Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 17, 2024

​1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Share of Wallet - this is one for all you marketplace people (who should also check this other article on Marketplace Liquidity and mentions in this newsletter from earlier this month). Share of Wallet is a measure of a marketplace going from being one of many options to becoming the main option for a buyer (AND also a supplier).


2. ONBOARDING (Remotely): Fun fact- I've only met three of my team IRL; everyone else is remote, overseas, and in a different time zone. Successful onboarding is hard, so check out this complete guide to remote employee training from Hubstaff (who I also use for my remote team). For some solid examples, this is how Zapier does it (and leverages their own product to use automation to do it), and here are some lessons learned from Slack.


3. PPG: Grab your tech dictionaries everyone! I have another acronym for you: PPG, or People Powered Growth. This is a derivative of product-led growth, which consists of a cross-functional team with customer- and non-customer-facing members. It's a People + Product partnership that develops and tests solutions, searching for ways to scale human interactions/intervention with a product. Some examples of PPG companies are Drift, Dropbox, and Loom.


4. GROWTH: Testing new marketing growth tactics takes a lot of resources, and most of us don't have much time to run experiments. So check this Google Doc from Dashly, where they collected 100 growth marketing hypotheses tested by a bunch of their experts (including advert retargeting, wait list for product launches, niche glossaries, etc.).


5. AI: Another week, another big AI update: OpenAI launched a new model called GPT-4o. It can reason across text, voice, and video. Take a test drive (it's free for everyone). It's impressive, and I can now turn off my accessibility microphone workaround as I can now actually talk directly to ChatGPT as response time is fast. It's not quite Human conversation fast, but close, and keep in mind this is the worst it will ever perform. Check these examples out. 


6. CHAOS THEORY (PIVOTS): Digital Transformations are important, strategically for most modern businesses. But the mindset needed for these changes to happen requires a certain kind of improv style to get there - as the systems in place needed to change or pivot are usually very complex - change IS chaos. So take some time to read this article to understand more of what this is about - I also aspire to have the title of "Chaos Manager" one day...


7. RAISING: Securing a Series A funding round in the current market has some seriously heightened expectations. It's a common tech-ism that most startups have not yet reached genuine "product-market fit" by this stage, but the expectation these days is that there needs to be a higher degree of PMF signals. The "graduation rate" from Seed to Series A has declined, showing increased investor skepticism. In fact, the graduation rate from seed to Series A is around ~12%, the lowest it has been in 5+ years.


8. MARKETING 1: Where do Marketers feel most confident about getting an ROI from their campaigns? This article answers that for you, but the TL;DR is that it's LinkedIn (and this is a survey of B2B and B2C marketers).


 9. MARKETING 2: Now that market conditions dictate profits are more important than growth, what is the role of B2B growth marketing? And, curiously, is it even marketing in the first place?


10. CASE STUDY: Everyone loves a good old Pivot story. Expanding on #6 above, here are 5: The Hidden Backstory of 5 Startup Pivots That Grew to $43B, including Lyft and Discord, and also a "definitive" Pivot list from Lenny of Lenny's Newsletter (see below for more).PIVOT! PIVOT!


POD OF THE WEEK: Continuing with the Pivot vibe this week, Lennys Newsletter has a Part 1 and Part 2 series on "The Art of The Pivot."