Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 17, 2023

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: This is for all the Product people out there - Product Metrics, beyond the 5 base KPIs y'all should know (you can dive deeper here), this article outlines a comprehensive KPI system that can work for product team and other stakeholder, ensuring accountability, progress tracking, and strategic alignment, etc.


2. BUYERS: According to this new B2B software buyers survey, Many buyers are skeptical of information coming directly from companies and predominantly use Google and content marketing when researching and deciding on software purchases but prefer a range of formats to consume content and make decisions.


3. BENCHMARKS: The 2023 OpenView SaaS Benchmarks Report has dropped (based on 3,500 respondents), highlighting a dramatic drop in SaaS valuations, yet steady growth and increased financial efficiency. Key metrics include burn rates, profitability, and diversity in leadership. I'll dive deeper into this one in a couple of weeks.


4. VENTURE: DPI (Distributed to Paid-In Capital) is a measure of the total capital that a fund has returned to its investors (to date) and, when looking at their portfolio companies, VCs balance art and science in their exit strategies by selectively selling to secure early DPI gains without losing out on long-term growth potential, while being mindful of the impact on fund performance and LP expectations.


5. TESTING (MARKETING) 1/2: According to this article at Reforge, marketers often don't see expected big returns from testing because they choose to avoid major risks. Making bigger bets with strong business cases can lead to transformational success - it has some great IRL example bets from Groupon and Google, and there is also a "Big Bet Calculator" embedded in the article for you to use.


6. TESTING (MARKETING) 2/2: Experimentation and benchmarking are crucial for goal/KPI setting when starting with paid advertising experiments and calculating return on ad spend (ROAS) to scale those advertising efforts efficiently. Read here on how to maximize ROI on your early paid advertising efforts.


7. PLG vs. PLS: Product-led sales (PLS) and product-led growth (PLG) are definitely different: PLG uses product experience for growth, while PLS prioritizes and nurtures leads for sales, leveraging product insights for personalized campaigns and user nudges - learn more here.


8. AI: From the person who brought us Clippy - some guy called Bill Gates - comes a new article, "AI is about to completely change how you use computers." He predicts that AI-powered 'agents' will revolutionize computer usage within five years, enabling users to communicate in natural language and perform various tasks without switching apps. This could significantly impact sectors like healthcare and education and lead to the biggest shift in computing-based productivity since the transition from command lines to graphical user interfaces (again, this may be something he knows a bit about).


9. SECURITY: The 2024 Data Security Report is out and highlights AI's impact on security, emphasizing collaboration needs and increased budgets. Everyone is still overconfident in threat responses, and for 2024, data governance and security will be prioritized over AI initiatives.


10. CASE STUDY: The consumer version of ChatGPT is barely 10 months old, and it really upgraded features last week, but we already have OpenAI's Head of Sales, Aliisa Rosenthal, share the transformative growth story of ChatGPT, at SaaStr Annual and highlighted the future of AI, and Chat GPTs impact, especially in the workplace.


POD OF THE WEEK: Prospecting - finding the right potential customers and leads is super tricky, so check this video from earlier this year on 6 steps to kickstarting your prospecting for next year and how to create a prospecting system from scratch. Also includes some good ChatGPT-based hacks to make it work.