September 2021 investor update
Dear all,
September was a good month as we are getting closer to having a scalable model. We placed 11 people, 3 developers left remotely (2 of these due to one customer churning). However, we made significant progress in cranking supply and demand. Our hope is that when both sides of the marketplace start to show higher volumes, matching volume will also grow significantly.
KPIs
Net Cash Balance: $940k in cash and short-term AR (previously $966k)
Last 30-days cash consumption: $24k
Months of run-rate: 39
GMV managed: $3.9M (prev $3.6M)
MRR: $85k (up from $75k)
Customers: 15 (prev 16)
Talent active: 66 (prev 61)
Open roles currently hiring for: 9 (prev 14)
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
❌We will continue to work on incrementing demand and get Open Roles back to >20, supply and improving our ability to match demand with supply.
✅ We will working towards creating a top-notch experience for our platform based on the past year managing both customers and developers.
✅✅ Hire more on two existing teams. Get 2 customers to hire their first developers.
Customer Demand: Because of our focus on scaling supply, we'd had abandoned our pipeline generation efforts. During the last month, we've corrected that, and we have a healthy pipeline that is only growing. However, it is taking some time to close and translate into the number of openings growing. We are also learning there might be some seasonality to this kpi: companies stop hiring during the last few months of the year, only to boost hiring in January when new budgets are approved. We are happy with how the referral program is working: we have 12 active ambassadors, we are onboarding 10 new ambassadors and have started the invitation process for 6 more. We are quite confident that this program will work well in increasing our demand numbers on a recurrent basis.
Talent Supply: Our process vets talent and if we deem them worthy to be introduced to a customer (based on communication skills, attitude, skills, expertise, english level) we accept them into the Remotely Network. Our vetting process started as 100% manual, preventing us from increasing the throughput at which we increase the number of members of the Remotely Network. Last April, we managed to add 44 developers to the network. In September, the same talent team was able to process 93 acceptances. We're very close to having the disqualification process 100% automated, which will enable us to increase the volume of process as we wish.
If both the supply automation and the demand programs work, we expect to increase the number of matches significantly.
Product: After months (years!) of manual+no-code experimentation, we've been designing the experience and workflows for our developers. An end-to-end journey that starts with the vetting, goes into matching and the recruiting process, and ends up with a job and making money at remotely.
We've been working with Z1.digital to design the experience based on what we've done manually over the last several months. We're getting close to having our first product designs ready to be built.
In our heads, when the talent supply automation, the scalable demand and the digital end-to-end journey for the developers are live (in the upcoming months), Remotely will have graduated from this first phase of the company. We will work hard to have it done before the end of our fiscal year (Jan'22). So that our next year will be about scaling and optimizing that experience.
As the developer journey gains more specificity, we are starting to experiment on what the journey is for our customers. The team is excited to experiment in wowing our customers faster which, in turn, should fuel our demand referral program and make our flywheel spin faster.
Finally, we released our chrome extension. Currently it is being used by 75 people. We will continue to monitor it's adoption and use, and invest more in product development as needed.
What we'll be doing during the next month
🗺 We will continue to work on incrementing demand and get Open Roles back to >20 (this will include signing up new startups), supply and improving our ability to match demand with supply.
🧪 We will working towards creating a top-notch experience for our platform based on the past year managing both customers and developers.
🔝 Hire more on two existing teams. Get 2 customers to hire their first developers.
How can you help?
If you know of any tech recruiter in the US, please share the chrome extension with them.
We look forward to updating you again next month, in the interim, let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,