I Know What We Did Last Winter
(NowFloats Annual Mail, Dec 2015)
This time last year, I wrote this slightly caffeinated e-mail to my rapidly expanding team. As I prepare my annual e-mail for 2016, I have a lot to draw from the past three years’ worth of reflections. My previous mails are here, if you need context for my excitement. This is from 2015-
As we start the new year, I wanted to share some of the key highlights & lowlights of 2015, and set the stage for 2016.
So here is the NowFloats growth over the last 3 years; extracted from the last 2 annual mails.
o Dec 2013: 4,500 customers // 1300 paid
o Dec 2014: 32,000 customers // 15,000 paid
o Dec 2015: 200,000 customers // 170,000 paid
This translates to over 500% YoY growth (all customers) and 1000% YoY growth (paid customers).
With these numbers we are already 25% of the ~700,000 SMB websites in India and attract 5% of all local searches on the mobile*
If this was not enough (and at NowFloats it usually is never enough!), in 2015, we increased our revenue 7x and grew our team, 3x.
(Do keep in mind our first product hit the market in Sept 2012)
So what does this really mean?
· We have highly relevant product(s) which continue to be well adopted and people see value in them to pay and renew.
· We are perhaps the only ‘latest local content platform’ which automates digital presence, SEO, SEM and engagement (RIA- our Relationship Intelligence Agent that prompts our customers to make the most relevant updates to their website) into one seamless product leading to higher revenues & profit for our customers.
· We continue to focus on free-to-paid conversion ratio which translates to higher revenues while our platform & processes are highly scale-able leading to higher margins.
· Most importantly, most of our original hypothesis continue to hold true:
o India SMB market is a tough segment, with high ROI expectation, proof-before-money and almost non-existent distribution channels.
o A frictionless product is the only way to penetrate this market.
o Learning and succeeding in the India SMB market has potential for a wider, global adoption.
o This market is evolving very fast. From being a predominant ‘do-it-for-me’ market, we are seeing the first hints of a ‘do-it-yourself’ market. From a ‘I bought a SmartPhone’ to ‘We don’t have reliable 3G’ market. This is getting proven by our growth and the NowFloats Digital Desh initiative (Refer here).
And it takes a kick-ass team to succeed in this market! And we know we have that… So THANK YOU to each one of you who has been a part of NowFloats.
On the subject of team, I want to highlight a team who have been so helpful and integral to our success, that they almost feel like NowFloats! I want to highlight Varun & Sohan from Constellation Blu. They have been exceptional in their support to us!
We also want to thank almost everyone at AskMe, all our Local Alliance Partners, our Digital Desh Partners and the participants which include Prathibha Sastry(Advisor), Animesh Khan (Zinnov), Ishaan Gupta (Interlude), Anu Subramanian & Abhineeta Raghunath(UrbanGirldom). Also to Sharad, Nakul & Avinash at iSPIRT, Tapaswi from Fox Mandal, our auditors Nandyala and finally, our investors.
While we have certainly grown a lot, it’s always good to remain self-critical and identify gaps for improvement. Here are things we need to get better at in 2016:
· Hiring the right talent at a faster pace
· Finance & operational processes
· Our sales need more enablement, training, leads and better customer expectation setting.
· Revenue diversification and up-selling/cross-selling
· Planning: In December, we have kicked off a massive internal project, code-named Auctus which is going to streamline this.
· Marketing & PR: While we got a fair bit of media coverage and awards/recognition, we have lots to do in terms of getting into more visible.
Finally, many of you know that I am inspired by amazing things happening around us. This year I want to highlight the one thing that stood out for me…
Canada. Yes, the country, which elected a 44-year-old Justin Trudeau as it’s PM. Among many things, I simply loved the answer to a simple question about why was he so intentional about picking a highly gender-diverse cabinet. His answer was: “Because its 2015!” (See this). So much of this resonates to me: picking a diverse team, being intentional, living in the present, standing behind what (frankly) looks like common sense to do in Canada but so hard to execute, etc.
And just by living in the present, being intentional and knowing that we have the capacity and capability to make a huge impact should drive us to bigger things…
Because its 2016!
Thank you,
-Jas
A scroll of the NowFloats on Twitter is highly advised, because we use Twitter as our record of reference :)
In the past few days, I posted the other e-mails I sent to my team in 2013 and 2014, which you will find here.
NowFloats is a company that puts small businesses online easily and makes them locally discoverable to generate more customer leads.
