August 2020 investor update

Dear all,

During August we made good progress with Remotely. As we embark on the final sprint of 2020 (crazy, right?) we're tracking well against our goal to be cashflow positive by the end-of-year. So if we continue to execute, we'll be well set up for growth in 2021.

KPIs - Access our KPIs evolution here

• Cash Balance: $1.27M

• Last 30-days cash consumption: $80k*

• Months of run-rate: 16

• MRR: $7,083 ($83 in substack subscriptions)

• One-off revenue: $14,400 (1 engineer placed with standard head hunting model)

• Customers: 3 (1 is non-recurring)

• Developers: 3 (1 is a one-off placement)

• Open positions currently hiring for: 16 (for current and prospect customers)

*$73k in one-off expenses were incurred (namely: legal fees from our round, legal fees from the legal infrastructure, purchase of laptops for developers). We also got paid our first client invoice.

How can you help?

• Introduce us to software companies hiring tech talent that either just raised a seed round, or are scaling up.

• Intro to VC’s or accelerators that have access to top-quality NYC or SF startups mentioned above.

• Blurb you can use here.

What we've done in the last month

• In our last newsletter we said we would:

  ❌ Finalize v1 of our legal infrastructure.

  🔜 Test video profile packages for candidates.

  🔜 Explore partnership with joppy.me.

  ✅ Close a second customer (in August! #aggressive).

  ✅ Add 1 developer to the existing customer.

  ✅ Gitsight: Improve the ranking of the developers using the page rank algorithm, improve the code base removing duplicated code.

• To add some color: while August was moderately slow (and some of us also took a vacation break), we managed to add a new developer to our existing customer, place a developer in a new (yet non-recurring customer), and sign a second recurring customer. The two new customers we have are special for different but important reasons:

  • The non-recurring customer already has a team in Argentina. We happen to be friends of the founder, and he needs help recruiting/expanding his team. By working with him on these one-off staffing assignments (for which we charge a one-off fee), we generate non-recurring revenue, but on the basis that we could potentially take over the management of the local Argentinian team. Our task is to design a value prop that suits companies that already have existing teams in Argentina/Spain.

  • The second recurring customer is looking to establish a remote team of designers and animators. While these are not traditional software engineers, we have a deep expertise in setting these teams up, and the value proposition plays around similar scarcity economics.

• Premium subscriptions to the newsletter have grown from 6 subscribers to 9. We currently clock $83 in MRR and we have a total of 369 subscribers. As a reminder, the goal of this subscription is to give back to the community by exposing our thinking while staying top of mind to allow for referrals to happen more naturally, so we are genuinely surprised about the amount of revenue we are able to generate. From now on we will track the % of our software stack it covers (currently spending about $2,000 per month in software licenses we use to power our no-code stack). As of end of August, we are at 4%.

• We started working with talentup.io and joppy.me to see if we can create value together. Talentup is serving as a data engine, enabling us to provide content to VCs who in turn refer us to interesting portfolio companies. Joppy is a fast-growing Spain-centric recruiting marketplace (tinder for developers) that aligns with our mission to be developer-centric.

• Our legal infrastructure is taking a bit more time than expected, but we've made excellent progress. During August, we iterated on our MSA and order forms, and uploaded them to pandadoc. We have registered Remotely Works Inc in Spain, and we have created Remotely Works Argentina (we now need to register Remotely Works Inc in Argentina as well). Following that, we will open bank accounts in both countries and be fully set-up.

• On Gitsight we fine-tuned our ranking methodology and worked on adding more relevant information to the database. We also started iterating on the slack bot to improve our experience using it to find profiles relevant to the talent searches we are performing.

• We are working quite a bit on operating and setting up our first developers. The structural work for the processes and documentation are being added for the first time. As we take the first steps in onboarding developers and getting them paid, we're documenting each of the steps required and continuing to streamline the processes.

What we'll be doing during the next month:

🛠 Finalize v1 of our legal infrastructure.

🎞 Test video profile packages for candidates.

🤝 Prove that VCs are a good referral source for quality startups.

📤 Test email reach outs to developers identified via gitsight.

🔝 Close 2 more customers.

🧿 Gitsight: Migrate our database to mongodb and implement our ecosystems recognition (which allows us to better identify candidates). Implement a few subtle high-value analyses on profiles that will allow us to better profile developers.

We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.

Many thanks,