Welcome to Our New Look for Fall!

August 10, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-21)

We’ve been talking about the need to update the marketing website for _quite_ some time now, so I’m really glad to have crossed this one off our fall to-do list. We had many comments over the past two years from all sorts of people including investors, customers, and prospective hires that they couldn’t figure out what we actually do. Hopefully, it’s now much more obvious!

Why was the old website so coy, anyway? Well, we originally put that up because we had to have a website to be able to post on job boards, but we didn’t really want to tell anyone what we were actually working on. So we talked a lot about our vision and values instead!

Updating it has been a fun distraction for me. I get the zing of writing some code without it being at all in the way of anyone else, which is nice! Next up, porting the handbook….But I digress.

We have one last to-do list thing before the external web is done-done, and that is getting permissions to use our customer logos. Thanks, Jason, Erika, and Marc for tracking those down!

When I wrote this about a new look, I was originally only talking about the marketing website, but I guess equially applies to our handbook!

Metrics

• Unique Buildings: 5,444 ←- as of 8/1
• Annual Run Rate: $1.3M ←- no change
• Monthly net burn: $94k ←- as of July close. Not sure about this number yet.
• 2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,257.34
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $118k ←- might not include Willdan payment

Last Week’s Highlights

• Congrats on Release 73! It’s nice to see these incremental improvements going out like clockwork – both bug fixes and the march toward national v0!
• 🏃‍♂️Related Companies is hot to trot with the LL97 bidding program. The contract was sent over on Friday and it seems they want to bid in August. Which is great!
• 📆 On Friday, Jason, Martine, Kate and I hit on a tentative plan to split GP into v0.1 and v0.2 – hopefully with minimal impact on delivery schedule, but LOTS of benefit for Martine and Kate.
• Revenue team’s retro! I heard this went well. Thanks again for trying that out!
• 360s! Kudos to Naina and Erika on their work plan meetings!
• Coms: CPC conference presentation proposal and NESEA magazine piece proposal both went in! Thanks Jessica and Marc! Also Marc did a webinar on Wed…?

Did I miss any highlights? Pls share in comments.

My Watchlist

• Generic Project: Well, we are past 2-weeks – Is it that we are truly terrible at estimating velocity? And also, no one on the dev team commented on the past two weeks of memos to say “hey that we’ll be done in 2 weeks isn’t correct!” Comment “banana” if you are reading these, Dev team.
• Tech Recruiting: We’ll all need to pitch in as we head toward hiring. Slack channel is #ops_diverse-talent.
• Cash. Mid-year re-forecast of the budget still pending. Erika has gone through our books with a fine-tooth comb, but we’re still a bit fuzzy on what is going on with variances and the runway calculation.
• Dev pipeline: Still so much to do after GP. The overwhelming feeling on thinking about the H2 pipeline seems to be that it’s too much. More to discuss?
• Partnerships: Many, many conversations: Accelerator, GGRF. None of them are (thankfully) very demanding at the moment.
• Onboarding: Incremental improvements to tooling and process. Will need more! Looking to Martine and Kate for their inputs on process improvement.
• Metrics: Not actively working out new metrics, but something to keep on the board.
• Don’t be a series of small businesses: ~Marc and I are shopping for some founder coaching to make sure we’re staying on a venture-scale path~. We put this on the back burner. We don’t have time to engage right now.

On Deck for This Week

• For me, Seed Round Prep. It is a slog, y’all, and not fun.
• Meeting to review software role descriptions by the dev team (I have the impression that this may have rolled over from last week)
• AC bill still feels rather loom-y to me. Meeting with WEAct on Wed.

And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?

Please Leave Feedback

Big thanks to the folks who dropped a note last week! 🎉 🤝

Please note your reaction to this update below. It helps me to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

• What are your highlights / lowlights?
• Did I miss a highlight? Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist? Something else you want to react to?

Respond in Slack thread or add comments in Github below. Thanks!

Comments

[!NOTE]

Luke Floden

🍌

I get the zing of writing some code without it being at all in the way of anyone else, which is nice!

Nice! 💜

…plan to split GP into v0.1 and v0.2

Glad to layer GP even more, especially if it helps reduce the workload of our team

…no one on the dev team commented on the past two weeks of memos…

Sorry, this is on me. I read them but for some reason or another thought the information found its way to you from what others had said in the comments or slack.

Naina (Generalist) Aug 12th at 9:47 AM - Few responses to this! I found the 360 process to be really helpful, even though this isn’t actually my “first 30 days”, the self reflection it prompts and feedback received was useful and I appreciate this being a part of our workflow New marketing website looks very cool In terms of responding to this in github, I can’t find somewhere to make comments - would it be making a new branch, add comments to the end of the md file and then submit a PR?

Bomee Aug 12th at 9:49 AM - @Naina (Generalist) re: comments in Github – I’m open to ideas! People could also just comment in thread and when we have a VA, that person can scoop them all up and do it at once?

Naina (Generalist) Aug 12th at 9:50 AM - I like that idea, easy for everyone!

Jason (BuildSci Lead) Aug 12th at 10:16 AM - I like commenting the thread. Quicker and instantly visible by others–no one needs to approve/merge anything.

Bomee Aug 12th at 10:18 AM - And also, sorry the github site is right now very ugly. I haven’t got around to fixing the css.

Jason (BuildSci Lead) Aug 12th at 10:18 AM - I also really like the new marketing website. The look, the content, and the potential to add more content to it! I saw the monthly burn almost doubled in July. I know it says we’re not sure about the number yet, but that seems like a big variance. I know you’ve been mentioning the need to get to the bottom of the variances/runway calc, but that one caught my eye. It doesn’t look like there’s anything in the 8/12 column in your radar. Let me know if you want to connect on the AC bill this week. I agree we likely have too much in the dev pipeline for H2. We’ll be talking about the scoping page this Wednesday during the backlog meeting; I hope that’ll help us getting more of a box around things. It still may be too much on other fronts, but let’s see after that.

Bomee Aug 12th at 10:20 AM -

It doesn’t look like there’s anything in the 8/12 column in your radar. Oh, I got carried away with the Almanac porting and forgot to fill it in!

François (HOE) Aug 13th at 5:36 PM - Trying the slack thread comments - First of all :banana: (is this your version of the brown M&Ms test? :slightly_smiling_face: ). There’s a flurry of threads right now and juggling them all with the right priority is so hard. I’m glad to see the 0.1 plan to have folks drive the GP road that’s already paved as soon as possible. Congrats Naina and Erika on your 360!