Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 4, 2025

1. 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CRO - Conversation Rate Optimization; Banklinko has created a great web guide about what it is and how to design for CRO within a business.
   
   
   2. PRICING: Packaging up offerings and finding the optimal pricing and features structured for both customers and business unit economics is incredibly hard and never right. The team at Heavybit knows this very well, and their article on using feature flags is a great read.
   
   
   3. SALES: Do technical products need a different type of sales process vs traditional enterprise SaaS products? Check this guide on Tech SDRs. These Reps, understanding developer needs, are key for selling DevTools efficiently.
   
   
   4. PRODUCT ONION: The Product Onion Framework can serve as a sanity-saver for early-stage founders without an established product management team who are overwhelmed by feature requests. It breaks product thinking into 3 layers—Core, Context, and Brand—so you can prioritize what matters and ignore what doesn't.
   
   
   5. VIBE CODING: New concept alert. Vibe coding = building without specs. Teams skip rigid planning and instead ship fast, guided by intuition, customer feedback, and AI. Sounds loosey-goosey for sure, but it's part of a new GTM playbook where rapid iteration beats strategy decks. Code, launch, repeat (with vibes apparently leading the way).
   
   
   6. PRECISION: Contrary time to compliment #5 above. Are you like me and not exactly sold on shipping fast and fixing later? This post makes the case for precision over hype. It's a tactical playbook for product leaders launching AI features that actually land.
   
   
   7. AI CHURN: Churn is brutal in AI, and it turns out "AI tourists" don't stick around. The fix? Annual plans. This piece breaks down how smart AI startups can use contracts to lock in revenue and filter for the more serious user.
   
   
   8. MARKET RESEARCH (with AI): I've taken a few cracks at this myself across different AI products in recent months with a varying amount of success (some of which was definitely user error); a16z's latest nails how to actually do AI-native market research: its fast, iterative, cheap, but may not get you all the way there.
   
   
   9. SLG (SERVICES LED GROWTH): Another from a16z this week and another new concept for our tech dictionaries outlines how high-touch services (like implementation or consulting) aren't a go-to-market failure; they're a wedge, especially in AI, where trust, onboarding, and value-realization are still human-heavy.
   
   
   10. CASE STUDY: GitLab is quietly becoming an AI's DevOps backbone. From training infrastructure to CI/CD and security, it powers the AI stack behind the scenes. A great reminder that boring, essential tools often win!!
   
   
   POD OF THE WEEK: To add onto #5 and #6 this week, What does it take to build world-class products today?