June 2020 investor update
The journey begins
Having recurring, transparent communication with our investors (current and prospective) is a must; it is good hygiene.
We maintain a consistent cadence of communication by emailing an investor update once a month. This level of accountability is by choice, and we steer clear of higher frequency to avoid a lack of "exciting updates."
We like to keep it simple, so our monthly email is structured into four sections:
Meaningful metrics about our financials (KPIs)
How our investors can help (what we need from them)
What we said we would do (in our last newsletter), and what we actually did
What we will do over the next month (before our next newsletter comes along)
Today, this email has two versions: the original for existing investors, and a sanitized version (with sensitive information removed) for prospective investors. The sanitized version is what you read here, via Substack.
Does it need to be sanitized? Could we share it all? Inevitably, my cofounders and I discussed what level of transparency we wanted to have -- both with prospective investors, and a wider audience via Substack. We've been burned before by sharing sensitive information too broadly, but at the same time, we believe this information can be valuable (to other entrepreneurs, for instance, looking for inspiration or benchmarking).
Long story short: we will test and iterate. For now, we will gate the sensitive information with a paid membership. Not because we intend to create a new revenue stream, but because we believe this sensitive information is only truly valuable to a subset of you (the core story doesn't depend on it.) If you choose to subscribe via a paid membership, we expect you to respect our wishes to not distribute the sensitive data.
So, without further ado, here is our first investor newsletter. Because it is our first, you'll notice it departs from the above structure a bit to cover the work achieved to-date.
Dear all,
Thank you for trusting us in joining our journey in Remotely. We look forward to staying in touch and working together in making our vision a reality.
As you know, over the last few months, we have been working on getting Remotely off the ground. You should expect monthly communications from us on how things are going, what we're working on, and what we may need help with.
KPIs - Access our KPIs evolution here
Cash Balance: $1.38M
Last 30-days cash consumption: $81k*
Adjusted burn-rate: $30k**
Months of run-rate: 23
MRR: 0
* Includes $30k one-off legal expense (for the round). Also, the founding team is not getting a salary. $42k was spent in the Gitsight Engineering team salaries (we run the $21k payroll twice).
**Includes $21k in Eng Team salaries + $9k in ongoing/prepaid expenses.
How can you help?
Introduce us to software companies hiring tech talent that either just raised a seed round, or are scaling up
Introduce us to VC’s or accelerators that have access to top-quality NYC or SF startups mentioned above
Note: you'll find a blurb you can use here
What we've done in the last 4 months
Incorporated Remotely; raised a small seed round
Admin Setup:
Setup our financial infrastructure (mercury, transferwise, brex, quickbooks, carta) and retained a bookkeeper
Retained counsel in the US, Spain and Argentina in order to create the legal infrastructure to operate; received their initial assessment and options for operating in those countries
Established Remotely's initial tech stack and operating infrastructure:
Internal: notion (wiki), miro (whiteboarding), grain (customer discovery), gsuite (email/docs), loom (high bandwidth, asynchronous comms)
Client-facing: amplemarket (sales intel/outreach), typeform (surveys), webflow (website), pandadoc (legal signatures), pipplet (supply english standardized testing)
Shared: zapier/integromat/parabola (automation), slack (chat), airtable (CRM, supply db), zoom (meetings)
Got Google Cloud Platform ($100k) and AWS ($25k/yr x2) credits
Performed 50+ Customer Discovery calls; distilled insights and narrowed down Value Prop and initial ICP (ideal customer profile)
Drafted our first referral program for supply of developers
Launched a landing page for Remotely
Created our first sales materials. Access our archive of sales materials here (for paid subscribers only)
Created a Blurb page that you can use to refer us to customers
Supply: Have identified 12 Tech Leads + Teams, and profiled them
Demand:
Have qualified a couple of dozen leads and are actively working on 10+ sales opportunities
Reconnecting with our network of VC’s, Accelerators, and connectors in NYC and SF
Kicked off our product strategy
Mapped our end-to-end customer journey (both supply and demand)
Set-up a vision, and 3-month challenge
Started working on our first product roadmap
Kicked off the development of Gitsight (a data platform for Open Source)
Hired a TL+2 developers, out of Spain (we're eating our own dogfood)
Downloaded the catalog of all available open-source repositories (~130M)
Built the analyzer of repositories, and ran it on 70M repositories, and analyzed over 1.3Bn commits
What we'll be doing during the next month
Push to close our first deal
Create 15 more qualified leads
Finalize Carta setup - you will receive an invite soon
Finalize v1 of our legal infrastructure
Iterate on our end-to-end customer journey for developers and companies
Recruit and vet 40 Tech Leads/Teams
Automate the following processes:
Intake form for prospecting customers on the website, linked to airtable
Intake form for developer candidates on the website, linked to airtable
Automate NDA signature process with developers and customers
Launch landing page for Gitsight
Finalize the analysis of 130M open source repositories (all of them)
Build and run the People Aggregator
Alpha launched our slack integration client
We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,