Hi All,

Will start off with the good news… we were profitable for the first time ever in January! 😄

Here’s the rest of the summary:

This is a bit of long update, but it’s chock full of good stuff. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback. As always, thanks for your continued support.

Andy

Tettra Investor Update - January 2018

Thank Yous

David Cancel - Thanks for agreeing to do an Org Uncharted episode. Excited for you to drop some knowledge on our listeners and us too.

Jess Meher - Thank you for making an additional investment in Tettra 🙌

Paul English, Mike Volpe, Dharmesh Shah, Mark Roberge, Diane Hessan - Thanks for sharing Org Uncharted with your social networks.

All our investors - Just want to say thanks for believing in us when we really had nothing but a vague idea and for the continued support as we’ve built Tettra. We have a sustainable foundation to create a big business over the long haul now and we couldn’t have gotten here without your help.

How you can help

Intro’s to guests for Org Uncharted + CultureCodes

Org Uncharted: We’re looking for podcast guests (preferably more women to help us keep it 50/50) who can talk knowledgeably about how to build organizations that empower their people to do great work in today’s fast-moving, modern world.

Culture Codes: These are interviews that dive into the specific tactics used to build a culture of trust & transparency in organizations. People Operations professionals tend to have great stories, but anyone who’s grown a team is a good guest.

Numbers

Challenges

Could really use more people on the team

We’re good at getting stuff done, but we’re feeling the pain of not having enough people on the team. This is just a constraint we have to deal with right now but I’d like to figure out a way to grow the team faster while still remaining sustainable by not getting our burn rate too out of whack.

Had some downtime in January

We faced some downtime in January because of infrastructure hiccups. Our assessment is that the slew of upgrades from our hosting provider for the Meltdown and Spectre security updates broke a few of our systems. Our customers seemed to understand and we got it under control pretty fast. We also launched a status page to better update our customers about downtime.

Successes

We’re profitable!

We made $1,625 in gross profit and $2,706 in cash flow this month. My initial estimates put us at getting to profitability in April and CFBE June, but we hit the goal early by spending less, making more revenue faster than expected, and closing more yearly plans.

Beat our MRR goal

We came in at $2,180 net new MRR and beat our goal of $2K. This is our third best month of MRR growth ever, and we did it without doing any demos. Our no-touch, try-before-you-buy funnel seems to be working.

Got our marketing on track and launched a podcast

We really focused this month and got our marketing on track. The result was a 34% increase in trials. The two big initiatives were publishing new Culture Codes interviews and launching our new podcast, Org Uncharted, a show for people who empower other people to do great work.

Launched Templates, Page Suggestions and Slack add-on for email sign ups

Here’s a write up of most of our recent improvements. The big ones from this month were:

Workflows - Lets users connect Zapier zaps to Tettra templates to create powerful automated knowledge sharing flows. The possibilities really are endless, but here’s a few examples:
- Create a Product Update page when a Github milestone closes
- Create a post-mortem page after a StatusPage incident
- Create a page for weekly kick-off meetings
- Create a page for new Slack team members to introduce themselves
Performance and UX improvements - We closed tons of UX issues and decreased page load time
Culled manual tasks - We automated a lot of admin tasks to make them self service, freeing us up to do other work to scale the business

Next up

Redo marketing site and launch Tettra 2.0

We really haven’t updated our marketing site in 18 months. We’re working to move away from “wiki for Slack” and towards “empower your team with faster answers”. We’re also planning a late February Tettra 2.0 launch showcasing Templates, Workflows and a new bot.

Improve our support documentation

We had realization talking to a customer in chat this month: “I’m finding most answers in your support FAQs, it’s great! Loving all of the info I am seeing so far. If I have any other questions I’ll definitely let you know. Thanks for the help, can’t believe how fast of a response I got!”

The interesting thing here is this was a Senior HR Director of Global Operations at a 7,500 person company who wanted to just check our support docs and chat with us instead of getting on a demo.

From this chat, we realized that up-to-date, well-written support docs are basically the best sales rep we can invest in. They're always available, know the product inside and out, and don't want a commission. Support docs are marketing and sales. We’re going to lean into our documentation as a way to efficiently grow the business and service larger customers starting next month.

Start looking for a marketer and continue to push hard ourselves

We’re starting to look around for an amazing marketing hire to recruit to the team. It’s realistically going to take a while, but this is the hire where we think we’ll get the most leverage to help us hit our $1M ARR goal for 2018. In the meantime, we’re going to keep working to build our marketing muscles by publishing a steady stream of great content.

Tettra Investor Update: January 2018