Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 11, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer Renewal Rate measures the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions at the end of each subscription period. High renewal rates inform companies about many things; product-market-fit, market, pricing fit, value, business model viability, etc. The authors of this article from Profitwell describe the formula and differentiate between renewal and retention - one is actively renewing, the other is not actively canceling. 
2. CRYPTO CAP TABLES: Have you ever wondered how the funding of a crypto/token-based startup works in relation to cap tables? (hint - they maintain more than one). Tomasz Tunguz explains how equity and token-based cap tables work.
3. GROWTH MARKETING: Want solid pro-tips on growth marketing ideas that just plain work? Here are a bunch collated from Intercom - a lot is centered around being user-focused, and if you don't like that one, try this: Notion's marketing secrets for those of us with small teams.
4. RECRUITMENT: It's always been a challenge but anecdotally, oh my word! Finding good people is so very, very, hard right now. Take a good read (and an even better bookmark) of this page from Heavybit - a comprehensive process and guide to developing a successful (and founder-led) recruitment strategy for those at the early stages.
5. REVOPS: aka Revenue Operations is a thing, and it needs to be - but do you need it? Well, you may already be practicing this without using the platitude - it's just a high-impact way to maximize revenues and provide some operational efficiency. Still, the plot twist is that it's also a way to align this operational excellence around the customer experience in this Age of the Customer. Here is an excellent introductory article from Chargebee on RevOps, and here are three nuggets of wisdom from some significant RevOps leaders. BCG also has a great deep dive for you to read here. 
6. BUILD or BUY: I'm constantly in a debate (mainly with myself) of whether to build or integrate with an existing app/service to solve a problem in my business or introduce a new feature on behalf of a customer/feature request. So (like me), you should read this article to get a better grip on assessing the pros and cons of a build vs. buy strategy.
7. SOFTWARE: Last weeks post on productivity (measured by the most popular apps at work) was a REALLY popular one (most click-throughs of this newsletter ever), so I'm doing another post this week as we all use some products more than others with G2's Best Software Award Winners - all ranked based on a combination of their G2 satisfaction revues and Market Presence scores.
8. MARKETING: There are many marketing strategies organizations can deploy that are relevant for their line of business and target audiences, from pay-per-click to content marketing. Bloom lists the differences between the three main categories. Cutting to the chase though, creating a solid marketing strategy is no walk in the park, so take a look at how to create a solid one in 7 steps. (BTW - benchmarking budget - Marketing teams spend 5-10% of a companies ARR).
9. MULTIPLES: This is a preferred metric used to value SaaS companies, which generally carry very few assets, little to no profitability, but all kinds of potential. That number is wildly variable, and Public SaaS and Tech companies have suffered a massive beatdown in 2022 (starting in Dev 21) that has had a significant impact on multiples. This chart shows that Tech/SaaS has almost reverted to pre-2019 multiples. Will it bounce back? Jason Lemkin remains bullish.
10. CASE STUDY: Uber made the call to completely re-write their app way back in 2016. But the cool thing was that the redesign is less than a 100MB as at the time that was the max size of an iOS app available via cellular download (the app these days is 300MB +) because most first time customers need this because they download the app curbside). This is how they did it - it's a pretty crazy developer ride.

POD OF THE WEEK: Expanding on #9 above. SaaStr has a podcast covering the 6 Steps to managing Marketing when everything in the business is locked into hyper-growth