Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 29, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: PQL: Product Lead Growth is the new SaaS strategy de-jour. All kinds of metrics tie into this new category - Product Qualified Leads (PQL) being the lead indicator that the PLG strategy a company is investing in is legit.

2. ONBOARDING CHURN: This is the sibling to the post above, as abandonment can signal poor onboarding. Here are 3 reasons why users abandon the onboarding process (identify verification, slow onboarding experiences, and being asked for too much data). Appsee has another 8 reasons in this article (adding Privacy and Ad clutter to the list).

3. WEB3: There is a whole new bunch of vocabulary to learn if you don't want to be seen as a big square at all your Web3 parties. Check this Twitter thread from @MishadaVinci, which covers all of the highfalutin' terms.

4. CUSTOMER SUCCESS - Quota: this is an expansion of celebrating CS's contribution as NRR and CAC payback referenced in #1 above. I have referenced AE and SDR metrics and quotas in past newsletters. But what about quota expectations in renewal and cross-sell/upsell within a Customer Success Team? Tomasz Tunguz takes a look based on a report a couple of years back from Gainsight. Most Customer Success Managers can handle between $2-$5M in ARR and between 10-500 accounts (but it varies based on segment/ACMR).

5. a16z: Watch out Y-Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz has apparently been stealthily piloting their own early-stage accelerator over the past year and went public this month with what they are calling "a16z START". They are offering early-stage founders up to $1 m in venture capital! Not sure how much equity that will require, and a16z will be accepting founders on a rolling basis.

6. PRICING FEATURETTE: Last week's article on pricing pages was a popular post, so I'm doubling down with more this week. Optimizing Pricing is hard, and it's never (ever) perfect. a) If companies decide to have a pricing page on their site (which is that whole other topic I mentioned last week), Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, lays out some thoughts on what makes a good pricing page. b) McKinsey gets technical, outlining how to leverage big data to make better pricing decisions. c) Want to look at competitor prices? Computers have a great article on conducting a high fidelity competitive pricing analysis project.

7. PODCASTS: Podcasts will make up nearly 20% of Spotify's US ad revenues by 2024 - whoa! In dollar amounts, that will be $400 million. This is just as well as fake artists are a problem these days on Spotify. Podcasting is a massive business now, with an estimated 120 million podcast listeners in the US last year. Podcasting is forecast to be a $94.88 billion industry by 2028. According to this Annual Report from Edison Research, growth is also corollary to Smart Speaker ownership in households.

8. VIDEO: According to this survey, the use of video Aids 95% Of Enterprise B2B Buyers in Conversion - read more (and how it does this) here.
9. BENCHMARKS: Bessemer VP has a playbook for us all (and a slide deck) describing how to scale your business from $1 to $10mm ARR. Significant benchmark data covering all the classics: CAC, retention, growth, etc.

10. CASE STUDY: Category creation! I know we all want to be up and to the left is one of those Gartner/Forrester Quadrant reports. So watch this presentation on category creation from Neo4 and how they did it, and here is another version from Gett.

POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #9 above ( but with the added challenge of doing it without any outside capital), how FastBridge scaled from $0 to $10m in just four years.