Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 8, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NRG - Natural Rate of Growth. Now that I've slow-burn convinced a bunch of y'all to go all-in with Product Lead Growth (PLG), it's time to reference the metrics you need to know. It requires us to get halfway through this article before that becomes clear. But hey - it's worth the scroll. With Natural Rate of Growth (NRG), the assumption is that a PLG business has an organic, self-service growth engine at the core (as they are built to attract the end-user). Keep reading as the article comes complete with benchmarks towards the bottom. Hungry for more best-practice PLG metrics? I got ya!
2. TRUST (Customers): People trust people over brands when it comes to trust. Chart Mogul has posted an 'Ultimate' Guide to Using Customer Testimonials to Boost Sales, noting that a generic and insincere endorsement is as helpful as not using anything. It's also possible to take it a step further by leveraging those frothiest of customers into a referral channel.
3. ZERO TRUST (Security): Trust is also a platform play, so expanding on the above and giving you an emerging phrase for your cybersecurity dictionaries - heck, it's even an Executive Order for the US via President Biden. With the widespread shift to #WFH life in the past couple of years, successful IT and security teams have leveraged Zero Trust initiatives to address some coarse-grain and fine-grain access control challenges. This is all happening at the edge because that is where we all are these days, and perimeter/fence based protection won't work. Identify based and zero-trust strategies and architecture are where we need to be, so start with this primer on Zero trust from ZDNet and move here with this State of Zero Trust Security report from OKTA for the APAC region.
4. PRODUCT TRUST: From my buddy, Ryan Koonce, this is the third part of the Trust deep dive this week, this time focused on product and how to build in-product experiences. Users are judge-y based on every interaction they have with your product. So if you provide experiences that are ineffective, annoying, distracting, or irrelevant, they could churn yours for another <Cough> <Evernote>.
5. VALIDATION: I'm sure you have heard this repeatedly: validating a product is a make or break part of a startup's scale-up process, especially at the early stage. But how do you do that properly? Check this list of techniques and tools (it all starts with Market Research) - and get more into that starting here (with free templates!)
6. CRYPTO: Gemini's new Global State of Crypto report highlights the significant changes happening to the Crypto market in 2021. Regulation and Eduction still make up the headwinds of the industry's future: $30 billion VC investments deployed in 2021 ($10 m of which was just in Q4' 21). 41% of those surveyed purchased crypto for the first time in '21, and inflation was a primary driver for Crypto adoption last year (which is indicative of what may be in store for the inflationary year that 2022 has been so far).
7. CRYPTO DEVS: The sibling to #6 above Tomasz Tunguz also noted this week that only about 0.07% of devs globally work in Web3, but they have managed to create about $2 TRILLION in market cap (and that's only counting the top 100 valued projects). So who are these people, and what are they doing? TL;DR They are young and using (soon to be not) niche languages.
8. INFLUENCE MAPS: I enjoyed this read earlier this week. The opening paragraph got me, as this week I really unlocked the power of a vertical monitor and literally said both statements ("This is amazing!", "WTF?! Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?"). Well, guess what - this kind of discovery in the behavioural design field is called the "Influence Map" Framework, which is super obvious (in hindsight 😊 ).
9. USAGE BASED PRICING: I may have mentioned this in the past, but only 41% of SaaS Companies priced by seat in 2021. This reflects the evolving tech/SaaS landscape but is it for your business? Tomasz Tunguz asked the same question earlier this month (in his second appliance in this newsletter this week) and boiled it down to 3 questions to ask.
10. CASE STUDY:  Blast from the past on how OKTA made category creation happen before possibly torpedoing everything earlier this month, so here is another SaaS security company, CrowdStrike, where Jason Lemkin takes a closer look via his "5 Interesting Learnings" series - they are currently at 1.7 Billion in ARR and growing at 65% YoY with $100k ARR ACV and 120%+ NDR.

POD OF THE WEEK: Great video (with outstanding notes) covering content creation and marketing strategy at the early stage: How to Earn Trust, Manage Risk and Build Momentum.