Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 24, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NRG - Natural Rate of Growth. Now that I’ve convinced everyone subscribed to this newsletter to go all-in with Product Lead Growth, it’s time to reference the metric you need to know. It requires us to get halfway through this article before that becomes clear. But hey - it’s totally worth the scroll. With NRG the assumption is that a PLG business has an organic, self-service growth engine at their core (because they’re built to attract the end-user). The article comes complete with benchmarks towards the bottom. Hungry for more PLG metrics? I got ya!
2. FUTURE (both links from McKinsey): The future is here and it’s not what we thought it would be (where are my flying cars for example?!) - it’s going to be a distant, resilient, efficient, contactless but opportunist place and here is how we might come out the tail end 
3. AR/VR: In a less-than-ideal moment for the AR-VR industry, the mysterious and hyped AR company Magic Leap, who’s raised $2 billion in funding over the past 10 years,  laid off over 1000 employees (over half) and announced its abandoning it’s consumer headset focus. This doesn't appear to be Covid related, as The Information discussed this back in December and reportedly also discussing a sale.
4. MARKETING: OK, there are plenty of people with ideas of how to market during a pandemic, but what exactly IS the impact of Covid-19 to Sales and Marketing Performance? The trusted team at HubSpot are tracking this all in real time. What you need to know: New deals dropped in March across all regions; webiste traffic increased; as did customer-initiated conversations. Thats some great insight about where to focus efforts! In summary - Shift campaigns tp rapidly mirror users ever evolving behaviors.
5. MEASURE: What Hub Spot say above is important but how do you also measure your own marketing efforts in this time of upheaval? Google have some do’s and don’ts for marketing measurement during a pandemic.
6. WEBSITE: Now we know that website traffic should be increasing during a lockdown (see #4 above), here are some ways you can supercharge your website using research.
7. GROWTH MARKETING: Julian Shapiro has a REALLY great primer on growth marketing (warning it is a very deep dive) for B2B and B2C marketers. 
8. PRODUCT LEAD GROWTH: You may have heard me talk about this category from time to time (today). But here is a sub-sub-category term for you: Product-Led Storytelling. PLG isn’t for everyone, some people, like the author of this article call it hype, but probably so he can hammer home his agenda/story: That Product-Led Storytelling is way cooler. 
9. SALES: PandaDoc has just releases some pretty great data-based content marketing - the State of Deals 2020 Report. In this report they take a deep look at the relationship between buyers and sellers, as well as the sales process itself. Highlighting interesting facts such as the process is likely more important than the people, and that many deals are just to cumbersome and difficult to close.
10. GLOBAL VC: I now know what dog-years actually mean (to a dog), January 2020 seems like 28 months ago to me, where it was simply just the start to Q1 2020. Crunchbase review Q1 2020 from a global VC perspective and paints a bit of a bleak Q: Lowest number of rounds in 5 years, lowest dollar volume in two years, and a proportional decrease of spend globally outside of the hot spots of US and Canada.

BONUS: Want to become an Angel Investor? Here is a 3 hours course form Angel.Univeristy coming up on May 11th. 

POD OF THE WEEK: This is actually a webinar to compliment #4 - Hubspot's presentation on how COVID-19 Is Impacting Sales and Marketing Performance