Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 3, 2023

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Churn is the metric that will make or break a SaaS business. This article is part one of a two-part series but lists 7 retention strategies that can assist you in retaining as many customers as possible:. Starting with scoring yourself to gauge where the business needs to improve.


2. WEB ANALYTICS: Being more data-driven is an intelligent 2023 move. So read this long-form article on how to be more web-based and data-driven this year (and why that's important).


3. EMPLOYEES: Here is a great question: How many employees should you have based on your ARR? In 2023 this answer may be much lower in our leanops market, but my former big boss David Sacks has a great slide from his SaaStr presentation on optimal SaaS Org Charts (Full deck here) - Series A is 40-50 at 1m ARR. Yup, that's only $20-$25k ARR per employee - full report here, which expands into what roles you should hire and what the org chart looks like.


4. MVT: Here is another one for your tech dictionaries: MVT or Minimum Viable Testing, which is about creating hypotheses and conducting tests that allow you to predict if a market will appreciate a product before even launching an MVP.


5. CYBER/API: APIs are big business these days, and the flip side of the rise of the API economy is that it catches the eye of cybercriminals. Based on figures from Salt Security's State of API Security Report, 94% have experienced security problems in production APIs, with a 117% increase in malicious API traffic over the past year. Check here for Trends, and also read on best defense practices.


6. MARKETING: So, how do you measure up in 2023 as a marketing business (that's all we secretly are)? Get started here with the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies, created by the former CMO of Zendesk and Slack, then complete the Marketing Scorecard Spreadsheet here, scoring each on a 1 to 10 scale. A deeper explainer is in this post.


7. LEAD SCORING (in a PLG world): Lead scoring is a way of assigning numerical values to prospects so sales and marketing teams can optimize their funnels and convert faster - so how does that work in a Product Lead World? This blog has all the answers.


8. LANDING PAGES: See below's Case Study link for the master of landing pages (Zapier had 25k of them). Scrapbook (who are getting very close to taking my money) looked over 100 SaaS landing pages and created a helpful (at least to me) landing page optimization checklist for SaaS.


9. MEETINGS:  We all probably attend more meetings than we need to. In the US, there are 55 million of them a day. So check this great episode from Freakonomics on how to have healthier meeting habits or even better (if you are of the Product mindset), "If our meetings were products, no one would buy or renew" so here is How To Product Manage the Sh#t out of your Meetings.


10. CASE STUDY: I love Zapier (and their 25,000 landing pages). Here is how they built up one of the most incredible content marketing machines around.


POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #3 above is the SaaS Org Chart Podcast live from SaaStr with David Sacks. (Video version here)