Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending August 13, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: PQL: Product Lead Growth is a relatively new SaaS strategy and there are all kinds of metrics that tie into this new category - Product Qualified Leads (PQL) being the lead indicator that the PLG stray a company is investing in is legit.
2. OUTBOUND SALES: Forget about Netflix, do you want to binge some Outbound Sales TV???? Yeah, that's the spirit!! The team at predictable revenue has been running over 50 outbound sales experiments using good ol’ scientific methods to find out what works best (and what doesn’t.). Watch the whole series on YouTube!
3. RECRUITMENT: It's always been a challenge but anecdotally, oh my word! Finding good people is so very, very, hard right now. Take a good read (and an even better bookmark) of this page from Heavybit - which is a comprehensive process and guide to developing a successful (and founder-led) recruitment strategy for those of us at the early stages.
4. ESOP: Employee Share Option Plans are a wonderful idea to incentivize and retain great staff. Not yet figured out your employee stock ownership plan? Check this cheat sheet or here’s a video version if you prefer to watch it. Obviously working out the dilution factor of an ESOP is an important metric to know - so check this page for more on that and finally here is a 9-part video post of the most common questions about startup options.
5. WRITING: Being able to write well is a skill that needs to sit with founders. So here is 3 step guide - Step 1. How to position your startup and achieve your unique value prop; Step 2. how to write well and one more version for good measure; and Step 3 top tips for telling stories.
6. KNOWLEDGE BASE: This is very relevant to my pain right now. Building a comprehensive and useful customer Knowledge Base platform is difficult. Keep in mind that 67% of customers prefer self-service (if executed well) and almost 90% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application.
7. SECURITY: The ever-increasing adoption of cloud-based software exacerbated by Covid also creates more exposure and risk to bad actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities. Tech companies should be continually concerned about the security of the software being built. OWASP can help you out here - it’s a foundation working to improve the security of software and maintains a Top 10 list of the most critical security risks to web applications. All of this makes Due Diligence for both raising capital and Enterprise based sales a lot trickier to navigate (there is a growing need for chief compliance officers for example). Take a review on what investors are looking for in a team's response to security and also how to pass that awkward, sales-friction-inducing, Enterprise Security Audits/Reviews….and finally how to get started as a startup.
8. SPEND: How much money do SaaS companies spend on everything? Well, check the first chart on SaaS company spend - remarkably to no one bootstrapped companies are being outspent by venture-backed companies - but the average is 80% of ARR to 115% ARR!! (operating at a loss to support growth - because growth is a Moat). Keep scrolling through - way more goodies in there (such as spending by ARR levels).
9. MOATS: Moats are one of the best ways to provide a competitive advantage for your business and moats come in all kinds of different flavors (such as speed, Brand, or growth). But here is a great one that conceptually covers b2b and b2c: Emotion. When it comes to B2B this post lists some popular and effective ways companies create moats for their products and Jason Lemkin is way better at this than me and lists 10 of them in this article - so what floats your Moat?
10. CASE STUDY: Netflix as I mentioned in the past they have (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience prioritization. Their recent deceleration in subscribers has created a bit of negative press but they are still over 200 million paid subscribers - here is how they got there.

POD OF THE WEEK: Nothing but rapid-fire VC jibber jabber this week from the team at the All In Podcast (Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg) - discussing (among other things) their own funds, the rise of venture studios, deep tech challenges risk, Theranos (and fraud), etc, etc, etc.