Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 31, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Payback Period. SaaS revenue is painful until it’s not. What I mean by that is that the cost of acquisition for every customer is generally much more expensive than the first payment(s). It takes time to recoup those costs (something called the "Capital Trough”). But how much time? On average (according to David Skok et all) it’s about 17 MONTHS! (Ouch). Tomasz Tunguz takes a look at this metric too and reviews best-in-class for public traded companies and data sources.. Zoom (one of my all-time favorites) tops out at a payback period of about 3-months.
2. VENTURE: The Q4 MoneyTree report is out (from PwC and CB Insights). Number of IPO’s, down. Funding from Q3-Q4, down, Funding YoY, down. Number of $100m plus rounds, down. Yikes.
3. PRODUCT: This is my favorite article of the year to date. Scale isn’t just something that happens in sales, it’s requires your Product Team to be ready for Scale Up too. First Round discusses how best to craft product teams at different stages of growth (I love the pre-MVP drunken walk analogy - stumbling around, trying to build something people want).
4. TESTIMONIALS:  When it comes to trust, people trust people over brands. Chart Mogul have posted an Ultimate Guide to Using Customer Testimonials to Boost Sales, noting that a generic and insincere endorsement is just as helpful as not using anything.
5. MARKETING - EARN, OWN, BUY: There are a multitude of marketing strategies organizations can deploy that are relevant for their line of business and target audiences from pay per click to content marketing. Bloom list the differences between the three main categories.
6. SVOD: How many streaming subscriptions is too many? This year we are probably going to find out with a projected massive shakeout on the horizon According to Business Insider here is a report on how this is likely to play out.
7. TECH TRENDS: Deloitte jump onto the 2020 Trends bandwagon and have released a pretty interesting paper, downloadable as a PDF here, exploring six key trends: Ethics, Agile Financing, Macro Tech forces in Enterprise, Operational Simulations, Human Experience Platforms (such as NZ’s Soul Machines and UneeQ), and Tech Architects. I’m also a big infographic nerd and thought that this visualization of their last 11 years of tech trends is great.
8. TESTING: Everything is a hypothesis in a startup and testing should be embedded in everything you try towards growth and product. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, Go Practice have some great advice on how to make these experiments run faster.
9. SMB vs ENTERPRISE: As a startup - which to chase? Firstly this obviously depends on the product being built, but in general, Old School guidance was to start chasing the biggest contract values as soon as possible, which is Enterprise. But according to Craft, more newer school thinking is to focus on SMB, which has been a sleeper category, as sales velocity is a better strategy than chasing contract size.
10. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a constant arms race, with criteria for optimization in a constant state of flux. Backlink have just updated their guide for 2020 for On-Page SEO (which is a different category than off-page)

POD OF THE WEEK: This is actually a webinar replay. But if you are a founder wanting to understand how other businesses structure stock-related incentives to their employees, watch this ( it’s got a global focus)