July 2017 Investors update

Dear investors, we now have closed the round. All the money is in the bank. Welcome aboard! We are grateful to have the opportunity to have you along for the journey. Thank you for your support! 🙏

We have added everyone to this mailing list and we have updated the list of investors on our website: https://opencollective.com/faq#investors. We also posted the term sheet and the stock investment agreement (we have redacted personal contact information).

Ask:

If you run a company with engineers, we would love to have you as launch partner in September for a new feature to allow companies to give a monthly budget to their employees to support the open source projects that they use / love (also to support collectives for more diversity in tech). It’s a great feel good perk and a great way to retain / attract talents. Please reach out if you can help!

Monthly Stats & Numbers

Straight up: they aren’t great. But we aren’t really chasing these metrics at the moment. We think optimizing for them month to month invites short-term thinking, when our sights are set on longer term strategy. We aren’t aware of a specific reasons for this slowdown (other than summer is a slower time).

July:
Backers: +11% (total: 2,764, 280 new, 1,195 repeat, 1,289 inactive)
Active collectives: -6% (188)
Total donations: +5% ($41,057)
Total revenue: +5% ($2,052)
Hosts: 81 (26 active)
Transactions: 1,841 (1,727 donations, 114 expenses paid)
Burn rate: $44k ($13k legal fees for Series Seed)

June:
Backers: 2,484 (310 new, 1,090 repeat, 1,084 inactive)
Active collectives: 200 active
Total donations: $39,205
Total revenue: $1,960
Hosts: 73 (24 active)
Transactions: 1,759 (1,639 donations, 120 expenses paid)
Burn rate: $36k

Focus for July-August: product improvements

We recently released an events feature, empowering groups to sell tickets and receive sponsorships directly to their Open Collective budgets. We’ve also delivered a new transactions page with filters for donations and expenses, and a redesigned monthly report for backers that includes recent expenses and events, and one for hosts that includes a PDF with all the receipts and a CSV export of all transactions for the month.

In the works:

• Custom Reward Tiers: will allow collectives to offer backers incentives at different levels.
• Collective to Collective donations: in response to user demand to donate ‘downstream’.
• Organizations: companies want to aggregate their donations in one place, and empower employees to give on their behalf.
• Save credit card on file: will make repeat contributions easier and contributions on behalf of a company easier.
• Ad revenue for collectives: we’re experimenting with ways websites can display ads and send the proceeds to the collective(s) of their choice.

These are a big upgrades, and development is still ongoing. We are targeting a September release for the new features.

News & Updates

We have a great monthly newsletter with 5,500+ subscribers. If you aren’t getting it every 15th of the month, subscribe here. And if you don’t have Slack fatigue yet, join our #investors channel.

• We Gathered 100 Open Source Sustainers — Here’s What We Learned: Brief report of takeaways from SustainOSS, a one-day unconference we co-hosted with Github and others.
• Events Feature, Ad Support for Collectives, + more: July 2017 Newsletter
• Introducing Events on Open Collective: Collectives can now host conferences and meetups, with tickets sales and sponsorships going directly to their budgets.
• We Offered Matching Funds for Open Source — Here’s What Happened: Open source company Sentry decided to match contributions, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities around getting companies to give.

FYI: We posted the previous investors update on our blog, and we’ll post this one next week as well.