Friday, 15 February 2019

Executive Summary Draft

Francis Pedraza
Invisible
Published in
7 min readFeb 15, 2019

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Description
Invisible lets you delegate repetitive digital work to a bot, which coordinates humans on a digital assembly line who securely log into your accounts and do the work by following step-by-step instructions — starting at $15/hr, before automation drives down costs further.

Market
Knowledge workers spend 41% of their time doing repetitive digital work: in the United States, the average knowledge worker makes $67,000 per year, so this inefficiency costs businesses $28,000 per person per year. Delegating 100% of that work to Invisible would save $20,000 per person per year in lost productivity! Invisible is the first affordable infinite delegation resource for everyone in an organization. People use it to 1) increase their productivity and do admin work, 2) power core business operations, like generating weekly reports for clients, and 3) generate leads and run sales processes so that sales and customer success teams can maximize time building relationships with and solving problems for their clients.

Competition
Invisible exists at the intersection of three industries: labor networks, robotic process automation, and AI-powered digital assistant bots.

Upwork is the largest labor marketplace in the world, but if you want to hire freelancers as digital assistants, you have to filter applicants, take security risks, design processes, provide training, and check the work — for each hire. Invisible is like a managed Upwork: it doesn’t matter how many hours of work you need done, or how many processes you need designed — we can do it, and we’ll guarantee the work. You don’t have time to hire, train, manage and coordinate an army of freelancers.

WorkFusion is the leading robotic process automation company. Enterprise clients, like large banks, will pay consultants to come in-house and map one processes at a time in one of their departments, like accounts receivable. WorkFusion will then automate about 20% of each process, so the bank can lay off, say, 20 people in a 100 person department. Invisible is like RPA-for-the-masses: every business can now afford automation, without paying for consultants or engineers. We deliver immediate relief with coordinated labor, and then drive down costs over time with automation. By constantly doing demand discovery with clients, designing processes for them, and then executing and upgrading over time, we already have the structured data required for automation. As soon as the volume justifies the investment, we’ll automate.

Apple, Google and Amazon are all investing in AI-powered digital assistant bots with a very limited set of features targeted at consumers. Despite the hype, general artificial intelligence may be a century away: it will be a long time before general AI bots are actually taking over knowledge work for businesses, or providing real admin and productivity leverage for consumers. They will remain marginal extensions of existing operating systems. But the reason why they are receiving so much R&D is that a full-service digital assistant would be the ideal interface for accessing all other services — a single bot that can do everything, a single touch point for unlimited specialization — so owning that relationship would make them the ultimate gatekeeper. As gatekeepers of the present with competing access points — operating systems, search, and commerce — they realize the value of building the single access point of the future. But NLP, neural networks and deep learning are long paths to delivering a value proposition that Invisible can effectively deliver today: “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Advantages
Invisible has created seven unique sources of leverage that allow us to compete at an advantage, and defend that advantage.

Our first advantage is UX: our website, client app and bot make it far easier for anyone in an organization to understand, use and access Invisible — than say, Upwork or WorkFusion.

Second, superior information architecture and content. We have a Process Library, Training Library and Template Library that allow us to continually upgrade service delivery. For example, we treat our Processes like products: version them, network them together, measure performance, collect feedback and upgrade them over time.

Third, The Digital Assembly Line. We have the best labor coordination technology in the world: we figured how to fit a hundred cooks in the kitchen. This allows us to deliver more labor specialization and more labor volume through a single touch point than has ever been possible. The platform includes routing tech, a time-tracker, reviewing system, messaging tool, load balancer, agent pay and more. Given privileged access to client accounts, security is something we take seriously and we’re continually upgrading the D.A.L. to make it more secure.

Fourth, Process Efficiency and Automation. We use speed benchmarks to measure Process Efficiency, automate our highest volume processes, and target gains of 2% a month against billable hours. The Digital Assembly is capturing more and more data as our agents execute process instances. In the future, we’ll use that data to build machine learning models. But for now, we’re build scripts, scrapers and operator tool features.

Fifth, The Agent Network and Model. “Agents” do billable work for our clients on the digital assembly line. We’ve built a truly global company, with 75 agents in 16 countries, and no country representing more than 8% of our workforce. We’ve received thousands of applications and only select the most motivated and able. Building our own labor network not only gives us independence and pricing power, it gives us the freedom to design our own culture and community.

Sixth, The Partner Network and Model. “Partners” are the core team that’s building the company, and we’ve built an ownership culture, where everyone owns a significant amount of equity, and pay is tied to gross profits. We’ve designed an innovative “Partner Pay Model” that determine’s everyone’s pay based on qualitative and quantitative evaluations which earn points in a formula. This has not only given us an incredibly powerful culture that is exceptionally can-do, self-reliant, motivated, aware and engaged — it has allowed us to attract talent that values ownership, team and mission above all, and are willing to work for less cash in the short term. As a result, we have a core team that is 4 times larger than we’d otherwise be able to afford, given the amount of capital raised to date.

Seventh, Client Network Effects. The more any individual client uses Invisible, the better the service gets for that client, as we gather context and preferences, and build and upgrade their processes. The more any team uses Invisible, the better it gets for that team, for the same reasons, but also because we can network data and processes together, power whole workflows, and keep everyone in sync. The more companies use Invisible, the better it gets for everyone, for the reasons already mentioned, but also because our process library grows and gets upgraded faster with more feedback. The larger Invisible grows, the better it gets, as our agent and partner networks surface more exceptional talent, as demand justifies automation investments and capital investments in UX, technology, systems, people and content. As the service gets better, faster and cheaper, it becomes easier for us to outperform any competition, and clients will use it more and for more things. Not to mention the brand value of exposure in reducing acquisition costs and increasing loyalty.

Strategy
Last year (2018), we grew from $5,000 a month in sales to $50,000 a month in sales, and last quarter (Q4 2018), we made the switch to a subscription model. By the end of this quarter (Q1 2019), we’ll be at or approaching $80,000 a month in sales, with 62.5% of that coming from subscriptions. By the end of Q3 2019, we’re targeting over $160,000 a month in sales ($2M ARR). If we hit this target, we plan to close a Series A by December 2019.

By the end of Q4 2019, we’re targeting $240,000 MRR ($3M ARR). The company should be profitable in the following quarter (Q1 2020). At our current burn rate, this round gives us runway until Q3 2020, but as revenue and gross margins increase, our burn rate will decrease steadily, and runway will extend.

In 2020, we would like to grow sales from $3M ARR to $15M ARR, and invest heavily in content, social media, and performance marketing and PR, outbound SMB and enterprise sales, customer success and account expansion, and process set commercialization.

Our website and core products — the client app and digital assembly line — have very clear roadmaps through the rest of 2019.

The website needs to more beautifully represent our entire process library, display speed benchmarks and version numbers, and make it easier to understand our core use case by bundling processes into packages (“sales in a box,” “operations in a box,” “productivity in a box”).

The client app needs to give clients more visibility into ongoing delegations, and make it easier to delegate, edit process instructions, add context and preferences, and adjust settings.

The digital assembly line needs to make it easier for agents to learn new skills, have predictable hours, see their performance and compensation measured in real-time, build, edit and use processes, and log in to client accounts via a virtual machine in-interface.

Vision
This company matters to us, because it incarnates our belief in human potential. If we organize you, you can be more creative. If we do your work for you, you’ll do your real work. If we make everyone twice as productive, there will be twice the innovation, twice the progress, twice the abundance.

70% of the world makes less than $10 a day. This is not only a tragic waste of human potential, it is also the biggest arbitrage opportunity in the world. Although there is nearly infinite demand for specialized digital labor, because of coordination costs, we’ve never been able to hire and train the rest of the world. But we can. And we can give them a career path and members of the digital class. By efficiently training agents, our constant automation is no longer a threat to them, but a relief in that it allows them to progress into increasingly advanced work.

Raising
Closing a $1M on a $15M SAFE by April 30th, 2019. 33% committed by existing investors.

Materials
— website: www.inv.tech
—overview deck: www.inv.tech/deck
— due diligence deck: [coming soon]
— team: www.inv.tech/team
— publications: www.inv.tech/publications
— data room: email francis@invisible.email to request access.

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