Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 25, 2023

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

32 SaaS KPIs Every Company Should Track, awesomely split across five different divisions: Marketing, Sales KPIs, Finance KPIs, Revenue, and Customer Success KPIs.

CONTENT

The idea that I should view content as a product was a valuable marketing insight. As was being told that the strategy of "producing ten blog posts" was wrong. Read this Two-part blog (part 1 and part 2) to change your mindset on what good content should be.

DUE DILIGENCE

For investors, what the heck does due diligence look like for pre-seed or pre-rev companies with no real traction or trends to share? It's hard to do - but this article captures many vital areas,especially founder equity, non-founders on the cap table, and founder vesting.

PERSONALIZATION

Twilio released their 2023 The State of Personalization report. AI is here - more than 9 in 10 businesses are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth, and over half (56%) of consumers surveyed say they will become repeat buyers due to personalized experiences (a 7% increase YoY).

VIDEO CONTENT

Nailing introductory and Demo videos is a total art form. Need help to figure out where to start or have video-block? Get inspiration from this curated collection of some of the best, and here is a list of 6 videos every SaaS Company needs. (TL;DR Explainers, Company, Testimonials, landing, page, FAQ, and Personalized Sales).

SHIP IT

Learn how to ship it real good in the tech world with these six offbeat strategies, from ditching staging to nurturing clear engineering ownership, ensuring success in the fast-paced startup universe.

ENTERPRISE

Check out the State of the Enterprise report by Insight Venture Partners - good reading if this is the sector you are selling into: Security is still a top priority, data & AI budgets have expanded the most, APIs are becoming mainstays of the modern infra stack within enterprises.

VENTURE

Tomasz Tunguz has done some hard-core statistical analysis examining Startup investing trends. It's a technical read but given current trends, round counts should revert to the mean sometime in H2 2023, which he calls ~ 1000 Seed, 240 Series A, & 65 Series B investments per quarter.

SAAS EFFICIENCY

It's surging. Many (public) SaaS companies are showing increased efficiency while maintaining growth: Toast's +6% EBITA, Monday.com +26% cash flow, MongoDB's +5% margins, Snowflake's 46% predicted cash flow, and HubSpot's 30% growth with double-digit margins. Hopefully, efficient growth trends like this will continue.

CASE STUDY

Complimenting #7 above, moving into the Enterprise is no mean feat. Here are the top 5 Lessons from Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable, on their Upmarket mission. Bonus content: how Airtable leverage SEO. And here are ten tips to start selling to big companies as a little guy.