November 2017 Investors Update
Dear investors,
November was a poor month for us. Total donations dipped after a consecutive increase for several months. Some of it was expected due to large one-time donations in October. Some of it was unexpected like no growth in recurring donations.
It’s a few factors — we believe largest is retention. We haven’t built basic features like alerting users that their credit card has expired and there hasn’t been an easy way for them to change it. We are focusing on it now.
Top of the mind: our engineering bandwidth is our largest bottleneck. We have two engineers (Aseem and myself). We desperately need to hire at least two full-time eng. We are now broadening the scope and we are open to candidates in Belgium/Europe and America. If you know stellar engineers in those regions, please let us know. The bar is very high for remote workers, we won’t compromise on the quality. We are looking for people that are full stack and that we could fully trust. Here is the job description for remote and in NYC.
Aseem put together a virtual board meeting that we did last week with Roy Bahat (Bloomberg Beta), Nadia Eghbal (Github) and Dave Eisenberg (Floored/CBRE). It was very useful to get the perspective from people who are not in the day to day of our operations. The biggest takeaway is that we should focus on hiring and retention as it has a compound effect. We plan to setup a regular cadence of every 2–3 months.
November Metrics
- $64.4k total donations through the platform: -20% m/m
- $3.2k total revenue: -20%
- 1,949 unique backers: +2% (4,175 unique backers to date)
- 255 active collectives: +5%
- 37 active Hosts (+0%)
- 2,389 Transactions: -2%
- Burn rate: $36k
Latest news
It’s end of the year so we’d like to encourage you to give and ask your portfolio companies to do the same! Here’s a list of 501c3 on open collective (your donations to any collective hosted by those organizations are tax deductible):
https://opencollective.com/wwcode
https://opencollective.com/operationcode
https://opencollective.com/democracyearth
🎉 Pia was nominated for the Red Hat Women in Open Source Award 🙌
I presented Open Collective at the “So What About Politics” event in Brussels where other interesting projects about the commons presented