Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 3, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). From Chartmogul here is the full guide.
2. PRICING: As mentioned in prior newsletter, it’s never perfect and shoudl always be viewed as a constinulal experiment. Here is a great guide on how to run those experiments. 
3. STATE OF STARTUPS: Great report of 3,600+ submissions and 190,000+ data points that closes out 2019 from First Round Capital. (Rockier fundraising, mental health, remote work are all key topics)
4. MARKETIING (deep dive): as we head into 2020 here are some measurement resolutions all marketers should make and Google are forecasting the next big things headed our way.
5. PLG: (Product led growth). In this new age of PLG hitting it’s stride, here are some tried and true practices for running sales within a PLG organization.
6. AWS EDGE: Amazon just hosted their Annual AWS conference last month and it contained a bunch of announcements. The big one is centered on the growing need for “Edge Computing” and their agressive push into this part of the public cloud market. It’s going to require some new thinking from an architecture perspective and will be achieved via “Outpost” racks located at local colocation providers and telecom carriers. 
7. PITCH: From a great friend of the newsletter, Bill Reichert, comes a classic top-10 tale of what not to do with your pitches slides. 
8. IT'S A ZOO: Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures coined the term Unicorn over 15 years ago. Since then the animal metaphors and taxonomy have expanded. Here is the current list (and here is the additional customer-focused one)
9. MESSAGING: Great little Reddit post of the most popular messaging apps by Country. The reach of Facebook via Messenger and WhatsApp is absolutely remarkable.
10. DECADE to DECADE: From Fred Wilson’s AVC site is a double post of what happened in the 2010’s and what he sees happening in the 2020’s

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POD OF THE WEEK: The SaaStr Podcast’s most downloaded episode of 2019: Tomusz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures - a SaaStr drawcard and frequently linked in this newsletter.