March 2021 investor update
Dear all,
March was a good, productive month. Our own Sebastian had a daughter (🥳), and he took his paternity leave while the team took over his responsibilities. We're glad to report we managed to close 3 more customers, hire 6 additional people and grow our MRR 33%. While we are not profitable yet (we realistically think we can get there 6 months from now) - we are starting to see signs of repeatability in our operations that hopefully lead into consistent and predictable growth.
KPIs
Net Cash Balance: $1.122M in cash and short-term AR (previously $1.138M)
Last 30-days cash consumption: $16k
Months of run-rate: 70 months
GMV managed: ~$1.9M
MRR: $41,500 (up from $31,000)
Customers: 10 (prev 8)
Talent placed: 41 (7 of which we don't manage their payroll)
Open positions currently hiring for: 18 (for current customers)
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
✅Launch our Sprint 6 and 7. Create additional dashboards for the pipeline, migrate the infrastructure of gitsight, and create a first front-end to our employee management platform.
✅ Ramp up our inbound generation efforts for developers, and experiment with our supply driven demand.
✅✅❌ Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer. Get 3 customers to hire their first developers.
Demand: We closed on three new customers, and grew our business with three existing customers (two of which hired their first developers), and lost one existing customer. As a result, our MRR grew to $41.5k and we have 5 customers pending any placements (we don't count their open searches as MRR until we close them).
The customer we lost, we had presented a long list of candidates who were asked to complete a challenging initial application. While the candidates made it to last parts of the process none was hired. We decided to pause the relationship as we did want the effort to go to waste for both of us.
Losing 4 customers in the span of a couple of months this early hurts because we put a lot of effort into the relationship and to source candidates. However, the experience helps us learn to better fit, and we expect to get better at picking the customers that are right for us and our developers. Despite these setbacks, we've managed to get back to growth on MRR.
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 placed 6 new people, above our 5 people goal we had for the month, and while we didn't get to our goal of 3 customers to make their first new hire, we did get 2 customers to make their first hires. Overall, we're quite happy with the effort.
Our gitsight powered audiences continue to work, and we've started to ramp up the email campaigns. We hope to be able to supply talent at a steady pace to our customers!
We continue to try to streamline our processes to be more agile and efficient. And we continue to find ways to enrich our database of developers that have engaged in our process.
In March we added 600 developers to our ATS, and reached another 840 candidates via Gitsight.
Product: we've migrated our infrastructure for gitsight, reducing it's monthly cost by 90%. And we're working on two work streams that will (hopefully) see the light in the upcoming months:
We've designed a chrome extension that shows the gitsight profile of a given developer.
We've created the first version of the Employee Management System. For now, we use it internally. In a second phase, we will give access to employees. And in the last phase we will give access to our customers.
We've started to experiment with RPA to automate certain tasks of our supply funnel.
Our automations have been refactored, and we've created a few more automations to make our productivity more efficient.
What we'll be doing during the next month
🗺 Hopefully we will be able to share some screenshots of what we've been building.
🧪 Better understand the funnel on the supply: build first end-to-end dashboards for the supply.
🔝 Close 1 more customer. Hire more on two existing teams. Get 3 customers to hire their first developers.
How can you help?
Want to join our alpha Ambassador Program? We provide 10% of the first year ARR that is generated by the startup you introduce us to. If you're interested, let us know and we will walk you through the steps. We are prioritizing people that know us well 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,