Sidetool Update - 20240505

What’s up, team! 🙌

Sorry, it took me quite some time to get back to writing this. In the past couple of weeks, I have spent most of my time restructuring our sales process and our existing engagements. I generated too much stress in the system by not bringing the best customers + not setting the right expectations from the beginning.

Bringing Jose into the team has helped me follow the proper system when signing up new customers. Here is our new customer lifecycle mapped — https://sdtl.io/4aYYEhg.

I will try to get back into a cadence of at least twice/once a month 😬!

Key Metrics:

• Monthly Revenue: $41,610.00

• Customer Base: 11

  • FirstGenLaw — https://www.firstgenlaw.co/

  • GoTime — https://gotime.ventures/

  • Adhesive Media — https://adhesivemedia.co/

  • Playbook Systems — https://playbooksystems.io/

  • Respiris — https://respiris.com/

  • Aprende — https://aprende.com/

  • Metadata — https://metadata.io/

  • Hang — https://hang.com/

  • Sicha — https://www.sicha.ai/

  • OpenBiz — https://openbiz.io/

  • Digital Radius — https://digitalradius.com/

• Average Customer Monthly Revenue: $3,782.73

Achievements:

• We recently finished the project for Volleybox, and David (the founder) took the time to give us this insane Review 🙌. Even though he mentions Ed throughout the review, this was not me. This was all Fran and Tincho who made this happen. Super proud of this 🙌

• One of our customers, Hang, doubled our account from $4k/mo to almost $9k/mo!

• With Sicha, we were able to negotiate not only a monthly maintenance fee but also a revenue share.

Challenges:

• As we aim for bigger accounts, our sales cycle is slowing down. We used to close leads within 1 or 2 weeks. Now, it’s taking us 3 to 4 weeks to close.

  • Also, there is a big effort from my end in the scoping process. I spend about 3 to 4 hours with the customer, bringing all their ideas into a project scope (https://sdtl.io/4a5yI2f). This is all done for free, but it’s a big wow moment for the lead.

  • Here is our customer lifecycle mapped — https://sdtl.io/4aYYEhg

What's Next:

• We are working on implementing a per-request model with some of our customers. Once we finish the project, our customers want to stay with us so we can keep iterating on their projects. We will roll this out with two or three customers in the upcoming weeks.

  • More here — https://sdtl.io/3UMoy23

    

• Getting to 65k/mo in revenue before the end of Q.

Team:

• FT:

  • Production

    • Manu 

    • Fran

    • Uli

    • Tincho

    • Pancho

    • Rodrigo

  • Ops

    • Valen

    • Jose

  • Sales

    • Ed

• PT

  • Ops

    • Thai

  • Content

    • Luli

• Total count:

  • 9 FT

  • 2 PT

Venture Studio:

• We are currently developing Luna, an AI Companion to help English-speaking users learn Spanish and/or Portuguese. We will be working with Hichem on this project. We will own the development, and he will own the distribution. We should be launching a v1 of the product by next week.

  • More here — https://sdtl.io/3wjfzMz

Cool Stuff I found:

“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.”​

That’s a line from one of the most profound books I’ve ever read, The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. In just 128 pages, it summarizes the key lessons of human history in paired-down prose.

​Here’s a few key ideas from the book:

• History repeats, driven by unchanging human nature.

• Geography molds civilizations' fates.

• Class struggles fuel historical change.

• Religion and morality shape societies.

• Civilizations rise and fall in cycles.

David Senra just did a great episode on this book on his Founders podcast here.

Peace out! ✌️