# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 7, 2024

Published: 6 June 2024
Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/week-ending-june-7-2024

## 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

[Net Dollar Retention](https://paykickstart.com/net-dollar-retention) is an important metric in product-led growth and consumption-based operations. It helps answer the following: *Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend*? Crunchbase has already done the work to calculate what [good NDR benchmarks should look like](https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention), and Tomasz Tunguz [looks at what it takes to achieve 200% NDR!](https://tomtunguz.com/two-hundred-percent-ndr/)

Link: https://paykickstart.com/net-dollar-retention

## 2. M&A

Navigating some kind of acquisition process is a relatively unexplored topic in this newsletter, so check this [guide to running an M&A process as a Founder from First Round Review.](https://review.firstround.com/how-to-sell-your-startup-the-complete-guide-to-running-an-manda-process-as-a-founder)

Link: https://review.firstround.com/how-to-sell-your-startup-the-complete-guide-to-running-an-manda-process-as-a-founder

## 3. FUNDRAISING

Carta has a [great LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjameswalker_founders-use-our-current-benchmark-data-activity-7193641089285656578-w95T/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop) that provides a snapshot of the key fundraising metrics from the last quarter. Benchmark yourself! Pre-money valuations for rounds held steady for Seed and Series A, with slight median growth for Series B and C and an upward trend in total amounts raised across most stages.

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterjameswalker_founders-use-our-current-benchmark-data-activity-7193641089285656578-w95T/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

## 4. MARKETING

Enterprise Marketing is difficult, and the fun part is that it's getting increasingly harder, yay. [42agency has a great article with 10 different Enterprise Marketing playbooks](https://open.substack.com/pub/42/p/enterprise-playbooks) for you to review. They also introduced me to a new app, [Clay](https://www.clay.com/), which looks to be a super useful tool (but a little pricey).

Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/42/p/enterprise-playbooks

## 5. AI

Adoption is ramping in many areas; [4 in 10 e-commerce marketers use AI](https://www.emarketer.com/content/ecommerce-marketers-use-ai-customer-service)for customer service and support, and [Andrew Chen notes many more use cases](https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/ai-and-marketing-what-happens-next). McKinsey also notes that businesses that adopt AI are [seeing benefits like cost reduction and revenue growth](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai).

Link: https://www.emarketer.com/content/ecommerce-marketers-use-ai-customer-service

## 6. SUPERCYCLES

This is a genuinely great read IMO and one that dives deep and also makes the claim that [the first golden age of SaaS is decidedly over](https://medium.com/@MohapatraHemant/capex-opex-supercycles-the-dusk-of-saas-and-the-dawn-of-ai-saas-8aa5cfe74c93), as it's the dawn of AI-SaaS (hard agree from me) and tying it all back to capex/opex cycles and now CPU/GPU cycles (and their commoditization). But there is a lot to absorb here; to me, it's a more-than-one-read-through article.

Link: https://medium.com/@MohapatraHemant/capex-opex-supercycles-the-dusk-of-saas-and-the-dawn-of-ai-saas-8aa5cfe74c93

## 7. FAILURE

It's a common tech-ism [that innovation needs a lot of failure before success, something businesses often do not culturally configure](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/fasttimes/have-you-made-it-safe-to-fail). CB Insights has analyzed almost [500 startup failure postmortems](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem/) - PMF, Cash, and Team Dynamics (see #9 in last week's newsletter!) play pretty consistent roles across the board.

Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/fasttimes/have-you-made-it-safe-to-fail

## 8. TESTING

According to [ZipDo Essential A/B Testing Statistics](https://wifitalents.com/statistic/a-b-testing/), 70% of marketers believe that A/B testing is essential to boost conversion rates. When running A/B tests, get started with [this refresher](https://hbr.org/2017/06/a-refresher-on-ab-testing) and then [this Step-by-Step Guide](https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/ab-testing-google-analytics/). Go Practice has [some great advice on how to make these experiments run faster](https://gopractice.io/blog/ab-tests-take-longer-than-should/), too.

Link: https://wifitalents.com/statistic/a-b-testing/

## 9. SENTIMENT

The Clouded Judgement Substack is always full of really interesting data. [This week is all about sentiment and the current sentiment in the software industry is not looking great](https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-53124-software). This is mainly due to disappointing Q1 earnings and lowered Q2 guidance (70% of companies are guiding a below-expected Q2). The biggest issue is that growth has slowed, making revenue multiples less relevant as a valuation metric. Investments in AI are causing additional traditional software apathy, and interest rates continue to add pressure to valuations.

Link: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-53124-software

## 10. CASE STUDY

Building AI features is a risky move, as, realistically, you can't know the quality of an AI response without building the system to see an actual AI response. So check [out this great case study](https://blog.dopt.com/mitigating-ai-product-risk) from [dopt.com](http://dopt.com), which makes the mind-bending observation that "you must build AI to learn what AI is valuable to build."

Link: https://blog.dopt.com/mitigating-ai-product-risk

## POD OF THE WEEK

Lenny of Lenny'sLenny's Newsletter [interviews Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrJNHlYUA8), who now have 150 MAU in more than 190 countries, and $2.3 billion ARR (and ready to IPO next year)

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrJNHlYUA8