Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 3, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ZCP: Repeat this metric five times as fast as you can: "month zero cash-on-cash payback"- this tongue twister is best referred to as ZCP. It's a cash-based metric because cash-in-the-bank is THE critical number for a SaaS company to monitor in my experience. ZCP answers the question: if we invest $1 in sales costs (such as salaries and commissions), how long does it take to recoup that dollar spent and welcome it back to our bank account?
2. BURN RATE: Speaking of #1 - because cash is king in SaaS. Here is a very bookmarkable link on how to best calculate cash burn rates - both gross and net - with some great ideas on things you can do to bring that burn rate down.
3. WRITING: Being able to write well is a life skill that needs to sit with founders. So here is 3 step guide: Step 1. How to position your startup and achieve your unique value prop; Step 2. how to write well and one more version for good measure; and Step 3 top tips for telling stories.
4. SALES: This week, Jason Lemkin lays down a great discussion on how sales efficiencies in a high growth startup get worse at scale...........so we all got to plan for it.
5. HIRING: #4 above leads into this next question of hiring to succeed in B2B Sales. Transitioning out of founder-led sales - When should you hire your AEs and SDRs to make sure you can deliver on your growth targets? This article is a little introduction to the tool, and the tool itself is a Google Worksheet and needs your ACV and sales cycle length metrics to work.
6. PPG: Grab your tech dictionaries, everyone! I have a new acronym for you: PPG or People Powered Growth. PPG is a derivative of Product-led growth consisting of a cross-functional team with both customer-facing and non-customer-facing members. It's a People + Product partnership that develops and tests solutions searching for ways to scale human interactions/intervention with a product. Some examples of PPG companies are Drift, Dropbox, and Loom.
7. CI/CD: Continuous improvement (CI) is not just a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly. The method identifies opportunities to reduce waste and streamline work within any department or team. CI can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for delivering outstanding customer experiences.
8. DEMO: This one is interesting to me - as the path to Demo is precisely the primary call to action my website is designed around. I assume it is the same for many of you B2B people, so..... "Should Your Website Drive Prospects to a Demo?" Take a read of the article to determine if this is a problem at your startup.
9. PITCH: Pitch Decks won't be replaced anytime soon, even though people are trying some nifty ways to bypass them. So, according to TechCrunch, these are the five most critical pitch deck slides most founders get wrong, and here is a monster collection (139!) of funded pitch decks here (including the neo-classics: AirBnB, LinkedIn, Intercom, Transferwise, Canva, and Sendgrid).
10. CASE STUDY: HubSpot's turn because I use them - this is another SaaS company that has managed to cross $1b in ARR (and growing at about 30%!!) even though I renegotiate lower rates with them YoY :-). They have been around for 14 years but didn't really get started until about 2011. You can watch the $0 revenue to IPO breakdown here too.

WAIT A MINUTE - BONUS: This is a cool one sourced from the FKA Newsletter focused on what happens on the internet in a given minute in 2021 now that the global internet population is 5.2 billion (up from 4.5 billion last year).
POD OF THE WEEK: Are you still a bit confused about #6 above? As in" "isn't that just describing Customer Success?" Well, no. Take a listen to this podcast to help clear things up a little by describing PPG from an agency perspective.