Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 11, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Back to basics this week and referencing a six-year-old article from a16z of the 16 fundamental startup metric classics covering Bookings vs Revenue, Gross Profit, ACV, CAC, Active Users and the like and here is how to choose your north star metrics.
2. VIDEO: Nailing introductory and Demo videos is a bit of an art form. Don't know where to start or have a video block? Get inspiration from this curated collection of some of the best, and here is a list of 6 videos every SaaS Company needs. (TL;DR Explainers, Company, Testimonials, landing, page, FAQ and Personalized Sales)
3. PRICING (deep dive): Product pricing is super hard. Here are the top lessons learned from 25 SaaS companies, the impact pricing changes can have on your business, and how to test it. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare, and Point Nine Capital has nine awesome pricing strategy experiments.
4. DIFFERENTIATION: Standing out in a saturated sea of SaaS is a tricky problem to solve - pro-tip - never do it on price alone (see #3 above). So ask yourself, "why should someone buy from you?" It requires balancing familiarity and differentiation - read this article to get you thinking on the topic more.
5. CORPORATE VENTURE: (or CVC) Hot off the press from CBInsights is the Global 2021 State of CVC Report (pdf). CVC-backed deals went bonkers in 2021. Global CVC-backed funding more than doubled ($169.3B), and Silicon Valley captured $35B of this (guess what - also a new record).
6. COMPENSATION: Ready to hire some salespeople for your Startup? Take a read of how Facebook re-imagined theirs at the 400 employees mark. When it comes to Sales Teams, bookmark the Betts Compensation Guide as it's always a handy reference site and then read this post from Jason Lemkin on constructing a framework for the first SaaS sales compensation plans. What about as a founder? A good rule of thumb, according to Nathan Latka, is if you're a two-co-founders and just hit $1m in ARR, you should each be making about $100k per year and Increase to $150k at $2m in ARR.
7. CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: Here is the Vonage Global Customer Engagement Report for 2021. LOTS has changed in the past two years: 300% growth in customers choosing video chat as the main channel for talking to companies, and WhatsApp is 160 per cent more popular now than SMS, with almost 50% of consumers using WhatsApp to connect with businesses.
8. HIGH OUTPUT MARKETING: Another for your tech dictionaries. It's a way to leverage and optimize workflow. The author increased SQL's by 177% using this method, so read their guide on getting started.
9. PRODUCT MARKET FIT (Another deep dive): Oooof. More than 50% of the time, the lack of Product-Market Fit (PMF) factors into why a startup fails (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. Marc Andreessen called PMF "the only thing that matters" to early-stage startups 12 years ago. Now his team get 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).
10. CASE STUDY: Expanding on above, asking the PMF question IMO is always the more noble focus (as opposed to answering the question). But sometimes - you've got to know (see above), and here is a case study on how Superhuman did it.

POD OF THE WEEK: Unpacking Product Market Fit - the podcast version - this episode references different examples and strategies to understand what kind of PMF would work for your Startup.