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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 September 24, 2021

9/24/2021

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Landing Page Metrics - you may not need 25,000 landing pages as 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 and Google is always up for listing ways to optimize website landing pages for lead generation this page also has some good inspiration.
  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 seconds 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. 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 - it's a long-ass blog post).
  4. MVT: Here is another one for your tech dictionaries: MVT or Minimum Viable Testing which is about creating hypotheses and conducting tests that allowed you to predict if a market is going to appreciate a product before even launching an MVP.
  5. 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. 
  6. COOKIES: Love them or hate them, the reality is that browser cookies have headed the way of the Dodo. This means that conversion tracking via cookies being phased out has created new attribution problems to solve in people's sales and marketing funnels. So check out this article on advances in ad-tech in a post-cookie world - or the PDF of the report here. Conversion modeling is a way forward, so if attribution is a necessary part of your business or your channel/partners Business, take a read of this article from Google on why conversion modeling will be crucial in a world without cookies and Advances in ad tech
  7. STORYTELLING: Last month I made a popular post discussing Emotional Moats as a competitive advantage: And anecdotally I feel like my way of storytelling has shifted from my pre-pandemic ways and Google seems to agree with my sentiment suggesting a reboot of our storytelling fundamentals.
  8. PRODUCT ANALYTICS: Product Analytics enables teams to develop a holistic, well-rounded understanding of how users engage with their digital products and experiences and totally complements Google Analytics. Check this article for a deeper than deep dive.
  9. ZERO TRUST: An emerging phrase for your cybersecurity dictionaries - heck it's even an Executive Order for the US via President Biden. With 2020’s widespread shift to #WFH life, successful IT and security teams have leveraged Zero Trust initiatives to address some coarse-grain and fine-grain access control challenges - all at the edge because that is where we all are these days, and perimeter/fence based protection just 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.
  10. CASE STUDY: Zapier. I like 'em and I use 'em. Zapier is now a $5 billion company based on the premise that we should all just get along because we are greater together. This is why they have the astronomical number of landing pages I reference above in #1. Integrating into and between apps using clicks is a strategy that put Zapier on the top of the No-Code/Low-Code movement and was fully remote long before the pandemic made it fashionable.


POD OF THE WEEK: The podcast version of #10 above. No-Code wasn't a thing when Zapier started, so they kinda created the category and only raised $1.3 million in VC capital.

BONUS: Its SaaStr next week and for those of us with no intention to travel they are hosting a streaming version - sign up here.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending September 17, 2021

9/17/2021

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: TTV - Time To Value: Time to value is similar to ROI (return on investment), but instead of realizing the financial success of an investment, it implies achieving the effectiveness of an investment or for a customer to realize value out of your product. There is also a corollary “trough of disillusionment” your customers may need to navigate before they get there though.
  2. DEADLINES: Author Douglas Adams once wrote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”. It’s funny because it's true. So when it comes to software development, how do you make peace with that whoosh? Check this article from Free Code Camp that discusses the art of managing the deadline - part of it is complementary to a reference to the sub-art of saying NO from a couple of months back.
  3. VALIDATE: I'm sure you have heard it time and time again that validating a product is a make or break part of a startup's product process - but how do you do that properly? Check this list of techniques and tools - starting with Market Research - but get more into that starting here.
  4. MVP CANVAS: OK - this is interesting (because visual frameworks are my jam). Y’all have heard of the Lean Canvas and the Business Model Canvas right? Well check out this spin on applying the framework focused on designing and launching MVP’s (just don’t burn the Pizza)
  5. UN-SCALE: Sometimes, while building a repeatable scalable business model, there are things that have to be done that are un-scaleable. This article highlights three specific non-scalable things sales teams should be doing right now.
  6. TRUST: According to Godard Abel (Co-Founder and CEO at G2, who know a few things about trust), SaaS buyers are increasingly more skeptical, suspicious, and unconvinced in this current post/current pandemic world, making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before.
  7. USAGE-BASED PRICING: Many SaaS Companies are shifting to usage-based models (Including me!). Charging per-use makes the product more affordable and accessible (and take advantage of the features they need), so check out this usage pricing guide from Baremetrics. Usage-based pricing is not a good fit for every SaaS business though - so here are 6 questions to ask yourself before adopting usage-based pricing.
  8. ENTERPRISE SALES: Moving upmarket into larger organizations is a pretty standard SaaS growth strategy. Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is good! But there is a lot to learn and a bunch of time, learning, and effort required to be successful in this market segment. It's not easy, but it can be done. Here is a great guide from Outreach on breaking into deals over $100k ARR.
  9. GETTING STARTED: There are plenty of SaaS ideas out there and getting started is hard. Take a read of this article on experiences starting a SaaS company from scratch and here are some great startup advice and Essentials from Y-Combinator.
  10. CASE STUDY: Expanding on #1 above Time to Value is something that is front of mind for me right now - so of course I found a case study on it (its' a LinkedIn post) - but gives great examples of what quality TTV looks like.


POD OF THE WEEK: Selling into Enterprise is no joke (see #8 above) and for this week's podcast, Asana's head of engineering has some great tips for ta on how to manage infrastructure needs to support those big old Elephants. Video version (with Slides) or audio version.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 10, 2021

9/10/2021

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: DAU/MAU. The DAU/MAU ratio is a popular metric for companies that need to measure user engagement. Rule of thumb: Apps with over 20% = good. If you have 50%+ - you’re world-class.
  2. WEBSITE: Do you ever ask the question “Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors?”. This line of questioning hadn't occurred to me before so how do we know if our website sucks or not? Well first up - focus on the jobs you want the website to do. GrowthInsider has released a great and comprehensive list of the biggest mistakes made on websites also take a read here on how to conduct an audit of your content.
  3. PERSONAS: SaaS B2B Marketing is a pretty unique beast - and getting into the minds of an idealized customer often requires going through the practice of creating personas - you should try it - it will def make you a better SaaS marketer. For most SaaS companies creating multiple personas is often a strategic necessity. So here is an additional differentiator (and what the difference is compared to a persona) of an ideal customer profile.
  4. MARKETING: More for your SaaS dictionary: Buyer Intent Data. There is never a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy and channel for a business. So how does a business find out what are the best marketing channels for them? This article suggests that everything needed to answer that question is already within the data a business generates every day. (you're gonna need Personas - so don't skip the links above)
  5. CUSTOMER DATA: Looping together 3 and 4 above - Customer data management is a practice, not a technology. I love that simple message. Bluconic give the crib notes/5-steps in this article about how to develop a strategy to optimize and improve customer experience using good data management practices.
  6. PRODUCT MARKET FIT #1: I talk about PMF a fair bit - but never with a true VC lens, even though it's a really important metric for earlier-stage investors. So AirTree (an early-stage VC) has just published this article taking a look at what metrics VCs like them look at for signs of Product-Market Fit - and also what the red flags are.
  7. PRODUCT MARKET FIT #2: Asking the PMF question IMO is always the more noble focus (as opposed to being focused on answering the question). But sometimes - you just gotta know (see above) and here is a case study on how Superhuman did it. Also, this article has some great PMF definitions. PMF was called “the only thing that matters” to early-stage startups by Marc Andreessen 12 years ago. Now his team gets a little more nuanced suggesting focusing on Product-User-Fit as an indicator towards achieving PMF. A similar nuance is also true post PMF with repeatable-scalable revenue models as a precursor to a repeatable-scalable business model (you know - the one with actual profits).
  8. FUNDRAISING: Hitting the fundraising motherlode this week with this downloadable PDF from IVP (DataDog, Coinbase, Slack, Twitter, et al) on how to be fully prepared for your company’s next fundraising round. This 25-page article has sections covering financials, go-to-market strategies, market sizing, valuation, and storytelling.
  9. HYPERLINKS: Probably a read for your coffee/Pomodoro break as we are breaking out the way-back time machine for this one (back to 1993). This newsletter is jam-packed with hyperlinks. So here is a question, not necessarily helpful for your business, but one I never thought to consider before: Why are hyperlinks blue?
  10. CASE STUDY: 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 - this was in 2020 - they are now at about $2.3m MRR


POD OF THE WEEK: Unpacking Product Market Fit - the podcast version - this episode references different examples and strategies to understand what kind of PMF would work for your startup.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 3, 2021

9/3/2021

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Cohort Analysis ( with a Cohort Analysis template for download). GoPractice has a Product focused article on how to forecast key product metrics through cohort analysis and The Startup takes a look at this metric from a VC Due Diligence perspective.
  2. FORWARD MULTIPLES: This is a preferred metric used to value SaaS companies, who generally carry very few assets, little to no profitability, but all kinds of potential. That number is wildly variable and currently increasingly bonkers at a quarterly rate - as of the writing of this, the median SaaS valuation multiple for public companies stands at 21.1x, and check out Snowflake at 84.5x!!!. So how is that number calculated? .....it depends: But a companies revenue growth and sales efficiency dominate the model. Cash flow margins, net income margins (profitability), gross margins, and many other metrics are largely irrelevant.
  3. GROWTH: Looking at those bonkers forward multiple numbers above, that metric represents an increase of over 150% in the last five years. Why? SaaS Growth rates that don't quit - the average is 40%
  4. CUSTOMER PROFILE: Here is a great tool for anyone. Sales can be a real uphill battle when sales teams don't truly understand their ideal customer, building out customer profiles is an incredibly useful way to identify your best customers. So download this Profiler kit pdf and use these questions and survey generator to quickly generate the ideal questions and template for your customer profiles. The rest is all on you.
  5. CAPITAL: Here is another term for your dictionaries - Entrepreneur Capital. It's a nuanced take on traditional VC - but one that is much more human-centric where the author differentiates VC and EC as Venture Capital = Companies + Money vs Entrepreneur Capital = Teams & Companies + Resources & Money. Seems superficial at first glance - but the more I sat with it, the more I realized it's all about assembling the right team.
  6. A/B TESTS: Every path towards growth and revenue is a hypothesis in startup land and A/B testing 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 how to make these experiments run faster. On the extreme end of A/B testing is booking.com who 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!
  7. 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 has some great copywriting guidelines in the time of Covid.
  8. CUSTOMER REFERRALS: Last week I referenced/suggested putting some effort and focus on Churn and optimizing ways to keep that number low. Let's take it a step further this week by leveraging those frothiest of customers into a referral channel. Here is a playbook from SaaStr.
  9. REAL ESTATE: What the heck does this have to do with startups and tech? And no this isn't about WeWork - so hear me out: Due to the massive (and likely fairly permanent) shift in work from home culture, Q1 2021 saw the subleasing of vacant office spaces surpass the 2008 financial crisis and Dot Com bubble-era levels (this is in North America). Prop-tech is finding a new gear and a boatload of startups are retrofitting unused space with companies providing indoor farming, micro gyms, and local storage services.
  10. CASE STUDY:  Some of you have signed up for this newsletter by a snappy little plug-in on the website. For a while, it was powered by Privy - and it worked really well. I had to bail once they monetized downstream because I'm a cheapskate and I now use a different product - but my whole Privy onboarding experience was something I took note of - as it was so easy. But they didn't start that way. Before the team discovered the power of an integrated app store discovery and distribution strategy, they were relying 100% on outbound!


POD OF THE WEEK: Don't want to read #10 above? You can just listen to the podcast version. Great notes on achieving scale via App Stores

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