The five most popular posts of 2018 were:

The Strategic Shift in Revenue for SaaS Startups as They Scale - or popular by any other post by a factor of 10, this post discusses the importance of focusing on renewals as a business reaches $10M, $20M and beyond in ARR. The dynamics of retention meaningfully change the way the business ought to be managed.

Ten Year’s Worth of Learnings About Pricing - This post is a summary of a presentation I gave to the executive team at Twilio. The presentation and the post summarize everything I know about pricing, which remains today one of the most befuddling questions for founders, and one of the most frequent questions I’m asked.

Dropbox S-1 - There were many questions surrounding the Dropbox IPO. The most memorable one was how does the business compare to Box. of course, we know now that they serve different markets. Box It is almost entirely enterprise while Dropbox serves predominantly the consumer market. Dropbox’s efficient customer acquisition is exceptional.

Red Hat’s Acquisition - A Triumph of Open Source - We saw many massive acquisitions this year. The RedHat acquisition demarcates a new high water mark for open source. Acquisition is particularly important this year, a year in which many investors have questioned the viability of open-source businesses in the next few years. Competition from Amazon and other cloud providers who host successful open source products has become an increasingly stiff headwind.

The Clearest Articulation of a Marketing Roadmap - After I interviewed a VP Marketing candidate, I summarized her perspective on marketing with this post. I still think it captures the key responsibility a marketer possesses: guiding a market and the buyer through a journey. In retrospect, I think there’s one key component missing which is a discussion around product marketing, and I hope to remedy that with a post soon.

They span quite a few different topics including marketing, M&A, and financial planning. If you have ideas for posts in 2019, please send them to me via the email link on the blog or by replying directly to this email if you receive it by email.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash