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