Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 13, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Light reading this week (jk, jk, lol) from Andrew Chen of a16z: An 80-page slide deck of the red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics. The article is the better read due to Andrew’s notes - but if you just want the PDF, I got ya, just click here. 
2. CONTENT MARKETING: Which this newsletter is packed with, has become a vital piece of tech companies growth strategies and it's bigger than just content now – it's evolved into full sales enablement.
3. E-COMMERCE: E-commerce sales surpassed 10% of total retail sales in last Q 2019 for the first time ever ($187 billion of almost $1.5 trillion in sales)
4. SALES: ...of the outbound kind require some serious planning and strategy. Saleshacker are pros in this realm and list 4 elements needed to execute in this article.
5. PODCASTS: Have we reached peak podcast yet? According to this report from Business Insider, probably not, and podcasting will be a $1 billion industry by 2021. With US listenership having doubled since 2015 and the biggest players being Apple, YouTube, and Spotify. Interesting recycled side-fact: The listening market is a much bigger market for Apple though - their AirPods division alone (so not including Beats or any other audio product) is estimated to make more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify COMBINED (thats $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth, and gross margins of 30-50% if you don't want to click).
6. JOBS AND AI: Tricked you - this is not about robots coming for your job. It’s kind of the opposite. According to a recent report from Zip Recruiter, AI jobs accounted for four out of every 1,000 job postings last year. This is waaaaaay up from 2016, when it was one in 1,000. The downside is (and this is a US-centric report) that they are all concentrated in only four U.S. states, the obvious ones: California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts. Fun Bonus: From CB Insights their list of the top 100 AI companies.
7. FAIL: Failure is a skill. Prove me wrong, and it’s also a culture of safety and permission to be wrong. 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 (cold hard fact: NZ Tall-Poppy syndrome does not help)
8. PLG: Another week another Product Lead Growth reference 🙂 Reading this article, I had to take a bit of side-dive into First Principles Thinking - here is how Elon does it for example. It made my brain hurt. Now that you are an expert on this principle, here is First Principle Thinking approach to being a successful Product Lead Growth business.
9. MARKETING: From SaaStock here is a great guide to SaaS Marketing. It’s simple but comprehensive if you are an early/growth stage SaaS founder just getting started with marketing efforts.
10. SaaStr: Sadly SaaStr 2020 had to be canceled due to Covid-19 concerns. It’s a wonderful conference full of all kinds of amazing SaaS Content and speakers. So as a shout out to the conference that should-have-been this week here are is a Massive repository of all the slides presented at SaaStr Annual last year.

POD OF THE WEEK: As an extension of # 8 above, its First Principle Thinking. Great intro podcast from Scale or Die. (Skip the first 2 minutes). The iPhone vs Blackberry analogy was the tipping point example for my brain .

BONUS: Is your business looking to hire US Staff some time soon? Check this webinar from Vistra on employer HR obligations. All of the head scratching stuff; From benefits and insurance to NO legally mandated Sick Leave or Vacation Days. 1pm Eastern 7am NZDT.