The weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators · Every Friday
ACV, or Annual Contract Value, is one of the most popular metrics in the SaaS world. Thisarticle from Chartmogul goes into detail about what it is, how to calculate it, and how to leverage it in your business. Here are some excellent recent data on ACV within scaled SaaS companies. TLDR, the median ACV is $49K.
Quick Question "Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors"? Quick Answer: Probably. Read further on the WJTBD (Web Jobs to be Done) or TL;DR - remove the noise and focus on the jobs you need the website to do.
FromLaw of VC is the Ultimate Guide to Fund Terms that can tell you all of the critical terms that govern venture capital funds so you can nod knowingly when pitching to all of those VCs.
According to Gartner's 2023 Global Software Buying Trends report, user reviews, and ratings influence the purchase decisions most - 41%. And of those reviews - customer reviews are trusted by 49% and peer recommendations by 50%. On the other hand, recommendations from industry influencers are used by only 37%, 32% have outgrown their current technology, and 30% have concerns about security and cyber attacks - good information to know when targeting new SMB B2B Customers!
Software is generally a boom during Economic downturns - the downside of which is more competitiveness. So take note that in the same report above, almost 70% of small to medium-sized businesses plan to increase their spend on software this year, many to increase productivity (47%), and security is a Top Priority for Software Buyers at 42% (more so than ease of use - 38%).
It's never right as it has to evolve (and we need to charge more). Intercom makes the case that a solid pricing strategy helps shape an entire business model.
Crack open them Tech Dictionaries again: PayFac (or Payments Facilitator) is something I have implemented to create an additional (recurring) revenue line to the business, but it was only this week that I discovered a pre-existing portmanteau for that. Stripe has a good guide on bringing PayFac in-house, and here is a downloadable PDF on the same topic. Very low touch once it's up and running!
This is a bit of a ying and yang 2-part post: Tom Loverro of IVP makes the case via a Twitter Thread (and also mentioned in last week's All In Podcast) that there'sa mass extinction event coming for early & mid-stage startups this year and next (due to short cash runways and the acute inability to raise cash in this market).
To contradict (a little) the post above, Nnamdi Iregbulem, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, makes an in-depth argument that we don't have nearly enough startups (well, at least the good ones)
Successful onboarding is challenging in person - it's 10x harder in today's remote work environments. This is how Zapier does it (and leverages their own product to use automation to do it), and here are some lessons learned from Slack.
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