✅ Successfully transitioned to a subscription model in May/June. Thanks to the subscription steady income, we can more easily predict future income. Then we can invest in more expenses and hiring. We are also more attractive for eventual investors (as investors require subscription income)
✅ Successfully removed the free trial in October**,** reducing the number of refunds (fewer fees, less customer support).
✅ Improved the marketing and analytics, since May. Better strategy + we found a more consistent and clear voice (thanks to Khushi).
✅ Great customer support since Summer. Customer satisfaction is at all high, thanks to Devie and Ysabell.
✅ Faster, more stable app since this summer, thanks to the dev team who worked on improving code and moving better infrastructure during summer. We now use the best tools for hosting: Vercel + AWS.
✅ Better tech platform. Moving to new platforms (AWS, Vercel) makes development faster, less buggy + easier to maintain. ✅ Better team collaboration: Using more Notion for working on projects + continue to reduce meetings and get fewer interruptions from Slack. ✅ Better focus for developers: we reduced the number of tasks they work on + allowed them to turn off Slack.
✅ We finally start to deliver new features for users: Global search, Sub-users, Figma plugin, Collections...
✅ More delegation with the new hires. Vincent is the bottleneck in this project, but was able to delegate more by hiring (customer support, marketing, illustrations production). These tasks are now better done and Vincent has more time for strategy and better decisions.
✅ Better strategy and decisions: as Vincent got more time after delegating, he took better decisions, define a better long-term strategy + assign more clearly tasks. ✅ Better icon production. As vincent got more time, he could rethink a bit more the strategy for icons production (more consistent, interoperable icon sets) + get more time for managing icons projects.
✅ Hired four new team members
✅ Started an Artificial Intelligence project to automatically tag our assets by image recognition, started this summer by Joy. When this project is delivered, it will get a huge impact on users' satisfaction and workflow. it will also be a great asset to promote for marketing and spreading word on twitter.
🚩 Expenses on tools keep growing: more than $1,000/month for AWS, $1,500/year for Figma, $1,500/year on Slack, Cloudinary surge of costs, etc. – But these expenses are necessary and we keep the rule to pay more for now (and save our dev team time and keep focused on goals). we will work later on optimizing costs. 🚩 Still cannot measure conversion properly, so we still cannot invest in ads and scale paid traffic. 🚩 Traffic from new users is not growing. For October traffic was even going down. An increasing part of our sales are made from legacy customers, so our income rely too much on people we already attracted. We must attract new users/customers.
Delegate more by hiring
Expand the AI project
Organize the production pipeline, make it faster