Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending April 23, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NPS: We all like to be liked - Net Promoter Score is basically a way to quantify that for your product. This White Paper from Ask Nicely reviews NPS (among other common customer experience metrics) and explains how to measure and calculate NPS. See this link for some methods to improve the NPS of a SaaS product and Neil Patel then gets into a 3 step program of how to leverage NPS for your business. 
2. TESTING: Everything is a hypothesis in a startup and testing should be embedded in everything you try towards growth and product. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, Go Practice has some great advice on how to make these experiments run faster.
3. PLG (aka Product Lead Growth) - as a refresher read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG and then check this article out that goes into lengthy detail of how to design for PLG across the customer journey (and creating a flywheel) - trying to get a user to a point at which they understand the value they can get from your product (aka the AHA moment). Still confused? This is a great article using the hierarchy of needs as an explainer.
4. SEO: Want More SEO Traffic? Follow this self-guided process to get a 7-week SEO Action plan from Neil Patel for your business! Moz also has a great little guide on keyword research complemented by their other article on Search Intent and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute.
5. REVOPS: aka Revenue Operations is definitely a thing and it needs to be - but do you need it? Well, you may already be practicing this without using the platitude - it’s just a high-impact way to maximize revenues and provide some operational efficiency but the plot twist being that in this Age of the Customer it’s also a way to align this operational excellence around the customer experience. Here is a good introductory article from Chargebee on RevOps and here are 3 nuggets of wisdom from some significant RevOps leaders. BCG also has a great deep dive for you to read here. 
6. GROWTH: Adding onto the above and using real-world companies Zoom and Twilio as examples (both also notable product-led) a16z make the case that the new era of enterprise go-to-market requires growth-plus-sales - which is just a fancy-pants way of highlighting the evolution in customer buying behavior for high-end B2B. Great read.
7. CONVERSION RATE: There are many, many conversion rate metrics you could track - so which ones are the most important? It really depends on the goals of your business - so let Neil Patel tell you his 8 Most Important Conversion Rate Metrics.
8. COOKIES: This is an expansion from above, so not the chocolate chip kind of Cookies. Love them or hate them, the reality is that browser cookies are heading the way of the Dodo, so conversion tracking via cookies being phased out creates a new attribution problem to solve. 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.
9. MACHINE LEARNING: A rather bleak article for many highlighted that AI is set to replace 50% of low skilled jobs in the next 5-7 years starting with a market growth of $112.2 billion (46%) by 2022 - that's next year for those of us like me that haven't adjusted to 2021 yet. Sooooooooo, want to check out something new after that? Well, take a looksie at these 28 Free AI, Machine learning, Data Science, and Python eBooks all ready for download directly to the device of your choice now.
10. CASE STUDY: Taking a look at Twilio this week as an expansion of #6 above. In August 2019 Jason Lemkin noted the impressive metrics of Twilio as it reached $1B in ARR. Fast forward to January of this year, he's update observations now that they are at $2b+ ARR - yup - a $1B ARR increase in 18 months - now 60B market cap and growing at about 53% YoY thanks to an NDR clocking in at 140%!
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POD OF THE WEEK: From 16z Podcasts: An episode about Developers as Creatives with the CEO and co-founder of Twilio, Jeff Lawson.