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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 of 2019 - What to know for Week ending December 27, 2019

12/27/2019

 

It's the last newsletter of the year and the perfect opportunity for a top 10 trends list for 2020.

  1. PRODUCT LED GROWTH (PLG): Yeah - I’ve talked about it a lot, so it’s taken the #1 spot of trends for 2020. 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 compliment 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.
  2. PROFITABILITY: Ouch - this one hurts. SaaS founders have fallen into the trap of chasing growth at all costs for too long and 2019 saw a real reality check. Building and growing a SaaS company isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon and while Growth is a great moat, sustainable growth is ultimately what we all need to be focused on.
  3. MARGIN: To add some more salt on the wound above, Enterprise SaaS margin, are experiencing a significant downward pressure on for software startups as commoditization and competition pressures increase.
  4. METRICS: Basic SaaS Metrics (such at LTV, CAC, ARPU, etc) are critical to any SaaS business but vanity metrics are dying and in a new millennium where investors need to understand the long term health of a business it will be critical to understand what are the best value metrics for you business (and how to figure that out).
  5. PODCASTS: I’ve recommended dozens of podcasts in 2019 (maybe even hundreds) and podcasts are continuing to grow in popularity and something I see as continuing intro 2020 as it's now big business and there are currently over seven hundred thousand podcasts available for your ears. This in-depth report from a16z covers the origins and growth of this audio-tech and what their investment philosophy is on this growing market.
  6. AI: It’s been hyped for years, but 2020 could see AI pragmatically become incredibly relevant. Today, systems of record are maintained through manual data entry, which can lead to data fidelity issues and time-consuming cleansing and validation.But AI can now create data records in your iPhone or Salesforce simply from email exchanges and the line between data and AI will start to get very blurry. 
  7. CUSTOMER: Customer retention is key to growth and profitability and businesses that truly want to put their customers at the centre of their business are the ones most likely to succeed. Challenge - what would happen to your business sand product if, instead of focusing on preventing Churn, your business focused on ways to increase revenue and customer loyalty?
  8. DISTRIBUTED TEAMS: High costs of living plus modern collaboration tools are pushing this trend into the mainstream. It really can be (if executed well) an employment strategy that improves employee retention, hiring, and productivity. Here is a report that reviews the data and this article is the TL;DR version.
  9. 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. Enterprise level security tools are now also coming in from the bottom up - such as Authenticator apps like Duo and devices like Canary).
  10. DESIGN: Agile based design practices and tools are being adopted in organizations outside of technical/developer teams. For example marketing teams are creating content and wireframes in Figma (a originally made for designers) and also code-less/no-code features can be easily created within no-tech teams with tools such as Chameleon and Flow Designer​

POD OF THE WEEK: Another good one pulled from Y-Combinator’s Startup School (40,000 founders attended!). The first half is a great breakdown on the makeup of great leaders  

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 20, 2019

12/19/2019

 
  1. FREEMIUM vs FREE TRIAL: Which is better for your SaaS Startup? Craft ventures take a review, starting with my old alma matter (and one of the original Freemium products) - Yammer. Tomusz Tunguz also conducted a survey on Free Trials last year - My favorite fact: Conversion rates aren't impacted by trial length (so make them shorter).
  2. MAPPED: Google Maps says that it now covers 98 percent of the places in the world where people live, including 10 million miles of Street View. The product also has 1 billion monthly users.Google obviously have some solid things to say on driving product usage and retention.
  3. HANDOFF: The customer journey has plenty of touch points and handoffs. Chartmogul provide some great tips on customer handoff from sales to Customer Success teams.
  4. CHURN: To understand why customers churn, it’s equally as important to look at why customers stay. But to get there the fidelity of the data collected to evaluate this needs to be high
  5. SALES: What does success look like? The answer is: It depends on your business. This article interviews sales leaders from a variety of successful companies and how they measure success in their roles.
  6. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: How does an early stage company know if they have PMF? This article has some great PMF definitions.
  7. CYBER CYBER CYBER: 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.
  8. MARGIN: Andreessen Horowitz explores Enterprise SaaS margin, believing that there is a significant downward pressure on margins for software startups.
  9. TERM SHEETS: As 2019 and the decade comes to a close there has been a significant disruption in the Venture Capital space, primarily centered around the #metoo movement, diversity in tech, and a shift in expectations on Growth vs profitability. According to Fortune magazine, Term Sheet readers will have more pragmatic expectations on valuations and bigger focus on inclusivity and ethics.
  10. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Requires great leaderships - here are interview with Head of Growth at Reddit and Head of Product at Twitter on how to create a good vision and strategy. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 13, 2019

12/13/2019

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Triple-Double-Double is a classic mantra we hear a lot in the SaaS world, referring to an abbreviated version of what it takes (revenue wise) to become a $100m ARR business. Jason Lemkin of SaaStr pitches that “10-100-110” is enough. Which is 10m ARR, 100% YoY growth, and 110% net-revenue retention. 
  2. PROSPECTING: Sales prospecting is a method of sales lead generation sourced via quality research (different than a sales prospect). This article from Crunchbase outlines some great prospecting techniques rests can utilize.
  3. CONVERTIBLE LOANS: Can be a quick solution to lines of funding outside of more traditional paths (such as Venture Capital) Point Nine capital outlines what to look out for.
  4. SALES: Chorus.ai have built a great report of what high-performing sales teams are doing to close deals (this is an analysis of over five million sales calls!). You can add in the kind of business you are (SMB, Mid, Enterprise) to see how you measure up. Key nuggets: An SDR dials, on average, 106 people to schedule just one meeting and the typical win rate of a sales qualified lead (SQL) is 19%.
  5. ANIMAL TOTEM: This is a repeat post, but it’s a fun one. There are many different ways to build a $100M SaaS business, and the analogy is, it depends on the “animals" your business is hunting as to which strategy is best.
  6. REVOPS: Yes this is a thing and it needs to be! In this Age of the Customer it’s a way to align operational excellence around the customer experience. Here are 3 nuggets of wisdom from some RevOps leaders.
  7. GROWTH: These are some of the attributes that great growth leaders have. 
  8. INNOVATION GAP: This is a pretty significant metric: 90% of growth in innovation-sector jobs occurred in just 5 cities across the US according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution.
  9. EARLY CUSTOMERS: I’m deep in this phase right now. Early customers are critical in Enterprise - but do they have what it takes as a business to take your product out of the trial phase?
  10. CONTENT MARKETING: How to create a Content Marketing strategy (and more importantly set up the right OKR’s for success)

POD OF THE WEEK: To add on to number 8 above. Users tinkering in their homes is often overlooked as a primary source of innovation.

BONUS: This is super exciting from the ever-entertaining team at CB Insights who make the observation that the term “Super Excited” has quadrupled over the last 4 years in Earning Calls.  

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 6, 2019

12/6/2019

 
  1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: $116 Billion! According to Jason Lemkin of Saastr (based on Gartner data), this is the size of SaaS in the Cloud next year (and Cloud overall will reach $266 billion), meaning that SaaS covers about 50% of all cloud spend and there are about 25 SaaS companies at, or close too, $1B ARR
  2. INSURETECH: Insurtech funding hit $3.3 USD billion globally across the first three quarters of 2019, hitting a new high. However the number of new entrants into Insurtech hit an all time high (3 total year to date!), indicating that the space may be getting a little crowded.
  3. SALES: The Startup challenges us all to sell something bigger than your boring product. It’s similar to the mindset of "The Jobs That Need to be Done” discussed in earlier posts, making the point that the true sales value is something that genuinely helps users get better or more successful at what they do.
  4. RETENTION:  How do publicly traded SaaS companies measure up to this metric? KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) have compiled a comprehensive database of publicly reported SaaS metrics with an easy-to-reference table, PDF version is also here.
  5. DUE DILIGENCE: It’s a two-way street when it comes to raising Venture Capital. Jason Lemkin, discusses due diligence questions every founder should be asking VC's
  6. BIG TECH: Just how profitable are they? A great way to do this is to calculate net income per employee. Across the big 5 (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon), that metric has shrunk for Facebook, Apple and Google, remained the same for Amazon and actually had a significant up-tick for Microsoft. But Facebook still remains significantly more profitable. As a little bonus, this is a fun article on the big-tech rivalries of 2019.
  7. PITCH: I can’t bang this drum enough. If you are looking to raise capital, burn this into memory: You have 2-4 slides tops to grab the attention of an investor. Use those slides wisely and don’t go beyond 12-15 TOTAL. Oh and also do these 4 things as a business.
  8. MARKETING: From Tomusz Tunguz, I really like the simplicity of this - 13 critical questions to answer about your startup’s product marketing and SaaS hacker provided 19 strategies a bootstrapped SaaS business can deploy.
  9. REAL-TIME OMNI-CHANNEL: As evidenced by this years Black Friday/Cyber Monday mash-up, everything is omni-channel. But how can retailers integrate omni-channel while shoppers are actively in their store and also putting their phones to work? Google has some great ideas.
  10. REMOTE WORK: Can be an employment strategy that improves employee retention, hiring, and productivity. Here is a report that reviews the data and this article is the TL;DR version.
​
POD OF THE WEEK: From Y-Combinator: Why fundraising is different in Silicon Valley

BONUS: Just raised a bunch of money? Sweet! As an add on to the podcast below, Y-Combinator provides great guidance on How Much Should You Spend After Fundraising

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