Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 15, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CAC PAYBACK: CAC is also a measure of cash profitability per customer, and CAC Payback calculates how long it takes for a customer to become cash-flow positive. Here is how to calculate it (and why it matters). When benchmarking this metric, it's evident in SaaS that the negative cash trough is long! According to this survey, new customers, on average, take 2 years and 2 months to become profitable. This really highlights what will be a deepening dependency on Capital to fuel a SaaS company's growth.

2. CHAOS THEORY: Digital Transformations are important, strategically. But the mindset needed for these changes to happen requires a certain kind of improv style to get there - as the systems in place that are required to change or pivot are usually very complex - change IS chaos. So take some time to read this article to understand more of what this is about - I also aspire to have the title of "Chaos Manager" one day...

3. RYAN BRESLOW: Ryan is the founder of Bolt and is taking zero prisoners this week on Twitter with three SIGNIFICANT threads calling out Stripe for the Fast fiasco and Sequoia Capital for acting like the Mob. Read more on his view on Stripe's impact on Fast (which was a direct competitor to Bolt) here and his teardown of Sequoia here. Finally, wrapping both of those threads up is the third Thread for founders on how to protect their companies from Hostile Takeovers (such as allegedly what happened to InstaCart by Sequoia).

4. INVESTORS: Looking to build a list of non-Sequoia investors for your Cap Raise? Check this new fresh list of 65,000+ Venture capital, Private Equity Firms, Angels and Family Investment Offices contacts.

5. ESOP: Employee Share Option Plans are an excellent 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. Finally, here is a 9-part video post of the most common questions about startup options.

6. ESOP BENCHMARKS: Fast follow from above here to this wonderful site that has compiled a set of benchmark data, comprising over 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe sorted by Seed or Venture stage.

7. PRICING: Getting pricing right is a big deal because a 1% increase in price can generate up to an 11% increase in your profits, so check this article on a data-driven framework for SaaS packaging and pricing to optimize that increase in profits.

8. WRAP-UPS: Add this to your tech dictionaries. Daily standups may no longer work in our new mashed up work-from-anywhere team environment, but Wrap-Ups are the new asynchronous, remote, WFH workaround. Possible fit? Take a read here of how to try them out.​

9. EXPERIMENTS: Every path toward growth and revenue is a hypothesis in startup land, so read how to run a growth experiment (in 4 easy steps!). Testing versions of things is something to embed across your company and culture as you experiment towards growth - it's why failure is key to not failing. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, get started with this refresher and then this Step-by-Step Guide. Go Practice has some great advice on making these experiments run faster.
10. CASE STUDY: Complimenting #9 above. On the extreme end of A/B testing is booking.com which often runs over 1,000 tests simultaneously! But here is the payoff: That flywheel enabled Booking.com to compound at healthy growth rates while maintaining ~30% EBITDA margins and scaling Google ad spend to approximately $4 billion per year!

POD OF THE WEEK: From the SaaS Revolution Show - Andy Whyte, CEO of MEDDICC (quite the acronym: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion and Competition), discusses how to get ahead of complex SaaS sales.