logs

I took a hiatus from posting logs during the winter holiday season. Happy new year!

Day 267: Monday, January 9, 2023

Productivity was a little slower over the holidays while we were remote, but things are starting to pick up again this week. Users are still trickling in (around 50 a day), but there hasn’t really been a concerted distribution effort since our initial launch. We did get an enterprise customer last week, when a company decided to sign up ~250 users for our product—hopefully we can work out an enterprise plan today/tomorrow to get some revenue flowing.

We decided to postpone our raise again for the same reasons that I described in an earlier post. We have flip-flopped on this decision, but the current reasoning is that we don’t really have use for the capital right now (we are sitting on more than enough cash for the four of us). Our current plan is to focus on students in the near term (launch to campuses by February), hopefully hit whatever target’s we’ve set for go to market, and then raise in March. After raising capital, we can look to hire/grow more aggressively.

Day 268: Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Yesterday was dominated by a number of VC calls. We had our biannual check-in with Neo, and also took some calls that we had previously set up back in December. After this, we’re most likely not taking many calls until March rolls around—there’s just no real point risking a negative impression until we’re in fundraising mode.

Aside from this, we have our enterprise call with our enterprise customer later this week—a high priority is to figure out a plan for that.

Day 269: Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Nothing crazy to update for today—the main thing is that we have our enterprise call tomorrow. Prepping for this call is a little tricky because typical recommendations for enterprise sales calls don’t apply here because they were the ones who reached out to us—we don’t have a solid understanding of their problems, and therefore can’t really sell a solution. Our current plan is to approach the call like a user discovery call, asking questions to figure out where we can provide value/convert them into a paying customer.

Kevin is also coming back tonight, so our team is slowly coming back together which is super nice.

Day 270: Thursday, January 12, 2023

We had our enterprise call today, which went relatively well. I spent a lot of time today looking at our growth numbers/setting up more user analytics—there’ve been a lot of interesting findings.

Growth in general is encouraging—we’re having more new users join every week than users going dormant. This is encouraging because we haven’t put in any marketing efforts beyond our initial launch, so the fact that we’re still seeing steady growth is nice.

Day 271: Friday, January 13, 2023

We had another call today, this time with a company’s M&A department. We don’t want to sell our company at this point, so I was a little apprehensive at taking this meeting. However, I think it was a good learning experience, and we’re trying to see if there’s some enterprise partnership that we can figure out (they’re a larger company and converting them into a paying customer would be huge).

I’ve been studying our growth numbers today as well—there are a number of interesting things. Our churn is not the greatest at the moment, but the good thing is that the users who do stay tend to use our product every day/are not dropping off. There are also a number of interesting cohorts where the churn rate is exceptionally good—I’m going to spend some time digging into these groups to see what the unifying thread is. Overall, even though I wish our churn rate was better, we’re gaining more users than we’re losing users, and we have a good base of loyal users who are using our product nearly every day—that’s a good sign that we’re heading in the right direction in regard to PMF.

One interesting trend that’s popped up in our data is that users will use our product every day for 3-4 days, stop for around a week, and then start picking up in usage again at around the day 14 mark. This makes intuitive sense, but the fact that a large percentage of users do this exact pattern, enough to be statistically significant, is super interesting to me.