Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending August 6, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: EARLY STAGE BENCHMARKS - Metrics are only good if you know what to benchmark yourself against and Chartio has a list of 20 benchmarks for Growing Startups all handily broken down by department (such as Sales, Marketing, Product, Revenue) to make sure that the business is ready for scale
2. EXPANSION: This is a bit of a deep dive and check/bookmark here for benchmarks. Expansion revenue costs pennies on the dollar vs net new customer acquisition costs and also demonstrates that a business can deliver increasing value to customers (and monetize that value!). On average 37% of new ARR bookings are attributable to cross-sell/up-sell activities and improving retention or monetization can impact growth 2-4x more effectively than improvements in acquisition. (see slides 41-46 for the real nuggets). Tips on how to optimize this via renewal are available here. But I enjoyed reading this working example of what that means to a companies growth and revenues from a product perspective from the company Buffer. 
3. GROWTH MARKETING: Want some solid pro-tips on growth marketing ideas that just plain work? Here are a bunch collated from Intercom - a lot is centered around being user-focused and if you don’t like that one, try this: Notion’s marketing secrets for those of us with small teams.
4. DO IT!: It's easy to get caught up in the debates, details, and troubles that work or projects throw our way. As a leader, keeping the beat and progressing the business forward during this time takes some help. So read this from Henry Ward from Carta on how to create a continued Bias for Action.
5. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: (Positive) Customer relationships are at the core of every SaaS and subscription company. Negative experiences lead to churn that has a direct impact on the bottom line (duh!). Getting started isn’t as obvious as that last sentence though - check this Profitwell article on how to get started with a solid customer success strategy.
6. ONBOARDING: Onboarding success is often de-prioritized with scrappy fast-growing business but giving customers all the tools they need to succeed with your product is the best way to ensure that they stick around. Profitwell reviews the importance of good SaaS onboarding and discusses steps to create an awesome program. Userpilot also has a great tactical complimentary post here on the best customer onboarding software options for SaaS companies.
7. MARKET SIZING: The dreaded slide on everyone's pitch deck. What's the size of the market. TL;DR if the market is not huge, same with your startup. Understanding the nuances of TAM, TOM and SOM is a great way to get started understanding market sizes as it applies to your business and the business problem your startup solves. 
8. EMAIL: DEEP DIVE. When it comes to outbound marketing, email works best. Yes, organic search is consistently the biggest source of traffic (Driving up to 68% of all traffic). Email accounts for less than 5% of traffic, on average, but has an incredibly high ROI, upwards of 3,800%!!! Digital Olympus has a great guide on effective email outreach (HINT: This takes time and effort!), Andrea Bosoni gives an IRL story about how he worked hard to improve email open rates and Gong provides a bunch (43 to be exact) highly effective Call-To-Action templates you can use in email campaigns.
9. METAVERSE: This is not a reference to DC Comics - Add this one to your tech dictionaries. Facebook (or more accurately, Mark Zuckerberg) wants to reinvent Facebook Inc (Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, et al) as a ‘metaverse company’. Here’s what that means - TL;DR: It's straight out of Ready Player One, spanning the physical and virtual worlds to represent a fully-fledged interoperable economy.
10. CASE STUDY: Spotify and its Squads. A few years ago a really inspiring and memorable video circulated (you know in one of those cutesy handwritten animation styles) describing the Agile Squads that Spotify employs in its, apparently cooler than cool, Utopian Developer department. Well, guess what, sorry to burst your Spotify bubble, but they abandoned it. (How Agile of them)…. In this post mortem assessment, the biggest key failure was such a SaaS-based one: It was solving the wrong problem.

POD OF THE WEEK: “Jobs to be done” isn’t a phrase, it’s a methodology for getting stuff done - listen more on the concept here.