Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 26, 2019

1. DUE DILIGENCE - PART THREE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES. This five-part series (delivered over five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 3: COHORTS AND REVENUE - The Curve is Important!
2. BIG TECH: A few years ago, Ben Thompson from Startechery, proposed the Aggregation Theory, where 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 week we reached a deep inflection point of this aggregation with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announcing large scale Antitrust reviews into Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.
3. SAAS METRICS: Customer Churn Rate (CCR) is an important part of understanding big churn trends (with its sibling being revenue churn). High growth businesses that are increasing Life Time Value per customer (LTV) are likely experiencing negative revenue churn (where LTV is expanding at a pace greater than revenue churn). A counterintuitive net result from this may also be a high customer churn rate (as low-value customers exit). Check this in-depth post from Loomly on how they approached CCR and LTV/CAC ratios.
4. SEGMENTATION: A SaaS business doesn’t cater exclusively to just one type of customer. So in order to focus in on engagement strategies and cater to the needs and problems of these different customer types, segmentation is key. Forbes provides 3 segmentation strategies here and from SaaSx, a well thought our segmentation caveat article (and accompanying podcast).
5. NEWSLETTERS: Email Newsletters are powerful marketing tools and very popular (you’re reading one right now!). Brian Dean has written The Definitive Guide on what he has learned building out a list with almost 150k subscribers (almost as many as this one ;-))
6. PRICING: Pricing will never be perfect and a constantly evolving problem to solve. Here is a great list of the top 5 common SaaS pricing mistakes (and also how to avoid them).
7. CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Visualizing the various interactions via customer journey mapping is replacing traditional sales funnel strategies as a means to close sales. 
8. FOUNDERS: A great article on the lessons learned through the journey of a startup……..which may not end with a founder in charge: "A founder creates something from nothing. A CEO manages something that already exists. They’re two totally different jobs"
9. CX TRANSFORMATION. The Customer Experience (CX) has never been more critical in todays business environments. From McKinsey comes the A, B, Cs of pulling together the building blocks of a customer-experience transformation
10. WEWORK: 2019 has been quite the year for tech IPO’s (so far) and WeWork has (officially) thrown their hat into the IPO ring, announcing that they plan to go public in September, targeting a share sale of about $3.5 billion.

POD OF THE WEEK: From our good buddy David Skok, choosing the right metrics for the right growth stage.

BONUS: Spread the word! LAUNCH Scale conference is October 7-8 in San Francisco. Designed for founders to learn next-level growth and fundraising strategies from the best founders and investors in Silicon Valley. They are giving away the first 1,000 tickets to founders for free.  launchscale.net/founderpass