Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 28, 2023

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Attribution - Marketing attribution models help marketers assess the data behind user touch points and conversions to understand the return on Investment and effort. Learn more here on Single-touch attribution models, Multi-touch attribution models, attribution tools, and more to make better data-driven marketing decisions.


2. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: Oof. More than 50% of the time, the lack of Product-Market Fit (PMF) factors into a startup's failure (keep reading this article, though, as it goes through how StartupOS figured their PMF out). AirTree (an early-stage VC) has just published this article taking a look at what metrics VCs like them look at for signs of Product-Market Fit - and also what the red flags are. Also, this article has some great PMF definitions. PMF was called "the only thing that matters" to early-stage startups by Marc Andreessen 12 years ago. Now his team gets a little more nuanced, suggesting focusing on Product-User-Fit as an indicator towards achieving PMF. A similar nuance is also true post-PMF with repeatable-scalable revenue models as a precursor to a repeatable-scalable business model (you know - the one with actual profits).


3. STARTUPS: Whoa - Crunchbase reported a significant decline in Startup formation this week over the past three years ('21-'23) across the US, EU, and Israel. Over this time, the number of new startups in the US is down 85+%! This is likely the triple whammy of Covid, Global Economies, and access to funding.


4. FAILURE: This is a skill. Prove me wrong. Failure also requires a culture of safety and permission to be wrong, Tall Poppy doesn't help. As many organizations look to best practices from the tech industry, one hard lesson is that innovation needs a lot of failure before success, something they often do not configure culturally.


5. ESTIMATION: If you have a services element in your startup, estimating effort, especially in Software projects, is mega hard, and we're all terrible at it. McKinsey found that IT projects are, on average, 45% over budget and 7% over schedule, and the larger a project gets - the worse these stats become. So you should definitely bookmark this series (or share with the person you know who needs the bookmark) - Estimating Software Projects by Jacob Kaplan-Moss  (and What to Do when you mess up).


6. API: The latest State of APIs report is out from Postman. Some interesting findings: APIs are viewed as moneymakers (43% said APIs generate over a quarter of company revenue), which means pricing really matters. Also, the two most popular API integrations are Salesforce (not surprised) & WhatsApp (surprised).


7. TRENDS: Here is a report on the latest SaaS trends that backs up my "SaaS is just a big Ponzi Scheme" statement from Productiv. The website is a little funky with its navigation tricks - so here is the PDF version too. A few interesting tidbits to tease you into the click include: Average SaaS spend per employee is ~$10K, and the average department uses 87 SaaS apps.


8. AWS SATELLITES: Amazon is readying to launch a lot of broadband satellites via Blue Origin Rockets, the competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX, to compete against Elon Musk's Starlink. The sky will get busy as they plan to have over 1000 satellites launched by July 2026.


9. LLMs: I, for one, am at the start of the journey to integrate LLMs into our Product stack, and this is a really well-thought-out (part 1) article/framework for how to think about security concerning LLMs features and how to categorize risks based on different use cases and deployment types (in-house, 3rd party, etc.).


10. CASE STUDY: I did write about Meta's newest app, Threads, last week - but here is a much better breakdown of the fastest-growing app ever (this will be a case study for years on Product Launch), as we compare that launch to the rebranding of Twitter to..........X this week, given Elon's very Succession-like desire for Twitter to become an "everything app" but with AI. Apparently, we don't Tweet anymore; we send Xs?


POD OF THE WEEK: Jason Lemkin's turn this week from SaaStr Europa - The cold, hard truths about SaaS in 2023 (part 1).