Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 11, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - CHURN: Profitwell has the motherlode - a complete guide to understanding, calculating, and reducing churn, which they call "the silent killer of subscription businesses”. This is more than a download, it’s pretty much an eBook (and a downloadable PDF).
2. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: CI is a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly, it can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for delivering great customer experiences.
3. ADOPTION: A couple of weeks back I mentioned a comprehensive guide to measuring ways in which new users turn into paying customers (and which users are going to drift away). Now that you know how to measure it, check this great article from UserPilot discussing ways to increase product adoption, complete with real-life examples.
4. CYBER-SECURITY: Threats are on the rise, as is the adoption rates of apps and products within large organizations. It’s a perfect storm of real risk that needs solid, strategic approaches to management. This article from McKinsey offers a risk-based approach to managing overall modern-day cyber-risk exposure. Great article from Mckinsey (downloadable PDF!) on how SaaS providers can meet the security needs of their enterprise customers. But as mentioned last week regardless of the size of your SaaS business, security should be part of your dev cycle. Not to freak all you CEO’s/founders out - but Gartner are also expecting more CEO/founders to be personally liable for cyber-physical security incidents in the future.
5. PRICING: Product pricing is super hard. Here are top lessons learned from 25 SaaS companies, as well as what the impact pricing changes can have on your business and how to test it. 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.
6. UN-SCALE: Sometimes, while building a repeatable scaleable business model, there a things that have to be done that are unsaleable.  This article highlights three specific non-scalable things sales teams should be doing right now.
7. 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? Well check out this spin on applying the framework focused on designing and launching MVP’s (just don’t burn the Pizza).
8. MOATS: Moats are one of the best ways to provide a competitive advantage for your business and can moats come in all kinds of different flavors (such as speed, Brand, or growth). This post lists some other popular and effective ways for B2B SaaS companies to create such moats for their products.
9. BURNOUT: Anecdotally I feel like I have had more conversations about burnout in the past few months than ever. I’m glad people are talking about it, but it’s also very much a sign of the times. Check this very personal article from the CEO of Subbly on how he he recognized and managed his own burnout. Great lessons in here for everyone.
10. AI and QUANTUM: Here is some great news - last month the White House announced a $1 billion investment into two of tech’s most promising frontiers, AI and quantum computing and announced the creation of the AI and quantum research institutes. (This is all likely in response to data on China’s spend on AI - $70b this year).

POD OF THE WEEK: From Invest Like The Best this week is an interview with Michael Seibel - the CEO of Y-Combinator's startup accelerator - he has reviewed literally thousands of applications to YC, so has a lot of experiential insight.