Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 25, 2022

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Revenue Churn - The differences between Net vs. Gross revenue Churn are neatly explained here. Great if you're trying to understand your Churn and reduce it and make negative Churn your thing Aka Net Dollar Retention)
2. COMPETITION: You will always be asked for Market Sizing in a pitch, but how well prepared are you for questions about the competition? (Pro-tip - saying you don't have competitors is red-flag). Read this article from Search Engine Land that outlines the steps you can follow to get some quality, competitive analysis research. Pro-tip 2 - as we are all tech people here - do not underestimate the power of G2, product hunt, or Capterra to set your research foundations.
3. GOVERNANCE: Mark Suster (from Upfront Ventures) has started a series on his Medium Blog covering StartUp Boards. With a follow-up article that shows a board structure based on stage! He also provides a blog post AND a 43 slide.
4. GROWTH MARKETING: If you're responsible for growth/marketing, you've hit the motherlode this week! Dan Siepen has compiled a comprehensive list of resources (and the lists are updated often), so make sure you bookmark this page.
5. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: - what exactly is it? This article highlights what it is and what it isn't (in comparison to the role of a project manager), as does this one. This article highlights a more subtle difference between Product Managers and Product Owners. When it comes to feature selection, add the Syms Method to your Tech Dictionary, which goes beyond features vs benefits but is more a guide on pure feature selection using some good old fashioned Venn diagrams.
6. STRATEGIC PLANNING: This is an excellent (pre-pandemic) article on planning from Foist Round Capital and includes lessons learnt from some of the best planners at Airbnb and Eventbrite (including their processes). It's a deep read and has some great templates (including the "W Framework" for you to put to work inside your organization.
7. VALUATIONS: This topic is making a common recurrence in this newsletter, thanks to the rapidly evolving shape of the SaaS market in 2022. Please look at Redpoint's State of Current Market Slide Deck (a Google Slide), where we see a MASSIVE correction (slide 10), but there is an all-time high amount of Dry Powder raised by big funds, AND liquidity is also at an all-time high. Based on much of this data, Jason Lemkin forecasts this sharp decrease in valuations to be temporary (he calls it a one-off "blip").
8. EXPONENTIAL GROWTH: It's all marketing hype and doesn't exist in real life. Take a look at this article which explains it more by taking a deep dive into the numbers of "Exponential" companies such as Slack ($0-$10m ARR in 10 months!), Facebook, and HubSpot. According to McKinsey, despite the sector's image as a bastion of hypergrowth, only a tiny share of SaaS companies sustains growth rates above 30 to 40 per cent.
9. LEADS: After a multi-year hiatus, TradeShows are making a comeback - with big ones such as CES and SXSW already wrapped up. Executing a trade show well is an art form, booths, networking, prospecting. It can be overwhelming, especially if you haven't hung out with people IRL for a while. So take a read of this Dear SaaStr article to get your head back into the Trade Show sales game.
10. CASE STUDY: WEWORK - OK, I'm sure you have all been watching AppleTV's Serialized Dramatization of the WeWork story and patiently waiting for the next episode to drop. But if you want a TL;DW version of that Growth-over-everything-else WeWork story, take a read of this article from Hackernoon.

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POD OF THE WEEK: Selling into Enterprise is no joke, and for this week's podcast, Asana's head of engineering has some great tips on managing infrastructure needs to support those big old Elephants. Video version (with Slides) or audio version.