Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 25, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CPA - Cost per acquisition is often conflated with Cost of acquisition, but they are different. Andrew Chen dives into the details as to why (and also how to calculate CAC accurately).
2. KNOWLEDGE BASE: This is very relevant to my pain right now. Building a comprehensive and valuable customer Knowledge Base platform is difficult. Keep in mind that 67% of customers prefer self-service (if executed well), and almost 90% of customers now expect a company's website to include a self-service application.
3. SECURITY: According to a 2021 IDC cloud security study, 98% of companies experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months—up from 79% in the previous period. Security should be part of the dev cycle and know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky, and the lessons from Log4j: Cybersecurity defense isn't just about tech.
4. SHAPE UP: A refresher for your tech dictionaries. Software product development requires innovative strategies based on today's cadence expectations of continuous integration, micro-services, feature delivery, and scale. The team at Basecamp (I'm an old school fan) have developed ShapeUp, their publications, and a toolbox of techniques designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to creating, prioritizing, and shipping products/features.
5. STARTUP SALARY: How much should you pay yourself as a founder after raising some capital? There are lots of good answers and also lots of different situations. A good rule of thumb, according to Nathan Latka, is if you're a two-co-founders and just hit $1m in ARR, you should each be making about $100k per year and Increase to $150k at $2m in ARR.
6. ESTIMATION: Estimating effort in Software projects is mega hard, and we're all terrible at it. McKinsey found that IT projects are on average 45% over budget and 7% over schedule, and the larger a project gets - the worse these stats become. So you should definitely bookmark this series (or share with the person you know that needs this bookmark) - Estimating Software Projects by Jacob Kaplan-Moss  (and what to do when you mess up).
7. MARKETING FOR ENGINEERS: For all of you technical entrepreneurs who have built something and trying to get it out in the wild, check this GitHub-based curated collection of marketing articles and tools to grow your product. It's the ultimate GTM Repo!.
8. GROWTH: Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Chrome, etc., are all software products that most of us use every day - they are frequent products. It's Tax Season in the US, so my annual pilgrimage into TurboTax software land is just about to begin. I will be enthusiastically welcomed back (Turbo Tax is a phenomenal lesson in good UX btw) - this is an outstanding lesson an excellent example of an infrequent Software product. The growth of an infrequent product is VERY different from that of those used frequently. Reforge have a great framework regarding this called the ICED Theory. (add it to your tech dictionaries) It's a great post discussing the nuances of infrequency, and they have just launched a complementary article to this post on strategies to grow an infrequent product.
9. PRIVATE MARKETS: From Carta's perspective, here is a look at the state of private capital markets leveraging their data. The number of rounds increased 31% over 2020 to over 7500, and the proportional amount of cash invested was up 111%!!! Every sector saw an increase in dollars - but healthcare saw the most significant jump. 2022 has already been a year of correction - so I'll report back at the end of Q1.
10. CASE STUDY: Adobe! Remember when Adobe products were just software licenses? This seems like a generation ago in Tech years. Adobe Creative Cloud launched a decade ago in mid-2012, and the transition was fast; Creative Cloud surpassed product revenues VERY quickly (by mid-2013). Adobe now is at a whopping $12.24B ARR just on subscriptions revenue (as of Q4 2021). Here are seven lessons for us all on this transition, and from ChartMogul, here is a break down the strategy that got them here.