All Hands MeetingJanuary 2015

Achievements in Q3/Q4

Team Growth• We grew by 4 full-time

developers in Q3/Q4 and one already in Q1

• In terms of raw “hours of coding per week” we’ve more than doubled!

• We’re starting to look for a senior marketing manager and another developer in Q1

Product improvements

• Q3 and Q4 were rather quiet in terms of feature releases

• Timur & Kolja on vacation, we had just lost Damien, Per on sick-leave a lot

• Some nice features made it though, many smaller improvements too (and major work in progress)

New Landing Page

New User Directory

New Release Notes

Objectives Overview Beta

New integrations

Customers vs Revenues

• We made $1.72m in 2014! Customer number doubled!!

$0

$150.000

$300.000

$450.000

$600.000

0

125

250

375

500

Quarter Q4 ‘11

Q1 ’12 Q2 ’12

Q3 ’12

Q4 ’12 Q1 ‘13

Q2 ’13

Q3’13 Q4’13 Q1’14 Q2’14 Q3’14 Q4’14

Revenue collected 8k 22k 65k 40k 72k 140k 193k 257k 283k 320k 402k 432k 564k

Active paying customers

7 19 32 50 73 111 145 195 230 285 350 419 445

MRR growth

• Our most important metric: How much do we make per month, with annual payments broken down per month.

Customers - overviewNov 14 Dec 14

Customers 439 452

Bronze 115 113

Silver 135 137

Gold 189 202

NPOs 33

0

125

250

375

500

Nov 2014 Dec 2014 Jan 2015

202189

137135

113115

Bronze Silver Gold

United States62,5%

Australia14,2%

United Kingdom4,6%

Canada4,6%New Zealand

2,2%

Germany1,7%

Switzerland1,0%

Outlook

• Collected $180k in January already

• Current 52 week window: $1.82m (up from $1.72m)

• $170k in outstanding invoices (a lot)

• Goal for 2015: $3m revenue (75% growth)

In summary

• It was an awesome Q3/Q4

• Not because of the stuff we shipped, but because we prepared for massive improvements in 2015

• And we have the money to fund it :)

Features in progressA peek into the SI workshop

User Import Rewrite• Import must become scalable and performant for

larger clients too. It’s very limited right now.

• CSV Import needs to become self-service, it’s taking too much time on our end

• We want new integrations (Workday! OneLogin! Okta!)

• While at it, we’ll drop lots of old brittle code

• Andi started in Nov, now joined by Kolja and Michael

Cycle Roadmap• Robin worked on this under guidance of Timur and

Sebastian

• Almost ready for prime time, but we need feedback from CS team and from clients!

• Once we’re happy, it will be centerpiece for admin dashboard and cycle administration

• Demo Time! Robin!

Roadmap Prototype

(The screenshot doesn’t do the roadmap justice. It’s highly interactive and adjustable.)

Objectives: Not user-friendly enough

• It needs to get easier to view, create and edit objectives

• Commenting “pollutes” the messaging stream

• There’s no change log. (We don’t have that anywhere, but it hurts most in objectives)

• Very cycle centred

• Hard to see what my team/ manager/ coworker are up to

• Not possible to sort by due date

Objectives: Not discoverable

• OKR

• Company/ team objectives

• Alignment

• …

Objectives: Currently missing

• It’s a huge task, but we’ve started working on it

• Focusing on view, edit and create right now

• Prototyping team/company goals and KRs

• Will take several months to complete, but the “living prototype” looks quite neat already:

Objectives overhaul needed!

Objectives stream prototype

Milestones, members & alignment prototype

Mobile App

Mobile App Beta – finishing touches

• All basics apart from 360s are now working

• First real customer to test: Dean from Rockend

• Cosmetic changes and improvements needed

• Beta launch planned for end of Q1

Challenges ahead

Competition heating up

• We’ve survived other competitors, and none of the above are exactly in the same space. No need to panic. But we need to take these seriously

Yes that’s pretty cool

Some SI features look old!• Our user profile pages look really quite terrible

• Our dashboard isn’t that hot

• Evaluator experience far from awesome

• Many workflow steps are too complicated

• This is hurting our conversion rate. Customer retention remains very high, but that’s not sufficient

Tech debt

• Lots of “founder code” in backend

• FC helped us get started, but frustrates dev team

• Still too much reliance on Wicket AJAX (instead of Angular) which doesn’t work that well on complex screens.

What will we do?• Improve code so we can scale the team

• Improve code to reduce support challenges

• More and better functionality!

• Changes will confuse some existing clients

• But to compete, we have no choice

• Improve communication regarding changes

Features planned…on top of small improvements and bugfixes

Considerations• So many projects to pick from, need to strike balance

• Keep existing & growing clients

• Must attract evaluators, look great for marketing

• Fix architecture and reduce code debt

• Improve supportability

• Prioritise some easy wins

Considerations

• Roadmaps change!

• Nothing of the following features is guaranteed to ship, better ideas may pop up

• But the following list is a good approximation

• Definitely no ETA’s!

Audit log• Each cycle and each user should display audit

logs, so clients can figure out problems by themselves, and have confidence in product

• Common question: “was an email sent to XY? We don’t see it”. Audit log for cycle and user will help

• We track the data already (activity observer), need a nicer presentation format. Not super easy, but not that hard either

Guidance feature• Tell admins about challenges and problems

• “You have too many/too few HR admins”

• “No upcoming objectives cycle”

• “5 managers not notified about reviews yet”

• Start with cycle and user overviews, longer term on dashboard

Even better release notes

• We finally ship more and more nice features

• Need to alert customers using a bell

• Ideally present changes on a neat overlay - triggered manually by clicking bell, and automatically for large scale features

User Management

• “Hipster view” tab like on our SI “about us” page

• Display user statistics over time

• General usability

• Fairly easy to code, nice screenshots for marketing, and very useful for end users too

Messages rewrite• The focus will be to recreate similar functionality,

plus important improvements:

• Praise multiple people

• Share with management chain (so future managers see this)

• Better and faster browsing and filtering, improve 1:1 notes experience

User Profiles

• Improve profile view and timeline

• The most important evaluator & end-user feature

• Use the timeline to generate the digest mails

Dashboard Preparations• Rewriting Dashboard is huge undertaking

• Most likely outside Q2 scope

• But we have to get started!

• Key ingredient is the todo-list, so we start with that

• Later on, we’ll combine cycle roadmap, guidance feature, timeline view and todo list in some awesome way. But not in Q1/Q2 yet

Customer Success

Status quo of Freshdesk tickets

Category# of Tickets mid Oct - mid Jan % of Total

Uncategorized 213 24,90%

Billing 200 23,40%

Administration 151 17,70%

Performance Reviews 89 10,40%

360 Feedback 79 9,20%

Objectives 40 4,70%

Trial Extension 30 3,50%

Password Probs 16 1,90%

Website Issue 15 1,80%

Messages 11 1,30%

Email Probs 11 1,20%

Total 855 100,00%

Trial Extension 4%

Objectives 5%

360 Feedback 9%

Performance Reviews 10%

Administration 18%

Billing 23%

Uncategorized 25%

Next steps for Freshdesk

• Simpler categories to track important messages

• Avoid uncategorised tickets > digging deeper

• Billing – mainly renewal, followed by customers then payment questions > automation?

• Administration – integration questions and user management

Rewriting ‘pre sales’ emails as well as ‘post sale’

• Targeting specific usage (small trial group vs large, many log ins vs few)

• Including new materials available

• Creating emails post purchase to keep conversation going

Starter guide

• What is SI, how to trial it and how to purchase

• Explaining cycles

• ‘Did you know?’ sections

• All important links in one document

Planned projects

• Case studies/How to’s - first up bottom up reviews

• Videos (user directory, end user views, objectives)

• Documentation overhaul

• Migration to Highrise

Marketing

2015 is the year!• Freelance project

• Blogging and thought leadership

• Social media marketing

• PR and exposure

• Communities

• ?

Improvements• Customer testimonials – diversity in location and

industries

• News section > mentions of SI

• Interesting reads > External articles as reference

• More newsletters!

• Twitter and LinkedIn

Even more newsYes, we’re running late, but…

US Office

• Hired accountant at last

• will talk to lawyer to prepare work contract templates

Berlin office search

It is getting crowded…

Pretty cool if we could sign this office! Currently a

showroom :)

Questions!