April 2018 Investors Update
Dear investors,
This is my first investors update since taking the role as CEO. We recently announced the team changes publicly and I wrote a blog post about why I couldn’t be more excited to take on this new responsibility.
Thank you all for your support!
Numbers
Total donation amount dipped this month about 7% as a consequence of Coinbase supporting open source projects through other organizations. The good news is that their experience outside of Open Collective wasn’t great and they have been asking projects to join us in order to receive their financial contribution (e.g. the famous curl command joined open collective). This reinforces our decision to keep on building tool to make it dead simple for companies to give to multiple collectives.
Number of total donations (+10%) and recurring donations (+5%) are up again this month and this are the numbers we want to keep growing.
One way of growing is by opening up to collectives that are also attractive to existing sponsors. We started reaching out to tech meetups and we have about 60 of them on board. Our challenge now is to make sure they get activated and get connected with sponsors. That’s why we started the Pledges feature (see below.)
We’ve been having interesting conversations in the crypto space, specially with Blockstack and Misthos. We want Open Collective to be the place where ideas in this space come to life in an early stage supported by initial funding for experimentation. If you know people in this space wanting to try ideas out and pull some financial resources for it, send them our way!
Team
The team is doing great, we are shipping features and making progress. We are finding it easy to work together and work remotely. Aseem’s transition has been very smooth and please congratulate him on his beautiful baby Noor!
Product
We’ll be focusing on the dual goal of growing sponsors and collectives on the platform. For sponsors we are working on search (feature is live already!) and pledges (enabling them to pledge money to an idea or a collective). For collectives we’ll be starting a flow to enable anyone to be a host, simply connecting a paypal/stripe account.
Ask
On that note, we are struggling with Braintree, we are blocked on them replying to us. Any contacts there we can reach out to would be super appreciated!
April’s Leaderboard
Top collectives: (based on total money received during the month)
$32,895 webpack
$8,445 babel
$5,505 curl
$4,445 perkeep
$4,115 burlington-code
Top new collectives:
$5,505 curl
$1,000 asciidoctor
$1,000 bostoncodecamp
$290 codefordenver
$82 commonswealth-network
Top backers:
$12,500 Coinbase (webpack, curl, styled-components, mobx, babel, babel, mobx, webpack, rubytogether)
$10,000 Trivago (webpack)
$4,378 airbnb (yeoman, react-virtualized, babel, rspec, sinon, rubocop, webpack, redux-devtools-extension, storybook)
$4,000 vcet (burlington-code)
$2,850 fbopensource (storybook, babel, rollup, vuejs, material-ui, gatsby, parse-server, mobx, webpack)
Numbers
Burn rate $42k
Donations ($)
- Total donations: $117.6k (-7% m/m)
- 3-month Avg total donations: $115.7k (+14% m/m)
- 3-month Recurring donations: $77k (+10% m/m)
Num of donations
- # of total donations: 3,187 (+10% m/m)
- # of recurring donations: 2,861(+5% m/m)
Other
- Avg recurring donation: $28.37 (dipped couple of cents)
- OC Revenue: $5,896 (dipped also expected because of coinbase dip)
Collectives
- Active collective: 367 (-1.9% m/m)
- Of the top 30 collectives by donations
- 15 collectives increased budget m/m
- 10 decreased m/m
- 4 stayed the same m/m
- 1 inactive (raised $0)
News
Nick Hehr and François Hodierne joined the engineering team. Nick is working with Lincoln and me in NYC and François is in Berlin.
I presented at the Civic Tech Toronto Meetup and there are plans in place for creating an Open Collective Canada chapter.
If some of you haven’t found a collective to support yet, try our new search feature opencollective.com/search
Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or suggestions and let me know if you are ever in NY would love the opportunity to connect.
Pía and the Open Collective Team.