December 2020 investor update
Dear all,
We did pretty well in December. We've had a great month placing talent, as well as closing new and incremental business. We exit the year with our homework done and ready to grow in 2021.
We're trying to shift our fiscal year by a month (ending in January 2021 - this is something we always wanted to do at Olapic) so we will circulate our yearly review then. Our current product challenge already ends then, and we'll run one more sprint before the end of the month.
KPIs - Check ourĀ KPI evolution here.
Net Cash Balance: $1.125M + $50k in short-term AR (previously $1.190M including short-term AR)
Last 30-days cash consumption: $15k
Months of run-rate: 78 months
GMV managed: ~$1.17M (aggr salaries of talent, annualized)
MRR: $24,000 (we cancelled our substack paid subscriptions)
Non-recurring revenue: $7,500 in one-off fees.
Customers: 7
Talent placed: 21
Open positions currently hiring for: 33 (for current customers)
How can you help?
Want to join our alpha referral program? If you're interested, let us know and we will walk you through the steps. We are prioritizing people that know us and are connected to VC backed founders CEOās and CTOās.
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
ā Pushing v1 of our legal infrastructure.
ā Integrate sprints from gitsight and remotely.
ā Kick off our first software development (beyond gitsight) focusing on connecting gitsight campaigns to RecruiterFlow and delivering progress reports on existing customers.
ā ā Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer.
ā Gitsight: we will keep working on the GitHub profile crawling.
ā Improve our paid marketing outreach.
On the demand side, we closed on two new customers, and grew our business with two existing customers. As a result, our MRR will grow from $24k to $32k (increase in MRR happens in January because of when the talent is starting and the start date of the contracts).
We've decided to be more picky with the demand. The reason is that existing customer demand for talent already keeps us busy and generates meaningful revenue growth. If we were to place all the open roles we currently have, we would more than double our MRR.
We are still continuing our experiments with our referral program as a way to grow and it is starting to work.
80% of our existing customers who have hired a developer have referred us to another potential customer. This is not the result of a "would you refer us" NPS survey question, it's an actual referral.
Our target to reach Ramen-profitability for Remotely sits around $70k in MRR, so we are aiming to get there by end of Q1-2021.
Unfortunately, we received a call on Dec 30th from one of our customers who is winding down operations (not just with us, but as a company), and will be "churning" $4k of MRR at the end of January 2021. These things happen in the startup world. We are confident that we will be able to relocate the talent to other customers.
On the supply, we've started to put more process to increase the scalability of our talent supply.
We've placed 8 people in the last month.
We've started to design talent qualification processes for Gitsight and Ad campaigns.
We've launched a developer referral program, and embedded it into our communications with them.
We've launched the Remotely Network, a space for all our developers to build a community.
We're done with the legal infrastructure in Spain, currently making slow but steady progress in Argentina.
We are experimenting on how to automate marketing both for demand and supply. We have spent cumulatively about $5k, but $2.6k just in December.
Instagram proved to be the lowest CPL when it comes to acquiring developers.
With $2664 we got 98 developers to fill out our questionnaire and are currently in the process of vetting them.
We are now focused on increasing our targeting efforts by starting lookalike and custom audiences in an effort to objectively find the best developers.
On the product side, we have built a custom integration between gitsight and recruiterflow to make launching new campaigns an easier step. We've also started working on a data layer on top of recruiterflow to be able to extract the relevant data we need for reporting purposes.
What we'll be doing during the next month
š Pushing v1 of our legal infrastructure.
šŗ Finalize the integration of sprints from gitsight and remotely.
š§Ŗ Complete our last sprint of Challenge 2.
š Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer. Get all customers that have signed an MSA to hire at least 1 person.
š¢ Improve our paid marketing outreach.
We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,