Happy Holidays 2022
This is an open holiday letter to employees of The Org
Dear Orgonauts,
It’s been quite a year. The global economic crisis has been a challenge for us just like it has been for the wider industry. We were forced to make difficult strategic decisions and let go of some beloved colleagues in the process. It has been hard, but we have emerged as a stronger company.
Some of the world’s most successful companies were built during hard economic times. PayPal was started right before the dot com crash of 2000. Airbnb was started in the aftermath of the last financial crisis in 2007. These startups weathered the storm and are now some of the most successful companies in the world. The economic climate forced them to operate in a focused manner with a solid foundation.
Recently, companies have been rewarded for hyper growth without a solid foundation. They were able to do that because of the abundance of venture capital and exit opportunities to an overheated market with severe FOMO. Some companies with a solid foundation fell into the same trap of scaling too fast. We were one of them…
We have a unique business with high barriers to entry and a scalable go-to-market strategy, but we scaled too fast before we had the fundamentals of our core business in place. This wasn’t something we did intentionally, but was born from a desire to grow quickly and compete in an overheated market. We were in a fortunate position to have the time to adjust to reality.
This summer, we initiated “Project Reset” which focused us around 3 key objectives: traffic growth through SEO, contribution growth through employer branding, and revenue growth through data monetization. We slashed our marketing spend and prioritized driving organic growth. We put our heads down and executed on the product strategy and are already seeing positive results.
I want to thank all of you for your hard work in 2022. We achieved some amazing things that sometimes get lost in the frenzy. We passed 100,000 public org charts with more than 1.6 million professionals. We now get more than 600,000 unique visitors to our site every month. We have real customers paying for our services. Very few companies achieve even a fraction of what we have done.
I am also grateful for the fun memories we made this year. In the spirit of hygge, we held our annual offsite at a cozy lakeside retreat in upstate New York. It was so energizing to see people connect both professionally and personally across our offices. This year, our Copenhagen office moved to a bigger (and better) location as we continue to scale our Engineering Team, and our New York office hosted multiple events for founders in the local tech scene.
I’m personally excited about the year to come. We need to keep growing (organically) and raise our next round of financing in a challenging economic climate. It won’t be easy but we will get it done. I have so much belief in our team’s ability to execute and in our long term vision to create a more connected and equitable professional community.
Happy Holidays!
Christian
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