Hey Team,
It’s been an awesome, but intense, winter. Many things are tracking well, but there are some challenges we’re working through.
TL;DR
-
Revenue is up 22%
-
We’re scaling up important product initiative Apollo.
-
We finally closed Microsoft for a major partnership
-
Big time hire — we closed Joe Bloggs as our new VP All The Things
-
Mrs Customer Success herself had a major life event — welcome to Baby Customer Success!
Key Metrics:
We continue to have a ton of momentum across every important metric. From Sep to Nov we grew revenue 5%+ Every Month. From Aug to Nov we grew 17%. We are also on pace for a really huge December.
We’ve learned something big this quarter about our Pricing Model and by February we’ll be on a $2M run rate. Needless to say I’m cautiously pumped.
We’ve basically 2x’d on revenue so far this year and I believe will have 2.5x’d by end of year.
One big thing we are scaling up is our Super Cool New Widget. We now have 25+ Companies that have bought Our Super Cool New Widget. In the last week we’ve added Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Samsung. Right now I’ve got more pipeline than I can handle but if you have any companies you think would be a good fit for this let me know.
Fundraising — Series A:
We are in active fundraising mode. This is super aggressive but my goal is to get something done by March. I was in Boston last week for some “sneak peek” conversations with friendlies. These went really well.
The deck is still a work in progress but you can take a look here.
Learnings since last update:
We now have a meaningful number of people that have hit their contract milestone. Our overall renewal rate is 72%, which I think is pretty amazing. What we’ve realized though is that if we can get you to do at least two F2F EBRs the renewal rate goes up to 87%!
We are also getting better at getting users to fully adopt features faster! Last year it would take us 2 months on average to accomplish this while now we are doing it in 5 weeks. We are starting to focus in on improving this even more.
Our NPS is +30. This is obviously huge but I still think we are just scratching the surface of how powerful our community can be.
Team
The huge growth we’ve seen this year is a direct impact of 3 big hires we made at the start of the year for Product, Sales and Marketing. It’s really taken our team to another level and it shows on what we’ve accomplished.
Everyone is pumped and feels the momentum. We are stretched really thin though and while it’s been awesome seeing everyone step up, I do worry about fatigue setting in at some point.
What I feel good about:
The graph on the left shows the huge rise in ratings and the graph on the right shows the decrease in customer support tickets as revenue increases.
All the work we’ve done over the last year and half is paying off. We’ve built the foundation that is going to let us grow and provide an amazing experience.
What I am freaked out about
For our Sales, Marketing and Product roles I invested in director level people instead of junior folks we would then hire over. We’ve also been spending a lot on digital marketing channels without optimizing its ROI. Our burn is up and we’ll be out of money by September.
What’s next
Get this round down and put money in the bank account.
We’ve also got to finish December strong. We are pacing really well but there is Competitor XYZ’s rebrand coming soon so it’s not going to be easy. At the same time we are preparing to take advantage of a massive surge for EXPO 2020.
What I need help with
Please take a look at the list of investors we are lining up
Let me know if there are people we should be talking to or if there are people already on the list you have good relationships with.
Thank you to Y Combinator and SaaStr for helping get the ball rolling on these with intros and deck feedback.
Thank you Sequoia and Point Nine for letting me practice the pitch on you.
Thank you for all the support.
Happy to answer any questions you might have.
Thanks!
Mr. CEO, TechLeaders
