Top 10 in Tech A WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 30, 2020

10/30/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Net Dollar Retention - Sammy Abdullah of Blossom Street Ventures backs up my on-going opinion that net dollar retention (and by-proxy Up-sell) is the most important metric in SaaS. NDR comes in a variety of different efforts though so take a read of this article to get a better grip of the nuance and then ask yourself: "Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend?" Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase do the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like.
CUSTOMER SERVICE: In this current age of the customer, enhanced by COVID, SaaSx make the argument that Customer Success is actually the product. Want to start building out that product? Check the HubSpot guide on getting started with your customer team.
HANDOFF: To add onto above, the customer journey will have plenty of touch points and handoffs. Chartmogul provide some great tips on customer handoff from sales to Customer Success teams.
NPS: To add onto the add on above. Customer Service and Success have many metrics to track and NPS makes the top of the list. This White Paper from Ask Nicely reviews NPS (among with other common customer experience metrics) and explains how to measure and calculate NPS. Neil Patel then gets into a 3 step program of how to leverage NPS for your business.
ANALYTICS: Being a "growth hacker" is just putting a shiny label on high fidelity analytics mastery but many analytics efforts result in failure - it’s all about the data, not the tools, check this primer on the topic. McKinsey provide five pointers on how to make analytics work in B2B Sales. And once you get good at collecting the cold hard data, check the following article on how to perform a sales analysis (step by step).
PERSONALIZATION: Did you know that personalization can reduce acquisition costs as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization? SaaS marketers have been leveraging personalization to increase conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels for some time so here is a great article from Chart Mogul on the (modern day) personalization fundamentals.
PRIVACY: The Debbie downer from above, let's not get too personal. Privacy concerns are rightfully growing and rules around the globe are tightening (FYI the California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect in 2020). This is creating significant challenges in the digital advertising industry, so Google has created a playbook, collecting best practices and case studies from this forward-thinking, privacy optimized, group of marketers.
FIRST PRINCIPLE THINKING : Want to be more like Elon? Take a read here on the concept of First Principles Thinking. Not gonna lie, I've re-read it again this week and it still makes my brain hurt. Want more? Fine. Here is a full guide/website. Now that you are an expert on this principle, here is how First Principle Thinking can be applied IRL - in this example towards a Product Lead Growth business.
ROADMAPS: Always seem a bit too waterfall-y for Agile teams - old-school, clunky and rigid. But Agile teams absolutely need them as the teams still need some overarching direction and sense of what’s to come beyond Sprint cycles. Read here on the reasoning why along with 5 roadmap templates to use. I'm personally a fan of how Atlassian have designed their public access roadmap - it gives me hope.
DEATH: Of the SaaS kind. Y-Combinator (via the SaaStr Blog) lists 5 things that kill startups (and what to do about it). It's a way deeper article than it sounds (and it ain't just 5 things)

BONUS: There is no real category for this post, but I think it's awesome. Entitled 'A Few Rules'

POD OF THE WEEK: Expanding on #5 above, just having data is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data. a16z explore the evolution of data architectures.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 23, 2020

10/23/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: WORD OF MOUTH - guess we are calling this one WOM? it's something that is very hard to measure, this article calls it a coefficient. Sure. Let's run with that! The WOM coefficient. Want something more WOM intellectual? Fine, McKinsey also has this deep dive on WOM Science.
INCLUSIVITY: From my buddies and old crew at SecondMuse comes a new report:"The State of Entrepreneurship in the U.S." Only 17% of Entrepreneurs interviewed view the U.S. Economy as inclusive. 91%of women entrepreneurs don't view the economy as inclusive, and 69% view COVID as an opportunity to rethink the economy.
PITCH DECKS: It's really hard to craft the right narrative in pitch decks at the earliest stages, but here’s a great Tweet thread on how to think best about telling you startups story. Then start with part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed and analyzed 50 pitch decks to find out that y’all need to delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
SALES: Last week we did a bit of a 101 to Marketing. This week, let's try the same with Sales (of the SaaS kind). LighterCapital has a great intro to everything SaaS sales - cycles, commissions, metrics and models. ScaleVP has a really good primer on SaaS sales efficiency (with some metrics) and I need to acknowledge it’s just a weird time to sell anything by referencing this article on leading sales through the COVID-19 Crisis.
DATA: The data hype is definitely back! I’ve certainly heard it hyped at a few events lately as kind of savior of industries and the Snowflake IPO was just bonkers. Let's unpack the data hype and focus in on what it means. Starting here with 5 trends in Data and what software buyers are looking for in tools. Tomasz Tunguz also presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes earlier this year (link to the slides here). TL;DR - data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments and tools now exist to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.
FREEMIUM: Don’t call it a comeback! But Freemium is gaining popularity again as an effective growth strategy for B2B SaaS companies. Canva and Slack have contributed to the re-emergence of this growth strategy. So, why is Freemium becoming popular again? Read more on that here, then check these 3 Famous Freemium SaaS Strategies (And Why They’re So Good):
ONBOARDING: It’s something I’m deeply into right now. Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates - so here is how some of the best do it: Leveraging email, this is how ZenDesk document their comms flow and ChartMogul have a guide to their non-email version too. From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality.
ABANDON: This is the sibling to the post above as abandonment can be a signal of poor onboarding. Here are 3 reasons why users abandon the onboarding process (identify verification, slow onboarding experiences, and being asked for too much data) and AppSee have another 8 reasons in this article (adding Privacy and Ad clutter to the list).
CSM ATTRIBUTION (Customer success managers): How do you account for or budget the cost of a CSM team? The team at Gainsight dive deep into this question and come up with some fantastic insights - even though the question itself is complicated and the answers end up being more non-monetary than you would probably like. Owning the renewal, up-sell, cross-sell are key delineation point s between expense attribution to different departments who CSM teams may sit under.
SEO: SEO is dead! Just kidding - thats #1 in this top 10 SEO myths article. Discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy. Moz has a great little guide on keyword research complimented by their other article on Search Intent and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute.

POD OF THE WEEK: For some the concept of ’salesperson’ is cringe - so listen to this podcast from Predictable Revenue that explores the idea of social selling and bringing back the human element of sales

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 16, 2020

10/16/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Product-Market Fit (Quantitate)- it’s cool to consider this concept as a metric, so I’m bringing it back, according to Jeff Chang this is the best metric for determining quantitative product market fit. Another metric is by Andrew Chen from a16z who calls PMF as a 5% conversion rate from free-to-paid, or 3X CPA to LTV ratio.
PRODUCT MARKET FIT: Continued from above - beyond quantitive measurements, how else can a company know (ie Qualify, not Quantify) that they have achieved product-market fit? This article from TechNexus qualifies PMF as 40% + of respondents stating “very disappointed” to the survey question “How would you feel if you can no longer use the product?” and 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.
CAPITAL: Pitchbook has released the Q3 Venture report (downloadable PDF here) GOOD NEWS: The total estimated deal count for US startups saw an uptick in Q3'20 and the total value of all deals remained about the same. BAD NEWS: Seed rounds continue to take a hit but ($4B so far, down from $6.7B).
ONBOARDING: It used to be pretty easy when a new team member starts and simply shows up to the office for their orientation. So how does that optimally work in a WFH/Distributed team? Justin Garrison has some great tips in this Twitter thread.
SALES: Enterprise sales are something else - especially if you're a small startup trying to just get some momentum going and don’t know s&!t. If this sounds like you take a good read of this article from Close on how to identify all of those enterprise sales weak spots and also take a read here - this is a big lesson I’ve learnt. Often times you are not just selling product, you are selling capability.
REVOPS: Is this for you and your business? RevOps is the concept of centralizing operations teams from marketing, sales, and customer success. To many SaaS B2B companies it can be a high-impact way to accelerate revenue growth and provide some operational efficiency (especially in more austere Pandemic Times). BCG have a great deep dive for you to read here to get started on assessing RevOps as a practice for your business.
MARKETING: Anyone here see Marketing as the big unknown? Just what the heck is it? Seth Godin has a pretty good idea and this article is a marketing 101-401 listing some of the best marketing-based articles and resources on the webs. Definitely something I recommend as a bookmark for frequent reference.
PRICING: How to price and sell in a pandemic is an article that immediately gets my attention - and the article is a good one from BCG, so def take a read. Then also take a read of this article from Julian Lehr of Stripe: 9 Tricks to Experiment with your Pricing Strategy.
VALUE: Unless you know why customers buy your stuff…...and then buy from you again….you’re not ready to scale. In this article from Solving Product there is a great list of questions you can ask your customers to identify why they made the purchase, but more importantly there is another group of questions to consider to figure out why they stayed (and spent more) as that is where the true and often unrealized value is. This is also a great complimentary article on choosing the ideal feature sets based on values.
CONTENT MARKETING: I bet you have been told that you need to focus on top of the funnel - but here is something controversial to read: When it’s comes to Content Marketing - focus on the bottom of the funnel first to drive signups. Whaaaaaaaat? The thinking is - top of the funnel already know their stuff, it’s the bottom part of the funnel thats truly on the learning search.

POD OF THE WEEK: It’s a kinda Product Market Fit special this week, so here is a podcast from SaaStock on how to find it.

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 9, 2020

10/9/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ZCP: Repeat this metric 5 times as fast as you can: "month zero cash-on-cash payback”- this tongue twister is best referred to as ZCP. It’s a cash-based metric, as cash-in-the-bank is a critical number for a SaaS company to monitor. ZCP answers the question: if we invest $1 in sales costs (such as salaries and commissions), how long does it take to recoup that dollar spent and welcome it back to the bank account?
WOMEN IN TECH: A new Girls Who Code and Accenture report has launched - check out this metric: By age 35, fifty percent of women leave their jobs in tech. This is primarily (37% of those surveyed) attributed to noninclusive company cultures. The call to action here is that the bottom 80% have big role to play: If all companies could score as well in inclusion as the top 20% performing do, attribution could drop by up to 70%!
REMOTE: Nearly all of us are working remotely or WFH. The big tech players in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) are all doing it too and not really looking back too much. So take read of this article from Inc. Magazine (and rip it off): 9 great tips from Googles Remote Work Policy. Ars Technica expand beyond policy and dive into both technical and cultural changes in this article.
REVENUE TEAMS: Revenue teams are a combo of Marketing and Sales. Getting them aligned is a really trick and Tomasz Tunguz has a quick diagnostic to determine if your sales and marketing teams are working well together.
SAASTR: In-person events are a thing of the past and hopefully the future. For now, we are stuck attending and watching events from the comforts of Zoom. SaaStr Annual hosted an “At Home” edition recently, which was pretty good, and Christelle Blanchet-Aissaoui from Proxi has written a banger of a summary for you to read.
PRODUCT LED GROWTH (PLG): Time for a refresher - read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG. Traditionally companies have focused their marketing and sales efforts on external acquisition channels to drive demand, but in a PLG world, your product is the driver for growth (such as Atlassian and Netflix). From ChartMogul here is the PLG Sales best practices to complement the marketing Cheat Sheet. OpenView have launched a Product Led Growth Maturity Grader - this tool is designed to give feedback on how far along your organization is on the PLG maturity spectrum.
CUSTOMERS: OK - so, umm, what exactly is the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support? Get started here to understand the nuances, they are both part of the same customer journey spectrum, and Totango posits, in this recent Start Annual presentation, that we need a fresher look at Success and Support that they coin the “Customer Operating System” (downloadable Google Slide presso).
LANDING PAGES: One of the most common reasons why a search engine based marketing campaign fail is that is does not have an optimized landing pages to continue the journey, take a look here at some best practices, real examples, and templates for Google Ad-based Landing Pages. Then also Check this site out - a collection of the best landing pages around the web with a focus on copywriting and design - finally (this is a repeat-post) IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy.
FREEMIUM: If you are looking to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy for your business, take a good read of this article on “everything you need to know" 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.
ROADMAPS: I’ve been asked for product roadmaps quite a lot lately and I have to admit, I don’t like traditional versions of them, Too clunky, too rigid, too old-school. Discovering the flexibility that Atlassian have designed on their public access roadmap gave me hope, but Ryan Singer has a different and far more flexible opinion on roadmaps - don’t do them, instead create options. Ryan is also part of the ShapeUp crew. Their publications and toolbox of techniques are designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.

POD OF THE WEEK: From SaaStr: Churn is dead. Long live Net Dollar Retention (NDR) with David Kellogg

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 2, 2020

10/2/2020

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: MONEY: aka Bookings or is that Billings? I mean Revenue. Wait, no ACV! etc, etc. These are all key top line SaaS metrics that seemingly are plucked from the same bucket of numbers and dollars. Don’t pretend you understand the differences! Take a read of this to decipher the nuances (with handy graphics and charts).
FINTECH: This is a two part series covering the M&A FinTech spree that has occurred over the past year most dramatically across digital banking, corporate cards, and mobile wallets, which is where it starts here with Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here that covers wealth management, alternative financing, and digital payments.
CAPITAL: From Mighty Capital General Partner Jennifer Vancini: 5 Fundraising Lessons (covering post seed, pre-C rounds). This is a TL;DW article from the long-form AMA Webstream, which can be viewed here.
SALES: A great primer on SaaS Sales from our friends at Lighter Capital. Sales cycles, commission rates, models, and metrics all explained (with best practices).
EMOTIONS: Unlocking the potential in your people is (in my opinion) that hardest part of a startup and for all the tools we have to optimize productivity, there is no tool or app to work around peoples feelings yo. Emotions can run high in startups outside of a global pandemic and recession. Everyone working from home just makes all this way harder. Managing and harnessing emotions before they get the best of you (and the team) is a useful skill and has never been more vital, so grab a self-reflective beverage and take a good read of this.
DEVELOPERS: Speaking of people - lets talk about Developers. The 2020 State of the Developer Report is out from AnswerHub. It’s a pre-pandemic sample, so there is the now-bizzare interest in attending in-person events, but we can substitute that for good old fashioned community in our post-COVID cynicism. So how can Devs build a great support community? Check this article to learn more. Side note - here 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.
GROWTH: Quick read from Sujan Patel listing 7 lessons learned in 5 years of growing SaaS companies and how to get maximum value for your business and to add an additional layer to this - check this article detailing case studies from some top SaaS Growth companies (including Canva, Intercom, and Hubspot).
USER EXPERIENCE: Optimizing a User Experience is key to the long term success of any service or product. Google is all over this and launched Web Vitals earlier this year. It’s a program that offers developers guidance about user experience. It’s benchmarking very Google based metrics: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
CURATION: Hey - this article is talking about this newsletter, well not literally, but ya know, it’s curation. Growth in Content Marketing = content overload. According to the article there are an average of 550 new social media users each minute, and over 40,000 search queries on Google every second and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify relevant and quality content in all this noise. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s your attention (so thanks for reading this newsletter!)
CLOUD: Now that cloud computing powers pretty much every industry Forbes have a “Cloud 100” list which is an annual ranking of the world’s top private cloud companies. This is the fifth year of this list and the number 1 atop of the list, Snowflake should actually be scrubbed off the list as it went public earlier this month (and CRUSHED it). A global pandemic+recession hasn’t slowed this group down. They represent a combined value of about $270 billion and at least 87 companies are Unicorns - valued at $1 billion or more.

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