Hi Unsearch Members,
Happy Friday! Ever wonder why some companies with different country / business lines use different URL conventions? (e.g., jp.indeed.com vs. amazon.in). Or perhaps why some companies issue restricted stock and others give stock options? Are you looking for some good early stage benchmarks for enterprise SaaS companies? Read more to find out! Also, we cover some project updates since our website went live!
Featured Q&As
Why do some companies give restricted stock while others give stock options? Is restricted stock the same as RSUs?
Jesus Rincon, a qualified CPA with experience helping businesses and individuals think through equity-related matters says,
Tax optimization at various stages of the company is a big reason why some companies choose to give employee equity in one form or another
Of the three, restricted stock is the only one where the actual stock is granted upfront. This presents a potential tax liability but is usually negligible when the company is still small and the holders prepay their taxes by filing an 83(b).
As the company builds value, they usually transition to options to give holders the option but not obligation to buy the stock (e.g., they can do it only when they can sell it for more)
Restricted stock is not the same as RSUs. Traditionally, RSUs only convert to stock at the point of vesting, which is also when they impose a tax burden on the employee (excluding double-trigger RSUs)
Why do companies with different country / business lines use different URL conventions?
There are broadly 3 types of URL structures
Subdomains (us.example.com, in.example.com)
Subdirectories (example.com/us, example.com/in)
Country Code TLD or ccTLD (example.de, example.in)
As you might imagine, there are pros and cons of using each format. Companies that pick one or another are implicitly making trade-offs between SEO signal strength and domain authority, ease of maintenance and user experience.
Country-code TLDs have the clearest signal to search engines, but they are also the most expensive and labor intensive to maintain. They also are treated as separate sites with its own domain authority.
Subdirectories aggregate and share domain authority across all country/business-level sites but the signal is often less clear (e.g., example.com/de could either be targeting german speakers worldwide or residents in Germany)
What are the some benchmarks and considerations that VCs look for in early stage Enterprise SaaS companies?
Anni Cai, an investor with Sequoia shares her thoughts,
Important to keep in mind that at seed stage, metrics alone rarely drive investment decisions. Often a combination of market, product and founder/team background.
On benchmarks, which are more germane to investment decisions at Series A and beyond: ARR, payback and net retention are three key ones
For instance, on payback, 6-12 months for SMB as churn is typically higher; 1-2 years for enterprise given stickiness and larger contract sizes
Project Update
A few interesting things to share with you, our earliest members.
1) 🛎️ Unsearch Profiles on Google
Since we went live with the web-version 2 weeks back, we’ve noticed a few people who have come to Unsearch through our members’ profile pages on Google.
We were intrigued and realized that for some people with less common names, their Unsearch profile pages (and their awesome answers!) were coming up on the first page of Google when people search for them. Interestingly, for a few people, it even ranked above their twitter handles. Weird!
2) 🧑🏻🤝🧑🏾 Unsearch for Professional Communities
We realized that a lot of great Q&As are happening in professional Slack communities all over. We are running a pilot with one such community to help them do better knowledge management, leveraging our tech and knowledge tagging frameworks. If you know of any other communities that could use something like that, please holler!
Worth a read
The one growth metric that moves acquisition, monetization and virality by Brian Balfour talks about retention as the silent killer and why it’s getting harder
The Content Marketing Assembly Line Based On a Survey of 2,203 Companies by Hiten Shah