshot - how long should a Blog Post be? Hypothetically this long (but also literally not that long - its a long-ass blog post).
  4. MARKET SIZING: The dreaded slide on everyone's pitch deck. What's 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. 
  5. LANDING PAGES: Check this site out - a collection of the best landing pages with a focus on copywriting and design - also (this is a repeat-post) IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
  6. ANXIETY: HEY!……….Do you constantly worry that something is always on fire within your startup? Well don’t worry about worrying about it being normal or not - it is (especially if you are venture-backed). Just read this article and hopefully, you feel some comfort that the discomfort you feel - everybody feels! Don’t believe me - well go check out this Facebook group (and join me and other startup leaders) to share your experiences and challenges
  7. PLG (aka Product Lead Growth) - as a refresher read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG and then check this article out that goes into lengthy detail of how to design for PLG across the customer journey (and creating a flywheel) - trying to get a user to a point at which they understand the value they can get from your product (aka the AHA moment).
  8. FLS (aka Founder Led Sales) are critical at the early stages of a startup. But most founders are not experts at selling. Something you can relate with? If so check this guide from Kunal Jasty on 10 lessons for startup founders to get their first 10 sales.
  9. DEMAND: From Campbell Brown of PredictHQ (who knows a few things about demand) - is a pandemic relevant article discussing demand forecasting for 2020 and beyond now that the ability to do that traditionally took a massive dump in Q1. TL;DR demand forecast will be wrong for at least the next 3-12 months, be prepared and pay attention to geographic disparities.
  10. SPEED: First Round Capital  have their take on speed this week but top tech companies are top performers and ,market differentiators in-part due to the fact that they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. It’s all about execution and heartbeat, which requires a fierce focus and prioritization.
​
POD OF THE WEEK: This is a great extension for #6 above. Don’t keep all your worry to yourself listen to the Startup Chat talk all about their worries (and how to reframe them)
BONUS: Looking for some good reads? Check this list of Free eBooks targeting Techy/Maker/Entrepreneury peoples - I’ve already added 4 of them to my Kindle!

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