Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 24, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NDR. Net Dollar Retention is an important metric in the new world of Product Led Growth (SEE #2 BELOW). It’s used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase does the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like. 
2. VENTURE:  The 95 page CB Insights MoneyTree Report Q2’20 is now out with some optimistic news. The number of deals is up (1,374 for the Q compared to 1,336 last Q) and Seed rounds have seen gains after a long (pre-pandemic) decline. On the other side of VC town, the number of quarterly mega-rounds (rounds worth $100m) also hit a new record (69). Other notable metrics - M&A activity dropped significantly - 120 exits compared to 155 in Q1’20.
3. SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY: Security should be part of your dev cycle but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky.
4. WEBSITE: I was on a local cafe’s website earlier this week trying to check out the menu ahead of a meeting and the site was terrible, resisting all my efforts to access a menu (something I’m sure, beside an address or phone number, is the reason people would seek it out) so I thought of this article from Smashing Magazine this week, asking the question “Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors”? TL;DR - remove the noise and focus on the jobs you want the website to do.
5. BRANDS: Just how much does brand matter in B2B?….put your bias away as it's apparently 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.
6. PITCH: Now you have your brand sorted via the above post. It’s time to sort the pitch. This is part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed 50 pitch decks and analyzed 4 UX techniques to find out.  TL;DR Delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
7. CHURN: In our current comic climate, crisis-driven product churn is a legitimate thing as most businesses are practicing austerity by default. As I’ve mentioned quite often in the past acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining an existing one. Creating a culture of customer retention is one of the best things to do, especially during a pandemic. This article discusses ways to make that happen.
8. GROWTH: To complement the article above on retention - as well as focusing on customer retention, now is also the ideal time for a startup to prepare for growth by getting data, CRM’s, processes, and lead get all in order.
9. DATA: I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation”, well OK fine, I do have more to say: The opposite of that is also a truth to hammer home "You Cannot run experiments successfully without being data-driven”. We all overestimate our experimentation skills AND our Data collection skills.
10. FREE-ER: It’s not necessarily a time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy? But it’s probably a good time to think about more free as a sales strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and Online Payments. 

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POD OF THE WEEK: A great discussion on what the future of B2B marketing may look like. Great insights in customer experience automation vs. marketing automation, changes in Go To Market and positioning/story.