Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 21, 2023

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: OTMM - aka One Metric That Matters (to you!!!). Another acronym for your Tech Dictionaries. Metrics can be personal, ya' know. And sometimes, all you need is a singular focus to get stuff done. So to shift the needle, check this great article that reviews the methodology to uncover your unique OMTM.


2. DEAD or ALIVE? Time for some reality here. If you want to try (or are expected by your investors/Board) to operate with no growth capital for the foreseeable market future (18-24 months?), then the question to be asking is: Will your business reach profitability before running out of money? Time to take read this throwback article from 2015 that dives deep into this question and also has a great visual calculator.


3. CAPITAL: Tomasz Tunguz notes a strong (and strengthening) correlation between interest rates & venture capital investing. It is strong enough to build a simple prediction of early-stage venture capital activity in 2023.


4. SCALE: This is a must-download. Mark Roberge, the founder of Stage 2 Capital and member of the founding team at HubSpot, has launched this excellent playbook for scaling. In this detailed book, Mark has defined different stages of scale, established quantifiable measures for each stage, structured the sequence and signals of when to move from one stage to the next, and explored the optimal go-to-market design of each one.


5. REVENUE PER EMPLOYEE: As an operator - asking the real question on scale: What should my annual recurring revenue (ARR) be per employee? Here is the chart in one TL;DR visual, but if you want to read the whole article, you can check it out here and also here (PDF).


6. CRYPTO: a16z has released its specialized crypto publications for the year, including the 2023 State of Crypto report that tracks data, indicators, and trends - active users are still way up. They have also introduced their State of Crypto Index, a tool for cutting through the money hype and focusing on crypto as a tech tool.


7. GTM: Go-to-market motions can be pretty specific, and your GTM motions can impact your marketing strategy and your org chart. Mark Roberge at Stage 2 Capital gives some PLG context on Go To Market Strategies. It's a really great presentation - I've watched it twice :-). The slide deck from the presentation can be found here.


8. CHATGPT: ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, and the Product Management, UX, and UI design part of the world have some significant ChatGPT use cases. Lenny's Newsletter has some great examples for getting real PM stuff done leveraging ChatGPT, and FastCompany has some methods that designers can superpower their work.


9. ZERO-OPS: A new entry for your tech dictionary, ZeroOps is a set of practices that result in developers focusing solely on coding and creating, with 0% of their time spent on operations or infrastructure.


10. CASE STUDY: Freemium. It's not necessarily a time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy, but ProdCamp did and learned a lot after removing and bringing back their Freemium tier.


POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #7 above - How to Prepare your Go-To-Market Strategy for a Downturn with Alexa Grabell of Pocus.