December 2017 Investors Update
Dear investors,
Happy new year! (never too late!)
December was a good month. Our focus for January is retention. Improve emails to collectives and backers, update credit cards when they expire, etc. Our hiring pipeline is good and we hope to close one candidate this month.
- Our Open Source foundation (501c6) is up and running. We did a big migration and moved all existing subscriptions (about 2k) to the new entity. We are not hosting open source projects from our own C Corp anymore.
- We added support for bitcoin donations (via Stripe) (surprisingly, no takers yet)
- We added support for matching funds. I created a personal one for $1,000 that ran out before the end of the year:
- Interestingly enough, I had created a similar fund in euros for collectives hosted by BrusselsTogether, sadly no one used it (cultural difference?)
- Thank you to Notation Capital (one of our investors) for also creating a matching fund
Top new collectives
- Perkeep (personal storage system) $4k raised
- Parcel (zero conf web app bundler) $400 raised
- Bincrafters (c++ packaging project) $260 raised
Top backers in December
- Trivago $10k to webpack
- Material-ui-website (carbon ads) $4.8k to material-ui
- Valor-software $4.5k to Nest
- Facebook Open Source $2.6k to babel, material-ui, storybook, vuejs, webpack, mobx, gatsby, parse-server
- Ag-grid $2.5k to webpack
Metrics
- $79.5k total donations through the platform: +19% m/m
- $4k total revenue: +20%
- 2,035 unique backers: +4% (4,526 unique backers to date)
- 282 active collectives: +11%
- 40 active Hosts: +8%
- 2,587 Transactions: +8%
- Burn rate: $40k
News
- Pia did a podcast: Evolving to a system of new power and she was invited to join Faces of Open Source.
- If you are in London 1st February, join Pia & Xavier for Open Collective UK second meetup and monkigras.
- Xavier is in Guadalajara this week (without a phone) working with the design team.
- Open Collective needs part-time help to onboard new OSS projects. Flexible hours, location agnostic. Know anyone wanting to get involved in the open source community?