SCALE-UP
Scaling any business is hard and especially scaling out the market-facing teams, in particular sales. Being ready is key. Here is a great list of questions to ask from Forbes about a companies readiness to scale teams.
Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 16, 2019
STOCK OPTIONS
In today's competitive employment market, incentivizing people to stay put is no joke. Using stock options, especially in the US-based tech world, is a tried and true strategy. This post from The Startup is a comprehensive guide on how to deliver employee based stock option grants.
VIDEO
Connie Chan from a16z makes the case that eCommerce apps will have to also become video apps as commerce trends evolve.
THE ROSE METRIC
People are the most important (and expensive) metric for any company, especially SaaS (yes, I would argue more important than the software product). Revenue per FTE is one metric to measure when it comes to people efficiency, but a better one perhaps is the ROSE Metric, (Return on SaaS Employees). This metric highlights the tradeoffs between headcount, recurring revenue, and EBITDA growth of a SaaS company.
LOYALTY
We are deep into the Age of the Customer and paid subscription-based premium loyalty solutions (it’s hard to figure out where to put the hyphens in that statement) are an emerging retention and value strategy for many brands - for example, Amazon Prime, Lululemon, and Nike Adventure Club. Clarus recently released a study on this growing segment, with great insights on what consumers expect from a paid program, how frequently they want rewards, and how it influences shopping behavior.
DEV TEAMS
An article from Marianne Bellotti that I wish I had read 15 years ago describing all the best engineering and management advice she stole from non-technical people. I’ll tease this with the reliability and security-based 100:10:1 rule; Brainstorm 100 things that could go wrong, pick 10 that feel like the most likely, investigate them, and focus on 1 critical problem.
SOCIAL COMMERCE
Great report from Business Insider on the Social Commerce sector - forecasting an $84.2 billion social commerce opportunity by 2024, assuming we can address the security and true issues.
STARTUP START-UPS
Brex launched out of seemingly nowhere a couple of years ago in San Francisco, proving that servicing startups is a lucrative business and famously ditching digital advertising in favor of physical billboards on buildings and public transportation stops. BONUS: If you are a Kiwi startup looking to use Brex as your internal Credit Card provider I have negotiated a NZ specific landing page with them (with zero fee card issuance).
SPEED MATTERS
I write this newsletter during my weekly public-transport commute times using Evernote - I prioritize speed and quality content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (My bad!) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, theyobviously also made speed a priority for their tech stack and speed is UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is another great speed-focused tech company, who (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy experience solution.
ZERO TO TEN
There are a bunch of founder stories out there telling quite scripted PR stories of their growth. But I found this post from the founder of HotJar very insightful (and full of great data on their industry unit economics) .