Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 25, 2023

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: 32 SaaS KPIs Every Company Should Track, awesomely split across five different divisions: Marketing, Sales KPIs, Finance KPIs, Revenue, and Customer Success KPIs.


2. CONTENT: The idea that I should view content as a product was a valuable marketing insight. As was being told that the strategy of "producing ten blog posts" was wrong. Read this Two-part blog (part 1 and part 2) to change your mindset on what good content should be.


3. DUE DILIGENCE: For investors, what the heck does due diligence look like for pre-seed or pre-rev companies with no real traction or trends to share? It's hard to do - but this article captures many vital areas, especially founder equity, non-founders on the cap table, and founder vesting.


4. PERSONALIZATION: Twilio released their 2023 The State of Personalization report. AI is here - more than 9 in 10 businesses are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth, and over half (56%) of consumers surveyed say they will become repeat buyers due to personalized experiences (a 7% increase YoY).


5. VIDEO CONTENT: Nailing introductory and Demo videos is a total art form. Need help to figure out where to start or have video-block? Get inspiration from this curated collection of some of the best, and here is a list of 6 videos every SaaS Company needs. (TL;DR Explainers, Company, Testimonials, landing, page, FAQ, and Personalized Sales).


6. SHIP IT: Learn how to ship it real good in the tech world with these six offbeat strategies, from ditching staging to nurturing clear engineering ownership, ensuring success in the fast-paced startup universe.


7. ENTERPRISE: Check out the State of the Enterprise report by Insight Venture Partners - good reading if this is the sector you are selling into: Security is still a top priority, data & AI budgets have expanded the most, APIs are becoming mainstays of the modern infra stack within enterprises.


8. VENTURE: Tomasz Tunguz has done some hard-core statistical analysis examining Startup investing trends. It's a technical read but given current trends, round counts should revert to the mean sometime in H2 2023, which he calls ~ 1000 Seed, 240 Series A, & 65 Series B investments per quarter.


9. SAAS EFFICIENCY: It's surging. Many (public) SaaS companies are showing increased efficiency while maintaining growth: Toast's +6% EBITA, Monday.com +26% cash flow, MongoDB's +5% margins, Snowflake's 46% predicted cash flow, and HubSpot's 30% growth with double-digit margins. Hopefully, efficient growth trends like this will continue.


10. CASE STUDY: Complimenting #7 above, moving into the Enterprise is no mean feat. Here are the top 5 Lessons from Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable, on their Upmarket mission. Bonus content: how Airtable leverage SEO. And here are ten tips to start selling to big companies as a little guy.


POD OF THE WEEK: This is a great one - The State of the Seed Market, specifically discussing why Seed is broken and what happens from here.