May 2021 investor update
Dear all,
May was a good month despite we haven't seen yet the cadence of hiring we'd hope. We added more customers (we want to increase the probability of a strong candidate to get hired), and continued to streamline our processes to make the effort more efficient. As a result, our activity levels went up (even thought these have not materialized -yet- in an increase in the rate of new hires).
KPIs
Net Cash Balance: $1.046M in cash and short-term AR (previously $1.096M)
Last 30-days cash consumption: $50k
Months of run-rate: 21 months
GMV managed: ~$2.5M (prev $2.2M)
MRR: $59,450 (up from $51,300)
Customers: 11 (prev 9)
Talent placed: 44 (prev 40)
Open positions currently hiring for: 25
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
✅❌We will have 100% of our contractors live in our platform. We will have our new landing pages live. We will release our chrome extension for any tech recruiter to use.
✅ We will continue to experiment and improve our chances of placing a candidate.
✅✅❌ Close 1 more customer. Hire more on two existing teams. Get 2 customers to hire their first developers.
Demand: We placed 4 new contractors (3 in existing staffed customers, 1 in a new customer). As a result, our MRR grew to aprox $59k and we have 3 customers pending any placements (we don't count their open searches as MRR until we close them).
We had our fastest sales prospect sign to first hire timing to date: 7 days.
We are working on increasing demand that is aligned with the roles we're already recruiting for, to maximize the chances of our candidates to land on a great job with us.
We are still not at the placement rate we want to be, but we believe that to be due to the relatively low volume of supply and demand makes the occurrence of a placement to be too sporadic and unpredictable. The focus over the next few months will be to increase both demand and supply through a simplification of our offering and automating our tasks.
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 and screen talent.
All the team is focused on smoothing and increasing the supply, and make/keep our customers happy. We are resisting the temptation to just hire more people as we believe many of our tasks can be automated.
We believe there is a big cultural gap between how developers are interviewed in LATAM vs how they are interviewed in the US. As a result, many developers fail not because of lack of skills, but because they haven't "learned the dance".
After months of working through a combination of no-code tools and manual processes, we believe we have enough experience to start to automate certain processes.
We've tracked in April and been able to report on the changes of stages of our recruiting process. This is providing great visibility and allows us to better manage the different bottlenecks of the talent pipeline.
Product: we've started using our gitsight chrome extension to beta test our newly designed workflow, and it's working beautifully!
After months of working through a combination of no-code tools and manual processes, we believe we have enough experience to start to automate certain processes.
We have been working on our new landing pages for Remotely Works and Gitsight - we hope to release them in the upcoming weeks.
Our entire contractor base is using our CRM tool for submitting invoices.
We believe to have a very rich database in our ATS. Next step will be to automate the enrichment and data quality assurance as well as build some automations to allow us to scale the top of the talent funnel.
We started working on compliance opportunities that will clarify our offering and solidify our value prop on an ongoing basis.
What we'll be doing during the next month
🗺 We will be live with our new site, and have a first version of our marketplace platform.
🧪 We will have support programs to train candidates that are not ready to jump into a recruiting process (interview preparation curriculum).
🔝 Close 1 more customer. Hire more on two existing teams. Get 2 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, CEOs and CTOs.
We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,