Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 29, 2019

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Renewal and Up-sell Rates. in SaaS you need to understand more than the headline ARR metric; you need to understand the layers of recurring revenue and also the health of that recurring revenue.
2. SALES: A lot of it is a management problem. Given the high turnover rate of productive sales reps (average tenure is currently under 1.5 years), optimizing their time is key for optimizing their value. Chartmogul covers the ways good management can help optimize value and minimize, or automate, the mundane.
3. MARKETING: Marketing is a practice covering many different disciplines and specialties.  Which one should a startup hire first?
4. CAPITAL: First Round Capital have a sound article centered on the much-needed strategic approach to raising capital, with MondayNote looking at the five mistakes entrepreneurs make misunderstanding VCs.
5. SEGMENTATION: Great article on how Segmentation can be combined with LTV (Life Time Value) to grow MRR (from a subscription box startup).
6. EMAIL: When it comes to outbound marketing, email still works really well! Digital Olympus has a great guide on effective email outreach. (HINT: This takes time and effort!)
7. SCRUM: Agile methodology is a modern software development process that encourages flexibility. It's an umbrella term for multiple management frameworks on how to get things done. Scrum is one of those frameworks and AngelList provide a primer on Scrum based techniques.https://angel.co/blog/agile-methodology-a-primer-on-moving-fast
8. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: A pretty succinct article from ChartMogul on what and how to get started with your customer success efforts - especially as a remote team.
9. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: A lot of SaaS businesses require flat fee based Implementation and deployment cost charges, often captured as revenue from Professional Services. This naturally increases with customer size (and complexity) capping out as an average of 11% of all revenue at Enterprise size customers.
10. SCALE: Salesforce is currently the only $100B ARR pure SaaS company - Jason Lemkin says there are many more coming and asks the question of what would it takes for a business to reach this kind fo scale. Great nuggets in this article of how companies like Salesforce sell to their customers.

POD OF THE WEEK: Many technical founders believe that great products and ideas sell themselves, without any extra effort or marketing. But in reality, they often need public relations (PR). A16z explore how brand-building really works in this Podcast.

BONUS: RayGun’s Tech Leader Events have been a great success in NZ and they are now taking them tooth US (Seattle and Portland in early December). The Portland one will be live-streamed too so check them out online or in-person.