January 2021 investor update
Dear all,
We completed our first year at Remotely! You can read about our yearly review in our substack newsletter. In the last month of the fiscal year things went well. We completed our 2nd challenge, we increased our existing revenue, brought in more customers and placed more talent. We have learned a ton, and have a new challenge for the next quarter and a clear goal for our second year.
At a high level, we started the year with an idea, now we are slowly scaling operations, managing $1.3M of GMV, making $400k in ARR. In the next 12 months we will look to reach $2M in ARR ($7-8M GMV) and find scalable loops for both supply and demand.
KPIs
Net Cash Balance: $1.138M +$18k in short-term AR (previously $1.175M including short-term AR)
Last 30-days cash consumption: $19k
Months of run-rate: 60 months
GMV managed: ~$1.3M (aggr salaries of talent, annualized)
MRR: $34,000 (up from $24,000)
Non-recurring revenue: $15,000 in one-off fees.
Customers: 8
Talent placed: 34 (7 of which we don't manage their payroll)
Open positions currently hiring for: 33 (for current customers)
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
✅ Pushing v1 of our legal infrastructure.
✅ Finalize the integration of sprints from GitSight and remotely.
✅ Complete our last sprint of Challenge 2.
✅✅❌ Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer. Get all customers that have signed an MSA to hire at least 1 person.
✅ Improve our paid marketing outreach.
Demand/Startups: We closed on two new customers, and grew our business with two existing customers. As a result, our MRR grew to $34k and we have 4 customers pending any placements (with an additional $7k in MRR in open reqs) and we're working into generating fees on a recurrent basis.
A month ago we decided to make a change on our MSA-OrderForm (we continue to iterate on it). We have 4 customers with open reqs (we charge $1k/month per OR, but only invoice for it if we place a person). This reduces the risk to try our service to 0. We also have 4 additional customers in the calibration stage (we show them a couple of profiles to assess the fit).
Collectively, all these companies are looking for 29 job openings with us.
We've built an interface to run our referral program to attract new customers. So far we've onboarded 5 referrers from our network (all friends & family) that have generated 7 opportunities and we have 8 new referrers waiting to be onboarded.
Talent Supply: The current focus is to both fill the open reqs of existing customers while at the same time find scalable ways to attract talent.
We've placed 13 people last month. If we can keep a placement rate of 10 people per month, we will reach our MRR goals by end of year.
We brought in new team members to help scale the supply operations. Loli and Lucia Claria (in our opinion the best recruiters in Argentina), who are joined with Maria Carcar and Horacio Oliva - Olapic veterans. These hires are instrumental at making sure we fill our current open reqs while we work on talent scalability experiments.
Talent Scalability experiment 1: We've launched a developer referral program, and embedded it into our communications with them and integrated the program in our Remotely Network. We've already received 16 referrals from existing developers.
Talent Scalability experiment 2: Gitsight has now processed all open source repositories on Gitlab (150M more commits, 1M more developers). We've released v16 of our database, and we've identified a list of 190k developers in Latam (18k in Argentina) that we think could fit profiles we're looking for. Next steps for our database are:
Engage the developers and to get consent or interest in staying in touch.
Gather additional professional information to be able to complete their profile.
In order to scale the supply we will need to solve two challenges:
Find scalable ways to qualify and screen applicants.
Automate a way to gather developer availability/appetite to explore new opportunities.
We've continued to scale and automate the infrastructure of our operations. We've methodically documented every step we do, and with each payroll cycle we get better and more efficient at running the show. Our bet for no-code solutions is paying off handsomely.
We’ve sent an offer letter our first Engineer found via GitSight and we are presenting the second one to another startup.
What we'll be doing during the next month
🗺 Launch our challenge 3, and Sprint 5.
🧪 Experiment with qualification and profile augmentation for gitsight developers.
🔝 Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer. Get 3 customers to hire their first developers.
📢 Increase the number of qualified applicants coming from Gitsight and Referral Program.
How can you help?
Want to join our alpha Ambassador 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, US based founders, CEO’s and CTO’s
We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,