Investors Update — February 2019
Dear Investors,
Hope you are well!
Before all, Xavier will be in San Francisco April 2–17th. He will send you a separate email to coordinate a time to meet since it’s been so long we haven’t touched base in person.
Other exciting news, I’m moving to Madrid! Several reasons for this: better quality of life, less air miles (everyone else except Alanna and Design is in Europe), and longer life runway (let’s chat about NYC taxes any day…). We make a lot of progress on important but not urgent things during our retreats and I’m looking forward to having more opportunities to do that, now that I’ll be in Europe.
February was a good month for us, even if total donations are down 53% (January was exceptional because of the Samsung/Next grants) if we compare them to December, we are up 55% (same with revenue).
Other numbers are healthy, total donations is up 7% m/m and recurring donations are up 8% m/m. New sponsors is up this month again by 57% (which is coherent with a higher average donation).
Team Retreat:
We did our Sprint in Lisbon and it was great!! We made progress in those areas that we normally don’t prioritize:
- The Open Collective Way: We worked on our values, community guidelines, team guidelines and expectation. We’ve taken another step towards being open and transparent about us and who we are. Check it out! Note: we will add you as “backers” of our collective (we only did it for the angel investors of our very first round). You will receive an automated notification email. So just a quick heads up.
- We put together and started a stealth Bounty Program. We are already working with new contributors. We are looking forward to moving faster!
- Engaging better with our community: We are paying more attention to how we keep our community engaged and we grow it.
Product:
V3 is making progress! We are having an ongoing conversation with out community about our next steps. We want to make sure we are thinking about this right,
We shipped the open collective bot, a little that posts a comment in a github repo, when the project’s sponsor’s open an issue.
News:
The Open Broadcasting Software joined us and they are doing very well (a diamond sponsor will be announced soon). Our twitter feed goes nuts every time they tweet.❤
Also worth noting, Airbnb doubled their yearly contribution, you can share Joe’s tweet.
On-boarding:
Active collectives decreased by 5% this month (Alanna and me are working on the email on-boarding content) Active hosts is up by 5% and active backers by 10%.
Donations ($)
- Total donations: $273,172 (-53%)
- 3-month Avg total donations: $344,098 (+13%)
- 3-month Recurring donations: $123,058 (+8%)
Num of donations
- # of total donations: 4,944 (7% m/m)
- # of recurring donations: 4,322 (+8% m/m)
Other
- Avg recurring donation: $31.15 (keeps growing)
- OC Revenue: $13,345 (-54%m/m)
Collectives
- Active collective: 568 (-5% m/m)
- Active hosts: 63 (+3%)
- Active Backers: 4114 (+10%)
Sponsors
- New Sponsors created: 121 ( +57%) from which 66 contributed +$100
Burn rate: ~25k (this lower burnrate is driven by the high one-time Samsung grants being executed on Feb — we also haven’t replaced Nick or Marco for another full time engineer yet)