Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 22, 2020

Feel free to share the knowledge outside of your bubble via this social distancing platform!

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: The Nag Metric. This one is fun (but not for everyone). A call to action within a site or customer journey is kinda like a parent trying to get their kid to clean up. It just gets a bit naggy after a while. This can impact your brand/NPS over time or just irritate people into churn. The Nag Score - outlined in detail here, is an attempt to quantify this.
2. LEADERSHIP: With the rise of COVID-19 across all of our business and personal lives, leadership and strategies for operating through these uncertain times has become heavily discussed. This article on the topic resonated hard for me - centered on the idea of a Human Centric CEO. Not just because it’s not just the right thing to do, but because the author believes it will inevitably lead to healthier organizations. Also - for fun. In these unprecedented times Leadership/Execs have ramped the use of the word “unprecedented” on earnings calls.
3. ONBOARDING: Onboarding success is often de-prioritized with scrappy fast-growing business but giving customers all the tools they need to succeed with your product is the best way to ensure that they stick around. Profitwell review the importance of good SaaS onboarding and discuss steps to create an awesome program. Userpilot also have a great tactical complimentary post here on the best customer onboarding software options for SaaS companies.
4. VENTURE: From Gabe Kleinman of Obvious Ventures a great article positing that the entire VC industry needs a reset, making a strong case that VC's are missing out on the most transformative ideas of our time (opposed to incremental ones) and PointNine ask from another angle - If entrepreneurs can come from anywhere, then why do all VC's look the same? There is a reasons why the (kinda) parody site VCStarter Kit exists you know.
5. PROFIT: There are myriad opinions on how well software companies perform, especially in public markets. SaaStistics analyze this across two article. The first asks the question 'Are Software Returns Really That Good?’ TL;DR - heck yeah. The second one asks - cool! So which ones are the best? TL;DR Shopify…..but also Zoom!
6. LEGAL DOCUMENTS: In startup land there is a long tail of legal documents that need drafting just to run the business. Here are some great resources for free legal documents so you can stick to the mission: Avodocs - 3 free per month. Cooley Go has a library of documents for the US and UK, from Penn State Law School - a startup Kit bundle and for those of us in NZ, Simmonds Stewart has a comprehensive library of agreements and templates.
7. INSURTECH: From CBInsights is the (PDF Download) Q1 2020 report on the insurance tech sector. Optimism and confidence are on a COVID-pause with a 54% dive in funding from last Q totaling $912M across 96 deals.
8. SALES: Cold calling and email is increasing as a tool during our new sales regimes but these methods historically have very low response rates (1.48% for cold calls and 1% for cold emails). Jason Bay has some methods to optimize response rates and Gong has some recommendations on cold calling.
9. MARKETING: Here is a relatively new phase for my SaaS dictionary - buyer intent data. I have posted all kinds of articles in this newsletter on Marketing strategies and tactics - but there is never a one-size fits all channel for a company. So how does a business find out what are the best marketing channels for them? This article suggests that everything needed to answer that questions is already within the data a business generates every day.
10. AAS: Made you look. From my buddies at VentureBeat is a validating post on why ‘as-a-service’ business models will likely reign in a post-pandemic world. (But these will not be the “growth at all costs” pre-pandemic ones).

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POD OF THE WEEK: “Jobs to be done” isn’t a phrase, it’s a methodology for getting stuff done - listen more on the concept here.