November 2020 investor update

Dear all,

October was a great month, and November did not disappoint either. We managed to get a lot done and we're starting to see the goals we set for the end of January become a reality. We are getting better at understanding the balance between demand and supply, so we are being careful at attracting the right type of potential customer. At the same time, we've made good progress in scaling our ability to source candidates and automate that process. Finally, we're starting to see existing customers double down on us and grow their relationship with us.

KPIs - Check our KPI evolution here.

• Net Cash Balance: $1.163M (net of security deposits) + $62k (in short term AR)

• Last 30-days cash consumption: $20k

• Months of run-rate: 58 months

• GMV managed: ~$700k (cumulative salaries of talent, annualized)

• MRR: $24,082 ($82 in substack subscriptions)

• Customers: 6 

• Talent placed: 16

• Open positions currently hiring for: 32 (for current and prospect 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. 

What we've done in the last month

• In our last newsletter we said we would:

  • ✅Pushing v1 of our legal infrastructure.

  • ✅ Executing on our first 2 sprints of our product roadmap.

  • ❌ We will launch a new developer inbound experience.

  • ✅ Increase our marketing efforts: We will run our first ad campaign.

  • 🤔 Close 2 more customers.

  • ✅ Gitsight: we will run our second/larger email campaign. We will invite 5 more companies to test our slack bot. We will enrich our database with new data sources.

• On the demand side, we did not close two new customers. Instead, we closed 1 new customer, and we turned our non-recurrent customer into somewhat recurrent (retainer + success fee). Also, two of our existing customers are looking to grow their talent pool 80%, which will increase our fee. We currently have a healthy pipeline, our campaign to reach out to our own network has worked well, and we're designing a referral program that will enable us to replicate the exercise we did with other people's connections that believe in the value that Remotely.works can bring to startups.

  • We revamped our pricing to adapt to a long term value/price misalignment we fear could be bad for us in the long run. As second time founders, we prefer to invest in churn mitigation early at the expense of short-term revenue growth. In turn, this new pricing charges for open req (when we start recruiting, not when we perform the hire) and includes the guarantee that if we don't deliver, we do not charge any fee, making it risk free for the startups.

  • We are entertaining the discussion to slow our intake of new customers to ensure we have a great experience with our existing customers. We have an MRR goal of $40k by end of January (with 10 recurring customers). It "feels" we could potentially hit that goal with 7-8 customers due to account growth. 

  • We have 32 sales leads/opps (most of them at an early stage of maturity). We believe we can win 3-4 of them in the next 60 days.

  • Ramen-profitability for Remotely sits around $70k in MRR, so we are aiming to get there by end of Q1-2021. 

• We've made some progress in the legal infrastructure, but Covid is not helping with the bureaucratic steps required. But we continue to push it forward.

• We are experimenting on how to automate marketing both for demand and supply. We have spent about $1,000 so far.

  • We activated Linkedin, Google and Instagram for customer and developer campaigns. 

    • On the customer side, we got 587 impressions and a 9.6% completion rate of our questionnaire. We know at least one lead came from our paid marketing efforts. It is not in the pipeline. 

    • On the developer side, we got 1,158 impressions and 21% completion rate of our questionnaire. We know at least 5 developers came from our paid marketing efforts.

    • As next steps, we are simplifying our questionnaire and improving our targeting capabilities. We are confident Linkedin will become a powerful source of leads and IG for developers. This will allow us to amplify our gitsight and talentup.io outreach. 

• We increased slightly the intensity of our Gitsight campaign and further improved our Gitsight universe of developers.

  • We sent 307 emails in total

  • We have 63% open rate and 18% response rate on Average. This is well above our expectations and we think due to the appealing nature of our offering to developers.

  • Early tests seems to show that we have a 5% “presentability” rate from people found through Gitsight. We define "presentability" as positively going through our vetting process resulting in a potential candidate for a customer.

  • Improved the filtering of non-relevant repositories such as demos, practices, etc. 

  • Added support for new frameworks, like Node.js.

  • Scrapping of the GitHub user profiles to complete the profiles with countries

• On the product side, we decided to delay the buildout of our own product a bit more. We've integrated RecruiterFlow (an ATS specialized in recruiting agencies) to manage all our sourcing of candidates. And we've started designing a process for product management evaluations that will help us with the prioritization of custom developments. As a result, the development of a custom Developer onboarding flow has been put on pause for now.

What we'll be doing during the next month

🛠 Pushing v1 of our legal infrastructure.

🗺 Integrate sprints from Gitsight and Remotely.

🧪 Kick off our first software development (beyond Gitsight) focusing on connecting gitsight campaigns to RecruiterFlow and delivering progress reports on existing customers.

🔝 Close 1 more customer. Upsell on an existing customer.

🧿 Gitsight: we will keep working on the GitHub profile crawling.

📢 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,