Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 29, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CLTV: This metric represents the average revenue that a customer generates before they churn - Customer Life Time Value. ChartMogul has a great online calculator here. Go to 'advanced mode' as this calculator references the traditional formula as well as the David Skok version (which is the advanced one, but viewed as being more realistic)....and check here for a thought-provoking read of why your LTV may be lower than you think.
2. SECOND ORDER REVENUE: Doubling down on LTV this week and a little contrary to the last link above: Jason Lemkin claims that CLTV isn’t the whole story and often references a term called "Second-Order Revenue". He states that traditional CLTV analyses underestimate true revenue generated by customers by 50-100% (whaaaaat!!!) in most SaaS models selling to any businesses larger than SMBs.
3. PERSONALIZATION: Did you know that marketing personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization? SaaS marketers have been leveraging personalization to increase conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels for some time so here is a great article from Chart Mogul on the (modern-day) personalization fundamentals.
4. SCALE: This is a must-download. Mark Roberge, the founder of Stage 2 Capital and member of the founding team at HubSpot, has launched this incredible playbook for scaling. In this detailed book, Mark has defined different stages of scale, established a quantifiable measure for each of these stages, structures the sequence and signals of when to move from one stage to the next, and explores the optimal go-to-market design of each one.
5. TRIALS: Are a proven funnel method for a solid go-to-market strategy. Check this article on 9 ways to optimize your SaaS trial and then take note from Tomasz Tunguz on how long should your customer trial period be?: TL;DR: Longer trials do not convert customers at greater rates. Two weeks, two months, same results.
6. FINTECH: CBInsights released their fourth annual Fintech 250 earlier this month across payments, insurance, crypto, digital banking, etc. Excel sheet of members here for download, the pretty infographic version here. About 65% are based in the US, with the UK being home to the 2nd most.
7. PRICING: It's been a while - so time for another pricing bit (because a 1% increase in price can generate up to an 11% increase in your profits). This one is interesting as the author explains how his startups approached pricing at the early stage (for their SaaS product)
8. CYBER: According to this 2021 State of Ransomware Survey & Report, 64% of those surveyed had been victims of a ransomware attack in the last year, 83% of those paid the ransom and 50% experienced a loss of revenue. Ransomware is everywhere and has got the CEO of Google to ask governments to do more at a Geneva Convention for Cybersecurity.
9. $100M ARR: I know - weird title. But this article from Bessemer Ventures is cool (and honestly also a little depressing). It's a benchmarking report, complete with a downloadable PowerPoint for what it takes to reach $100m ARR - asking the big questions: What should your gross margin be? How much should you be spending on R&D as a percent of revenue? How does your companies growth rate compare to peers?
10. CASE STUDY: This one is for all of you interested in Product Led Growth - How Ahrefs (an SEO product) scaled to $100M ARR with a team of 69 and 0 salespeople. (hint - it required a team of 10 marketeers)

POD OF THE WEEK: An interview from Profitwell with Mark Roberge - creator of the playbook listed in #4 above - The Science of Scaling.