The speedbump update
October 2022 investor update
Dear all,
October was a rough month in terms of terminations/resignations. Two customers did severe restructurings that impacted our talent. We also had a few resignations and a developer walked back on a signed offer. That resulted in 10 offer letters that did not materialize in an increase in headcount, as we netted at 0. We think our offer letter cadence was strong since our active open positions also were significantly impacted by the current climate decreasing from 30 to 20.
As we approach the end of the year, with new budgets being approved as we speak, we hope to see a rebound of interest in open positions from both existing and new companies. Our demand generation machine is starting to click into gear, and we hope we will be able to show results towards the end of next quarter.
This has been the first time we've struggled to grow in a month, we believe it's a speedbump rather than a systemic change, and we expect to resume growth in Q4. But given the current environment, we continue to play it by ear month to month.
KPIs
Cash Balance adj: $0.83M (previously $0.80M)
Last 30-days cash consumption: -$30k
Months of run-rate: all the months.
GMV managed: $13.1M (prev $12.9M)
MRR: $214k (prev $212k)
Great Talent working at Great Startups: 169 (prev 170)
Open roles currently hiring for: 20 (prev 30)
What we've done in the last month
In our last newsletter we said we would:
❌ We will continue to work on increasing demand and get Open Roles to 40 (this will include signing up new startups), supply, and improving our ability to match demand with supply.
🔜 ✅ We will release our platform for the matching and will have our website live.
✅ ❌ Hire more on two existing teams. Get 3 startups to hire their first developers.
Customer Demand: October was an intense month for the demand team. We have made progress on many fronts: onboarding and ramping up new team members, migrating from our homemade CRM built-in Airtable to Hubspot, and setting the basis to increase the volume of our go-to-market tooling. Nevertheless, results have not yet materialized (we have closed only two new contracts, and only one customer made their first hire). We have many advanced conversations with new companies that we hope to onboard to our marketplace during the month of November. This influx of new customers, plus the reactivation of recruiting in existing customers to prepare for 2023 plus the collaboration with the Talent Supply side of the business to reduce the timing to present candidates should get us closer to the aggressive goal of 40 open roles by the end of the month.
Talent Supply: Our top-of-the-funnel was very strong again, but more remarkably, we were able to deliver strong numbers in introducing developers to the few challenging openings we have. As a result, we were able to deliver a good number of offers. Although it is early, the white-glove experiment seems to be working fairly well. We will continue to invest time in a higher-touch engagement model to source high-quality candidates in challenging open positions (especially now that we have few open positions).
Product:
We launched our new website early in October. We are very happy with the results and believe it has substantially improved our positioning.
Unfortunately, we were not able to release our platform yet. We've run into some issues at the very last minute and need to fix them before going live.
We've made additional improvements in the tooling we use to manage the marketplace giving our team additional power.
What we'll be doing during the next month
🗺 We will continue to work on increasing demand and not going below 40 Open Roles (this will include signing up new startups), supply, and improving our ability to match demand with supply.
🧪 We will release our platform for the matching.
🔝 Hire more on two existing teams. Get 3 customers to hire their first developers.
How can you help?
If you know of companies hiring engineers, or companies looking to rationalize their R&D spending, please point them in our direction. If you want to help we would like to share the love: join our Ambassador program and get 10% of the first-year fees we generate.
If you know people working at Software PE firms (think Vista or Thoma Bravo) or Software conglomerates (think IAC) we would love to connect with them!
We look forward to updating you again next month; in the interim let us know if you have any questions.
Many thanks,