Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 4, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: DAU/MAU. The DAU/MAU ratio is a popular metric for companies measuring user engagement. Rule of thumb: Apps with over 20% = good. If you have 50%+ - you're world-class.
2. REVENUE GROWTH: This one is from the archives, as I consider it one of the best presentations at SaaStr Annual. It's from Mark Roberge of Stage 2 Capital and Harvard Business School, who is providing a handy step-by-step guide to revenue growth - broken down by stage (as a downloadable PDF!).
3. CONVERTIBLE LOANS: They are a kind of debt until they are not. But Convertible Loans are a quick way to access money quickly via an interested investor. Point Nine Capital describes what is involved in a convertible loan and what to look out for.
4. BUYERS vs. USERS: The person writing you a check is not necessarily the same person getting value from your Business. So take a read of this insightful article from HeavyBit on differentiating messaging based on this premise and the different profiles.
5. OUTBOUND vs. INBOUND: How you handle an inbound lead vs. an outbound lead is quite different. Check this article from Jack Jorgovan on how Outbound leads differ (and how to close them). Oh, and do you want to binge some Outbound Sales TV???? Yeah, I knew you would. The team at predictable revenue has been running over 50 outbound sales experiments to find out what works best (and what doesn't.). Watch the whole series on YouTube.
6. BRAND MARKETING: Just how much does brand matter in B2B?….well, put your bias away as it's a lot according to this article and this one. Need to get started or run a branding review? Check this article on how to get started.
7. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: It's a weird open secret that many B2B SaaS businesses generate a significant amount of revenue from implementation and deployment projects, often captured as revenue from Professional Services, due to deployment and configuration complexity. So what are the revenue benchmarks for a SaaS Business to capture revenue through professional services? On average, it caps out at 11% of all annual revenue with Enterprise focused businesses, but even at the lower end of town, it's still 5% of revenues with SMB focused companies.
8. CULTURE: LinkedIn has published a fascinating new report into the rapid workplace culture shifts that have been in play since 2020 and what these shifts mean for your internal team branding. Flexibility and work-life balance beat out compensation and salary.
9. PRODUCTIVITY: Okta has released its 8th annual Business at Work report covering the applications and services workers use to be productive; plenty have emerged in response to WFH and pandemic-related shifts. In a surprise to no one, companies focused on collaboration and data security tools as the top 2 most popular categories.
10. CASE STUDY:  From a VC perspective, the Series A funding round is a stamp of approval. It shows that product-market-fit is evident and that there is a venture-backable market out there for the Business to target. From the PointNine Capital blog comes the story of how PlayPlay managed to raise their €10M Series A (broken down into a digestible 9 point play).

​
POD OF THE WEEK: It's a video, not a podcast this week. The content pumping out of Y-Combinator at present is always good. YC Partner Carolynn Levy details the basics of startup financing and how modern early-stage financing rounds work using convertible securities, such as the SAFE note.