Erika, Marc, and I have been working on looking around the corner to the finances for 2024. Here are some top-line take-aways from the newly minted preliminary budget:
Gross revenue: $2.25M (50% increase from 2023)
Subscription revenue: slight increase to $1.5M
First transaction revenues hit: $100k
Net burn for the year: $250k
As with any budget we’ll do at this stage of the company, this is a roadmap on a napkin! There’s a lot that we don’t know right now that could make a big difference for us (namely GGRF), as well as a lot of work to do before we can take on the next big tests (new market entry! NYC transactions!), so in some sense, it’s the intent that matters more than the numbers:
Fully support permanent staff costs with committed funding. We were able to do this for 2024 largely thanks to grants. Next year, the goal is to be as well positioned for 2025, but based on subscriptions and transaction fees. FWIW, this is how non-profits are run–and it might be unusual for a startup, but I hope having this kind of discipline makes us more resilient.
Subscriptions: Focus on consolidation. We’ve made great strides on winning customers this year, and it’s time to hunker down and learn as much as we can from working with them. As I understand it, Marc has some important relationship sales that have been in the works for a while that he intends to land in 2024, and there are opportunities to up-sell some of our current customers. And beyond those, we won’t be making a bigger sales push in 2024 – so our new customers acquired number might be lower next year than this year, but our relationships will be deeper!
Land the transaction revenue. So, we know we have $100k in transactional revenue booked via CPC for 2024, but thanks to our efforts with HPD this year, we have an additional opportunity to prove out our transaction fee model in a way that is complementary. Getting it right will mean really fine-tuning the product for New York, at the same time that we’re rearranging its guts to support national expansion. It’s going to be great!
There’s still quite a bit of fine-tuning work to be done on this budget as we get into 2024, but I think it already shows a pretty darn exciting year ahead! Onward!
2023 ARR: $301,130
2023 New customers: 11
Old revenue collected this week: None
Outstanding invoices as of Dec. 8: $142,998.72
Wow, so week 1 of “two releases in one week” is officially in the permanent record! Congrats! Especially want to thank Jason and Chuck, accomplishing this goal in the midst of having a challenging week.
Really enjoyed starting to get to know François! I’m excited to be getting glimpses of the things he wants to do and finding that they are new and different!
Horizontal meeting next week is part 2 of the iceberg exercise!
Another 2 releases - which will mostly catch us up to the work DevSquad has worked on over the past month. It will be great to clear the decks!
And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?