August Investor’s Update

Dear investors,

August was a really good month for us (total donations are +37%). Confirming the trend we’ve been seeing, 63% of donations are from sponsors of which +⅔ are recurring. Same for individuals backer where ⅔ are also recurring. Numbers are looking healthy!

There’s space to convert one time backers to recurring enabling recurring paypal donations although we still need more data to see the impact paypal is having. Active collective is also up (+6%) as is the number of new sponsors (+32%)

Team Update & News:

- We are doing our second sprint this week and it’s been very useful having the whole team together. The team is starting to work more in sync! We’ve been focusing on core things we normally don’t get to do during regular weeks: Aligning priorities, best practices, company culture and deep dives in product areas.

- We launched our partnership with Drupal Association and we have 8 camps on board already.

- We also launched BackYourStack with great success! Homepage of HackerNews, +150 upvotes on ProductHunt and well as some nice tweets from our community here, here and here.

Product roadmap:

- Pledges: We are still working on Pledges with the goal to enable anyone to pledge money to collectives that are not yet on the platform. We see this specially as an opportunity to grow the open source vertical (linked to BackYourStack) as well as experimenting with a way of starting projects/ideas to life without needing to set up a legal structure from the get go.

- API: we’ve taken the first steps to structure the platform to scale with contributions from others. This is a great example of things we want to see more of. Open Collective will provide the infrastructure for third party services to be offered to collectives. No one can be the best at everything so we’ll be the space where the best services compete to serve this new economic units, the collectives. BackYourStack is now supporting C#, Go and PHP thanks to external contributions!

- Ledger: Our core business is to provide a way for communities to raise funds and spend them transparently without needing a collective bank account. The heart of Open Collective is the ledger that keeps this transactions. We are working on an MVP of a new ledger taking into account everything we’ve learn in the past two years.

- Virtual Cards: Enable anyone to give gift cards to their community to support collectives. Read more about the user story and how we are thinking about it here. (Maybe something your portfolio companies will be interested in? ❤)

Ask:

SustainOSS is doing its second edition in London in October. We are still looking for 2 more sponsors, if you are interested in supporting this effort and joining 100 sustainers from around the world, let me know!

August Leaderboard

Top collectives: (based on total money received during the month)

$43,453 babel
$21,961 webpack
$11,066 material-ui
$7,900 sustainOSS
$6541 Drupal Texas Camp