Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 17, 2020

​

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. SEED INVESTMENT: According to Y Combinator’s investment  history, Seed investors are favoring enterprise startups
3. ANTITRUST: According to the Aggregation Theory, Tech companies at scale provide a commoditization affect into markets (as they are uniquely enabled by very low marginal costs and high user preference). Think Airbnb and Uber for trust, Amazon and Netflix for choice, and Google and Facebook for advertising. This year much of this aggregation will be put to the test as regulatory clampdowns and anti-trust behaviors will face large scale scrutiny. Business Insider provide a deep dive on what this means for big tech and digital media in 2020.
4. TRACTION: Another new SaaStr guide, which is basically a curated PDF of Wisdom from SaaStr speakers for gaining initial traction within a SaaS business. Packed full of great nuggets and insight.
5. SMART SPEAKERS: They are everywhere and all the big players are also heading into cars (on average, US drivers spend nearly an hour driving each day). From Business Insider here is the latest report on Smart Speakers for 2020, forecasting it to be the fastest-growing digital platform ever.
6. GROWTH (bootstrapped): 5 Sales lessons growing to $150k MRR without salespeople and how they cracked the elusive organic growth strategy.
7. CUSTOMER SUCCES: Jason Lemkin has said "Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is” and this was back in 2015. Chart Mogul expand on this and explain their approach to a (successful) success management strategy.
8. MOBILE: AppAnnie just released their annual The State of Mobile report for 2020 which is packed full of valuable data. At a high level the average user in 2019 spent 3.7 hours/day on their device and consumer spend has more than doubled since 2016 (at $120b USD)
9. DEV-SEC-OPS: Most startups and dev teams have been living the DevOps life for a few years now - but how does a team transition into a one that integrates security into that system? Sqreen write about how best to take first steps. Automation and Cultural permission are key! Also a great presentation here (downloadable slides!)
10. CHURN: This is real simple (but cringey-because-we-can-relate) list of things to do in order for your customers to hate you.

POD OF THE WEEK: A great synopsis on how modern product discovery and development practices (such as Agile, Lean, Jobs to Be Done) evolved.