Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 12, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Active Users! An active user is any user who interacts with your platform in some way during a specific time period that you can identify (depends on your business but can be daily, weekly, monthly). Some consider this a vanity metric but here is why this is still important.
2. SALES: Many well-known tech companies (Atlassian, Zoom, SurveyMonkey) "moved upmarket" - which means they started in the Consumer/SMB space and transitioned into a successful enterprise-focused business. The team at SaaStr has 5 tips to closing larger deals more frequently and Tom Hale has a great case-study on how it was done at SurveyMonkey.
3. PR: Getting PR if you’re an unknown startup is hard (and also can be seen as a low priority in their stable of things-to-get-done)- but it's not as hard as you think without a publicist. Here is a great 101 article from Point Nine Capital (they call it PR for dummies) on how to get great press coverage. The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center also has a webinar coming up on Feb 17 PST on how to get PR for your business without a publicist.
4. VENTURE: The CBInsights/Money Tree tech report for Q4 2020 is now out and despite this whole pandemic thing, 2020 investments reach a new annual record (of USD $130B - up 14% YoY) - mostly attributable to the rise of fewer-but-bigger checks with investors consolidating their tech investments into more mega-rounds (reflected by the fact that deal count is down 9% from 2019). IPO's also made a come-back - 147 tech IPO's in 2020 vs 90 in 2019. 2021 is also not messing around with, $40B invested, setting an all-time high record, according to Crunchbase.
5. USABILITY TESTING: Creating an intuitive user experience within an application or website takes time, and requires a continual process of design - what may seem obvious to one person may not be for everyone. It's not just about UX - it's about usability testing, read here for the fundamentals of this concept. Once you have that article mastered, head over here on how to elevate your UX design empathy skills.
6. FRAMEWORKS: Beyond measurements/metrics, a successful business framework can distill complex processes or models to make execution more of a simple recipe (but ones that can build enduring, mass-market businesses). Sarah Tavel has compiled a great list of compelling Frameworks covering the 10x model, the hierarchy of engagement, hype cycles, and more!
7. SAAS SPEND: The "Covid Boost " is a thing, the speed of digital transformation is going gangbusters - so much so that Gartner has had to re-forecast their numbers in this report that has increased its estimates for global enterprise and IT spend for 2021 and 2022, with Enterprise Software and SaaS the biggest winners - projected to grow 6.2% and another 4.6% in 2022 - with Enterprise Software really taking the big (forecast) prizes - 8.8% 2021 and 10.2% 2022.
8. PRICING: In the Software and SaaS world, pricing has always been tricky. With the more recent additional complexity introduced by Data, AI, and Intelligence-based products, it’s getting even harder - how do you price intelligence?. Tomasz Tunguz breaks down what he has learned on pricing over the past 10 years and this article breaks down pricing in Per-seat vs Usage-based scenarios.
9. CUSTOMER PROFILE: Here is a great tool for anyone. Sales can be a real uphill battle when revenue teams don't truly understand their ideal customer, building out customer profiles is an incredibly useful way to identify your best customers. So download this Profiler kit pdf and use these questions and survey generator to quickly generate the ideal questions and template for your customer profiles. The rest is all on you.
10. CASE STUDY: OTKA - They are an under-the-hood Tech company ("one of those" SOMA 2nd Street Tech Companies is the SF reference) but coming up to almost $1B in ARR!!!! So check this SaaStr Case Study on the growth of the OKTA business on how they got there.

POD OF THE WEEK: To add some power to #4 above What It Takes to Really Raise Capital in 2021 with Christoph Janz, Co-Founder, and Partner @ Point Nine Capital‬.