Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 19, 2024

1. CAC - in a modern SaaS world that has maturing companies using both sales-led growth (SLG) and product-led growth (PLG) motions and teams, how do you calculate CAC? The answer is they should be kept separate (see Pod of the Week for more below)


2. GTM: Go-to-market motions can be pretty specific and can impact your marketing strategy and your org chart. Mark Roberge at Stage 2 Capital gives some PLG context on go-to-market strategies in a really great presentation. The slide deck from the presentation can be found here.


3. CONVERTIBLE LOANS: They are a kind of debt until they are not. However, convertible loans are a quick way to access money quickly through an interested investor. Point Nine Capital describes in detail what is involved in a convertible loan and what to look out for.


4. PLG vs. SLG: According to the Expansion SaaS Benchmarks report (it's a downloadable PDF), PLG businesses lead the pack, but as stated above - SLG can outperform PLG, and according to this article, it's not a "vs." thing - you don't have to choose, both strategies can co-exist.


5. KNOWLEDGE BASE: I complain all the time that building a comprehensive and useful customer Knowledge Base platform is hard. But here is something to consider (it's certainly a helpful article for my mindset): There are probably stakeholders/purchasers of your product who do not respond well to traditional marketing and, in fact, may actively hate it. These people are like me, and while I may moan about how difficult creating good documentation is, it may be one of the best anti-marketing-marketing tools you have available, Especially if you have an API as part of your product.


6. DUE DILIGENCE: For investors, what the heck does due diligence look like for pre-seed or pre-rev companies (especially those seeking out Convertible Loans - see #2 above)with no real traction or trends to share? It's hard to do - but this article captures many key areas, especially founder equity, non-founders on the cap table, and founder vesting.


7. SEO (and AI): Last week, a post on how SEO is becoming less reliant (thanks to AI) was the second most clicked article. Apparently, everyone is interested, so here is more on how to prepare.


8. VENTURE: According to Pitchbook, the one-year rolling internal rate of return (IRR) metric for VC funds in the US is at the -10% mark (yup, that's a negative), started in late 2022 and has continued through to now (with a dip to almost -18% at the end of 2022). These Fund returns remain negative due to portfolio markdowns and a lack of liquidity.


9. ANNUAL DISCOUNT: We are all part of the great SaaS Ponzi Scheme, and the average enterprise has 23 vendors in their tech stack, so it probably comes as no surprise to you that annual SaaS contracts are discounted. But how much? 10% is the median, and the range is tighter than I thought, at 6%-14%. Why? Jason Lemkin has the answer for you (TL;DR - behavior - Human behavior)


10. CASE STUDY: This is more of a guide this week and a follow-up from #5, which I assume 95% of you think is boring. Yes, yes, it is—but it's super necessary. So read this guide to knowledge base creation for SaaS. I use it as a case study as it's also Userpilot drinking its own lemonade.


POD OF THE WEEK: To marry #1 and #4 above from the SaaS CFO Calculating CAC when you have PLG and SLG motions. ​