October 2020 investor update

Dear all,

October was a great month for us. We were able to generate new sales opportunities, place more people in our existing customers, close new customers and evolve our product strategy. We also run our first mini email campaign on gitsight with great results.

KPIs - Access our KPIs evolution here

• Net Cash Balance: $1.21M (net of security deposits)

• Last 30-days cash consumption: $10k

• Months of run-rate: 120 months

• MRR: $15,092 ($92 in substack subscriptions)

• Customers: 5 (1 non-recurrent)

• Talent placed: 14

• Open positions currently hiring for: 9 (for current and prospect customers)

How can you help?

• Introduce us to founders or CTO’s of VC backed startups that are hiring tech talent that either just raised a seed round, or are scaling up.

What we've done in the last month

• In our last newsletter we said we would:

  • 🔜 Finalize v1 of our legal infrastructure.

  • ✅ We will reprioritize our product roadmap for the next 4 months based on the insights we got this last quarter.

  • ✅ We will conduct 2 talent sourcing tests.

  • 🔜 We will map out our demand funnel and design 3 tests to scale demand.

  • ✅ Increase our marketing efforts: IG, Testimonials.

  • 🔜 Close 3 more customers.

  • ✅ Gitsight: we will run our first email campaign. We will release our API (probably not to the public, yet) and iterate on our slack bot. We will enrich our database with new data sources.

• On the demand we fell somewhat short in closing new customers against our goal of 3 new customers. Instead we closed 2 new customers, and are on redlines to convert our non-recurring customer into recurring (despite we already placed two developers this month, and have verbally agreed on oct 1st start date of the contract, we are not counting it yet as MRR). The beauty of having small starting MRR is that that still represents over 100% growth month-over-month. We know, we know... let us savor that while it lasts. All in all, we close October feeling very optimistic about ending the year strong, with great new sales opps and leads in the pipeline.

  • Our legal commercial process is taking longer than expected. We hope that the new iteration of the MSA will run into fewer issues and result in a shorter sales cycle.

  • We lost a customer that was on price negotiations and had identified good talent. We learned from the experience in hopes to better qualify the type of startup we are better suited for. We also lost an advanced conversation as budget priorities shifted.

  • We have done a big push on creating referrals via our network on Linkedin, as a result a few opportunities have emerged. We've also put a focus on creating several experiments for lead generation that we will be executing over the next couple of months that do not rely on our personal networks.

  • We also converted our non-recurring customer into a some-what recurring customer (retainer + success fee). It is not our ideal model, but we're testing it with companies that already have a presence in Argentina.

• Our legal infrastructure is moving along, but slowly. Last month we thought we would be fully operational in a couple of weeks (including bank account) in Spain. In short, we didn’t. After hitting the wall several times, we decided to issue power of attorneys to our legal counsel there and have them fight the bureaucracy. It is working. Similarly, we're still trying to nail down the requirements in Argentina.

• Our programmatic approach to demand a supply generation has gotten more definition. We run our first talent sourcing campaign within gitsight: leading to improvements on the database as well as 25% response rate on our cold-email campaigns. While the number of emails we sent was small, the result doubled our expected success threshold. We also teed up our advertising campaign for lead generation, we plan to run it in November. The goal of both programmatic approaches is to reduce the acquisition cost for demand and supply.

• The main change to gitsight was to integrate further our product development process so it is more in sync with Remotely.

• We have continued to establish relationships with potential team members in case we want to setup a bit more infrastructure. We've relied on consultant setups to test how we work together. We have no shortage of great talent that is knocking on our doors.

• Finally, we will start building some product that improves on the existing customer/developer experience. We will continue to invest in using existing tools first to see what works and what doesn't, and get shorter times to learning.

• Ah, and finally, given we have proven the revenue generating capacity of the business model, we've started the process to put modest salaries and health insurance for the founders, starting on November 1st.

What we'll be doing during the next month

• 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.

We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.

Many thanks,