Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 21, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: USER ADOPTION - measuring which new users could turn into paying customers (and which are going to drift away). Everything you need to know is in this article - it’s a comprehensive and a very deep dive (because these metrics differ between businesses and between cohorts of users).
2. MANAGEMENT: Favorite/hardest part of a startup?…...Unlocking the potential in your people. Managing a team (and being good at it) is an incredibly hard art and a perishable skill. Take a read of this collection of people management principles with a nice little TL;DR list at the top.
3. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: A lot of SaaS businesses require flat fee based Implementation and deployment cost charges, often captured as revenue from Professional Services. This amount naturally increases with customer size (and complexity) capping out at an average of 11% of all revenue at Enterprise size customers. So why do it? Well according to this Pre-COVID survey $$$$$ -  the number of apps in use has increased by 68% for large companies and 43% for small and mid-size companies since 2015. 
4. SALES: Managing remote sales teams? From the team at Close comes a great read on how to leverage your CRM to keep coaching sales teams remotely.
5. FINTECH: CBInsights released their State Of Fintech Q2'20 Report - it’s similarly bleak to the Q1 report from Business Insider I mentioned a few newsletters back with CBInsights reporting the number of deals continued to drop (397 compared to 452 last Q, which was already down significantly from Q4 2019). Total dollars invested though is up - ($9.3B compared to $7.95B last Q) - but mist of that was dues to mega rounds ($100m and above)
6. API: You’ve probably heard of them - but what the hell do they do and why should I care? An API is a simple code interface that helps two applications communicate without having to know the details of the other application here is a non-technical explanation if you want more.  According to this report from Pandium the average SaaS company has an average of 15 API-based product integrations and some of those integrations can be a serious driver of revenue.
7. SPEED MATTERS: I write this newsletter during my weekly morning coffee - I prioritize speed and appreciating the content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (But big shout to Grammarly who I outsource all that too) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, they obviously make speed a priority for their tech stack - Speed is very much a UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is my favorite great speed-focused tech company, who (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience solutions.
8. ONBOARDING: Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates. From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality. I also love me a good working example, so take a look at this onboarding teardown from the Product-Led Institute.
9. GROWTH: Using Zoom and Twilio as examples (both also notable product led) a16z make the case that the new era of enterprise go-to-market requires growth-plus-sales - which is just a fancy-pants way of highlighting the evolution in customer buying behavior for high end B2B. Great read.
10. DATA: You like Data Lakes? Tomasz Tunguz presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes last month, the link to the slides is here. This is technical stuff but highlights are data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments. Which means these data systems need to be meshed (that's the Lake!) - and the tools exist now to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.

POD OF THE WEEK: Want to build a sales culture that attracts, and retains, top performers? How to build a culture that attracts top performers with Justin Welsh.