Getting Into Gear!

I did these on Fridays for 6 years straight, but Fridays are not working for me right now, maybe because my week doesn’t end and reset on Fridays anymore! Sorry to be late again.

Revenue

• New revenue this week: 0

• 2024 ARR: 0

• 2024 New customers: 0

• Old revenue collected this week: 0

• Outstanding invoices as of today: Quickbooks says it’s $43,908.11, but I think Marc has checks in hand for all but $10k. Yay! We are basically caught up!

Last Week’s Highlights

• Congrats on getting testing going on in Staging-Fly! This has been long-awaited, so feels like an important infrastructure milestone. Looking forward to next steps w Prod!

• Fundraising: Received signed SAFE from NY Ventures (embargoed until the wire hits); received draft loan agreement from Kresge. When all is said and done (+NU Impact), we’ll have raised $1.375M in debt and equity at a cost of ~14.3% of the company and $44.7K in interest (feel free to check my math). This is the money we have to make work for us for the next 18-24 months, and so this first half of the year is critical in teeing up the right balance of investment in resources.

My Watchlist

• Revenue: Willdan negotiation continues, and we have yet to close Related….but we’re getting close on both! Willdan is down to details; we received Related contract last week and hopefully will be getting an executable agreement this week.

• Refocusing on feature releases: I think we’re making progress in this direction. Jason and I gathered up what we think are critical path for National Product. We now also need to start to refocus the development management.

• Staffing:

• Designers

• Customer-focused help for Marc Zuluaga

• FinOps help

On Deck for This Week

• Revenue follow-ups with Willdan and Related. Marc deposit checks!

• Monthly Retro this week feels like a reboot, and our first with François Huet. We still need to decide whether we’re using Almanac, Miro, or something else.

• Release: To be honest, I have no idea what is headed for this week’s release. Hoping our new release process will set me straight going forward!

Some of my personal to-dos:

• LL97 321 Go! website: Text tweaks and front-end responsiveness help from Henry Baum. Let’s get this thing crossed off the list nice and early.

• Get Henry Baum going on implementation of design changes

• Get SOW out for design management help from Ellis

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

A thought about Clifton Strengths

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Clifton Strengths workshop for February and want to make sure I’ve been clear on why I think this will be a fun, productive way to spend a couple hours (This is especially for folks who missed last Friday’s brownbag--please do eyeball the recording and the video we watched together):

• Different people have different ways, and we, as a company, have decided (as part of going horizontal) to accommodate them

• My intent is bringing in Clifton Strengths is to give us shared vocabulary to talk about commonalities and differences, as part of our building toward a discussion of diversity

• We don’t have to drink the full container of Cool-Aid about Clifton Strengths–the marketing can get much–the point is to have pro-active conversations

Lots more fun to come on Feb 7!

Please Leave Feedback

Feel free to leave comments below., or leave a comment.

• Did I miss a highlight?

• Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist?

• Something else you want to react to?

Chuck Lin
Erika Parkins
François Huet
Henry Baum
Jason Block
Jeremy Parker
Maksym Khrystunov
Marc Zuluaga
Naina Shah
Reuben Firmin
Robin Neri