Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 24, 2023

​1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: VALUE-BASED PRICING: It's a tough nut to crack as it makes the most of what the maximum cost customers would be willing to pay for a product or service - this means there is no magic guesswork or thumb-suck number. These prices need to be arrived at Empirically. Paddle.com has a good guide on what this means (with examples), and Profitwell has a comprehensive guide on making it happen (and how to go about calculating/measuring it).


2. PRICING: This one is totally a follow-up to #1 above and is interesting as the author is pitching a new, better (gasp!) way to decide your product pricing HINT: It's all about how you ask the question. And this is a variant of how to research and implement a value-based pricing model.


3. ENTERPRISE: Moving upmarket into larger organizations is a standard SaaS growth strategy. Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is good! But it takes a lot of work to pull this move off as a tiny startup selling to large organizations. Here are 10 tips for selling to big companies as a little guy.


4. PERSONALIZATION: SaaS marketers have been increasingly turning to personalization in recent years to increase conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels. So check out this great article from Chart Mogul on the (modern-day) personalization fundamentals. As a teaser: Personalization reduces acquisition costs by as much as 50%, and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization.


5. PLG DATA: One of the keys to excellent product-led growth is capturing and leveraging the right data to determine what to build next. Here's how to do that (REALLY in-depth with great examples).


6. INFLUENCE MAPS: I love discovering great tools - especially visual ones, as my mind works mainly in diagrams. Add Influence Maps to your tech dictionary this week - as one of the coolest Marketing Frameworks I've come across in a while and is an excellent tool for answering strategic marketing questions.


7. DEV: Great report from HeavyBit covering Software and Development Trends for Engineering Leaders, 16 pages of quality, including best practices, top languages, trends, and spending forecasts (Productivity Tools are top).


8. FINANCES: For many startups across the globe, it's been a heck of a month for finance teams. So for pre or post-mortem reasons, look at these guides on cash management and treasury management to help with more strategic planning or finance-based BCPs going forward. They are Google Docs - so be sure to make a copy!


9. VC AI: Pitchbook has launched an AI platform called VC Exit Predictor. This new tool aims to answer the question, "Of all the startups and funds, which ones are worth putting time into?". A full PDF report can be viewed here.


10. CASE STUDY: The Airtable links last week were popular - so doubling down on journeys into the Enterprise this week with a great article from Canny on how (tactically) they did it.


POD OF THE WEEK: From Ophelia Brown, the Founder of Blossom Capital, discusses why growth investors ruined the Venture market (mainly via follow-on investing), along with some insight into the European VC market.