Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending September 17, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: TTV - Time To Value: Time to value is similar to ROI (return on investment), but instead of realizing the financial success of an investment, it implies achieving the effectiveness of an investment or for a customer to realize value out of your product. There is also a corollary “trough of disillusionment” your customers may need to navigate before they get there though.
2. DEADLINES: Author Douglas Adams once wrote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”. It’s funny because it's true. So when it comes to software development, how do you make peace with that whoosh? Check this article from Free Code Camp that discusses the art of managing the deadline - part of it is complementary to a reference to the sub-art of saying NO from a couple of months back.
3. VALIDATE: I'm sure you have heard it time and time again that validating a product is a make or break part of a startup's product process - but how do you do that properly? Check this list of techniques and tools - starting with Market Research - but get more into that starting here.
4. 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 right? Well check out this spin on applying the framework focused on designing and launching MVP’s (just don’t burn the Pizza)
5. UN-SCALE: Sometimes, while building a repeatable scalable business model, there are things that have to be done that are un-scaleable. This article highlights three specific non-scalable things sales teams should be doing right now.
6. TRUST: According to Godard Abel (Co-Founder and CEO at G2, who know a few things about trust), SaaS buyers are increasingly more skeptical, suspicious, and unconvinced in this current post/current pandemic world, making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before.
7. USAGE-BASED PRICING: Many SaaS Companies are shifting to usage-based models (Including me!). Charging per-use makes the product more affordable and accessible (and take advantage of the features they need), so check out this usage pricing guide from Baremetrics. Usage-based pricing is not a good fit for every SaaS business though - so here are 6 questions to ask yourself before adopting usage-based pricing.
8. ENTERPRISE SALES: Moving upmarket into larger organizations is a pretty standard SaaS growth strategy. Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is good! But there is a lot to learn and a bunch of time, learning, and effort required to be successful in this market segment. It's not easy, but it can be done. Here is a great guide from Outreach on breaking into deals over $100k ARR.
9. GETTING STARTED: There are plenty of SaaS ideas out there and getting started is hard. Take a read of this article on experiences starting a SaaS company from scratch and here are some great startup advice and Essentials from Y-Combinator.
10. CASE STUDY: Expanding on #1 above Time to Value is something that is front of mind for me right now - so of course I found a case study on it (its' a LinkedIn post) - but gives great examples of what quality TTV looks like.

POD OF THE WEEK: Selling into Enterprise is no joke (see #8 above) and for this week's podcast, Asana's head of engineering has some great tips for ta on how to manage infrastructure needs to support those big old Elephants. Video version (with Slides) or audio version.