Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 16, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Product-Market Fit (Quantitate)- it’s cool to consider this concept as a metric, so I’m bringing it back, according to Jeff Chang this is the best metric for determining quantitative product market fit. Another metric is by Andrew Chen from a16z who calls PMF as a 5% conversion rate from free-to-paid, or 3X CPA to LTV ratio.
2. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: Continued from above - beyond quantitive measurements, how else can a company know (ie Qualify, not Quantify) that they have achieved product-market fit?  This article from TechNexus qualifies PMF as 40% + of respondents stating “very disappointed” to the survey question “How would you feel if you can no longer use the product?”  and Salesforce.io has an even more in depth deep dive that is also a 56 page Google Doc on how to find Product-Market Fit in the most capital-efficient and time-efficient way possible.
3. CAPITAL: Pitchbook has released the Q3 Venture report (downloadable PDF here) GOOD NEWS: The total estimated deal count for US startups saw an uptick in Q3'20 and the total value of all deals remained about the same. BAD NEWS: Seed rounds continue to take a hit but ($4B so far, down from $6.7B).
4. ONBOARDING: It used to be pretty easy when a new team member starts and simply shows up to the office for their orientation. So how does that optimally work in a WFH/Distributed team? Justin Garrison has some great tips in this Twitter thread.
5. SALES: Enterprise sales are something else - especially if you're a small startup trying to just get some momentum going and don’t know s&!t. If this sounds like you take a good read of this article from Close on how to identify all of those enterprise sales weak spots and also take a read here - this is a big lesson I’ve learnt. Often times you are not just selling product, you are selling capability.
6. REVOPS: Is this for you and your business? RevOps is the concept of centralizing operations teams from marketing, sales, and customer success. To many SaaS B2B companies it can be a high-impact way to accelerate revenue growth and provide some operational efficiency (especially in more austere Pandemic Times). BCG have a great deep dive for you to read here to get started on assessing RevOps as a practice for your business.  
7. MARKETING: Anyone here see Marketing as the big unknown? Just what the heck is it? Seth Godin has a pretty good idea and this article is a marketing 101-401 listing some of the best marketing-based articles and resources on the webs. Definitely something I recommend as a bookmark for frequent reference.
8. PRICING: How to price and sell in a pandemic is an article that immediately gets my attention - and the article is a good one from BCG, so def take a read. Then also take a read of this article from Julian Lehr of Stripe: 9 Tricks to Experiment with your Pricing Strategy.
9. VALUE: Unless you know why customers buy your stuff…...and then buy from you again….you’re not ready to scale. In this article from Solving Product there is a great list of questions you can ask your customers to identify why they made the purchase, but more importantly there is another group of questions to consider to figure out why they stayed (and spent more) as that is where the true and often unrealized value is. This is also a great complimentary article on choosing the ideal feature sets based on values.
10. CONTENT MARKETING: I bet you have been told that you need to focus on top of the funnel - but here is something controversial to read: When it’s comes to Content Marketing -  focus on the bottom of the funnel first to drive signups. Whaaaaaaaat? The thinking is - top of the funnel already know their stuff, it’s the bottom part of the funnel thats truly on the learning search.

POD OF THE WEEK: It’s a kinda Product Market Fit special this week, so here is a podcast from SaaStock on how to find it.