Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 28, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Net Dollar Retention is an essential metric in product-led growth and consumption-based operations. It's used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? Crunchbase crunched the numbers to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like, and Tomasz Tunguz looked at what it takes to achieve 200% NDR!


2. AGILE MARKETING: Agile processes are coming for ya marketing people! This is another one for our Tech Dictionaries  - it's how to really validate learnings, make mistakes, and deliver impactful results. Hubspot covers this concept in detail and outlines how DoorDash hardcore leveraged this methodology to increase revenues from $885m to $2.89 billion in just ONE year!


3. ESOP: Employee Share Option Plans are a great idea to incentivize and retain great staff, but under the hood, ESOPs are complex, especially with changing valuations, both positive and negative, in today's market. So here are some great resources for you: 1. Data-driven VC's ultimate guide to startup equity breaks down everything from vesting schedules to tax implications. 2. Airtree Venture's best practices for communicating the value of  ESOP to teams - this article also has a bonus financial model template (value calculator, salary package calculator, and vesting schedule). Check this cheat sheet for common ESOP terms.


4. ESOP BENCHMARKS: A fast follow from above is this site that has complied a set of Option benchmark data (taken from 20,000 option grants across 1,650+ startups across the US and Europe) - this is all sorted by Seed or Venture stage. Last year, Carta did the ESOP math and found that for seed-stage valuations ($1M to $10M), the median pool size is 12.9%.


5. UNDERSELL: If expansion fits into your growth strategy (it should btw), take a read of the two-part series from Tomasz Tunguz and  Bill Binch - part one is deliberately underselling as a sales strategy to minimize churn and increase upsell/expansion opportunities as a land and expand strategy and post 2 is an expansion of land and expand witch details how to structure a Startup sales team for optimal land & expand.


6. FOUNDER-LED SALES: Founder-led sales is a well-documented part of the startup journey, especially in the early days, and often with very inexperienced or more technical founders. Here is a great article (with Engineering-based analogies) on how Founders can mentally re-frame and execute an excellent sales program.


7. GTM: Early-stage startups waste time when sales and marketing aren't aligned. ChartMogul lays out how to tighten your ICP, unify messaging, and avoid the classic trap of marketing generating leads sales can't close.


8. SEO 1: SEO is under some pretty interesting changes. Google's new AI Overviews are changing how users interact with search results (which is reducing click-through rates). New acronym time, apps like ChatGPT and Claude focus on EEAT-ing you (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). User-generated content is also becoming a significant factor in search rankings.


9. SEO 2: Choosing the right keywords is one of the major levers for SEO success, and it's super hard to figure out. Focus on highly relevant terms, proper search intent alignment, manageable competition, and significant search volume. If you need to figure out your SEO monthly tasks (like analyzing organic traffic patterns, evaluating rankings, and optimizing outdated content), take a read of this article to get you started.


10. CASE STUDY: Outreach (the Company) didn't scale by accident—it followed a 5-phase GTM framework to dominate their space (sales engagement). From early adopter focus to repeatable sales motions and strategic market expansion, this breakdown shows exactly how they did it.


POD OF THE WEEK: From Lennys Newsletter is an insightful and entertaining podcast with growth-guru Elena Verna (dropbox Mire, SurveyMonkey) covering 10 growth tactics that never work (and 3 of her favorite frameworks that do).