Carter Lathrop for Paperstreet
Engage and grow your startup network through beautiful company updates.
Hi everyone,
For those who don't know me, I'm Carter, Co-Founder, and CTO of Paperstreet. I run all things product, architecture, and development here.
If you don't recognize me, that's ok, it's been a while since I've written an update. Matt and I recently decided to give a go of switching off writing our updates so that I can better put myself in the proverbial driver's seat of our own product.
I've added some new faces to this newsletter from my network, if this is the first update you're receiving this will catch you up nicely with the current state of affairs, for everyone else this should give you some insights into how Matt's better half thinks 😏
Lastly, we will be shifting towards quarterly updates for the foreseeable future as we simply don't have the manpower at the moment to continue with monthly updates. We hope to get back in a monthly cadence as we start to distribute our workload to new partners.
Before we get started, a few shoutouts for those that deserve recognition.
- A BIG shoutout to my father, @Howard Lathrop, who has recently moved to Portugal for a sabbatical from his work as a prolific modern architect, has started writing and editing (wonderfully) for our blog! Talk about a career shift!
- @Willie Jiang for his masterful SEO/SEM and marketing consulting work he has been doing for us 👏
- @Saba Karim We are eternally grateful for the work you've put in spreading the good word of Paperstreet 🙏
- @Jack and his team at friendly.studio for their skills and overall great attitude. My favorite part about what we do is when we get to create new products, you've always been a big part of that fun.
- @Mark at Trixta for the late nights ideating with Matt and sharing with us your architectural wisdom and predictions.
Self serve onboarding & Portfolio invites
For the past 2 years, we have onboarded nearly 1,000 companies to Paperstreet... all manually. While it has been enormously time-consuming to do, in retrospect there was plenty of good to go with the bad. Good because it gave us an opportunity to engage with and get to know our users by speaking with them directly. Bad because it started to take an extremely large chunk of time away from the product, ops, and marketing as we started to onboard hundreds of companies a month. Launching self-serve onboarding has allowed us to get back to new product development while the Paperstreet network can continue to grow organically.
Self-serve onboarding for new companies, portfolios, and general members.
Freemium
We have started to segment the product into free and premium versions which allows us to generate revenue for those users that want to be able to have an upgraded experience. We will be tracking revenue from here on out on the premium product and use the first month of this upcoming quarter to optimize conversion rates as we also focus on new product development.
Breakdown of freemium for companies (subject to change)
What's next?
With the core company updates the product in good shape and growing organically at a steady pace, we have set new priorities for the next few quarters on expanding the portfolio experience.
Portfolio metrics concept design
To achieve this, we are looking forward to re-engaging with our friends and skilled partners that we’ve had the honor of getting to know and working with in the past. The goal of this expansion is two-fold:
- Data - Helping companies and portfolios collect, quantify, and permission their company & portfolio metrics.
- Collaboration - Improve engagement and discussion around company and portfolio performance to help our users with SWOT analysis and portfolio trends.
To do this we're going to need some help...
We're expanding our team
Time to meet the teams that are working with Paperstreet this quarter. Some faces are new and some have been around the block with us once or twice.
Marketing
This quarter we are setting ourselves up for long-term success in SEO by utilizing @Willie Jiang and his content team to bolster our blog. Check it out here. Additionally, we’re excited to have @Saba Karim advising Willie's team on creative direction. Together we'll be a powerhouse in portfolio management & investor reporting keyword rankings.
Design
Jack & friends at friendly.studio will be helping us with the product vision and design for Metrics, our most ambitious and requested product to date.
Development
Our good friends at Trixta are the primary implementation partner for the development of the upcoming Metrics product. By utilizing and integrating with the Trixta platform, we will not only speed up development time by 30%, but we will also be well-positioned to move Paperstreet to a more decentralized architecture. This will allow our users better sovereignty of portfolio and company data along with setting the stage for application development on top of the Paperstreet network.
- ➡️ Completed development of company onboarding
- For the past 2 years, we've manually onboarded all ~1,000 companies on Paperstreet. We cannot tell you how excited we are to never have to create a company account from scratch again.
- 💰Started generating revenue from premium company accounts.
- ✍️Launched Paperstreet Blog & SEO optimizations
- We've started measuring our marketing efforts to get a better understanding of where our customers are coming from. Today 90%+ of users and our waitlist comes from referrals. What will happen when we have fine-tuned SEO and an established web and social presence?
- Check it out! https://blog.paperstreet.vc
- 👋 We lost our full-stack developer, Will, this quarter which has slowed down our product development. Will was with us from the early beginnings of Paperstreet post pivot. Paperstreet was his first professional programming job and we're extremely proud of how far he's come and thankful for all the work he put into Paperstreet's vision.
- 🐢Though we just started tracking revenue from company accounts, revenue growth this quarter was inhibited by the inability to ship onboarding in February as originally planned due to lost dev resources.
We've decided to end our fundraising journey and focus solely on product development and growth.
Our company has enough funding to expand and grow for the next 2 years. It's been quite a journey to get here and we're ecstatic for the future ahead!
As our platform has matured, our priorities have changed and so have our KPIs. We have plenty of users using the platform consistently. For the past few months we've been focused on using portfolios as distribution channels for our product, over the coming months we're going to be doubling down on activating these channels as they sign up.
Current KPIs:
- # portfolios created this year: 34
- # total portfolios: 97 (35% growth)
- # companies created this quarter: 130
- # companies created total: 781 (13% growth)
- company activation last quarter: (51/130) 39.2%
- New companies that have created accounts, added contacts, and distributed an update.
- company retention: 76% (companies who have sent one update that was active in the past quarter)
- company MRR: $600
- We've slowly been converting startups from our waitlist to paying customers, once we launch freemium we're expecting to see an increase in usage as well as an increase in paying customers.
Future KPIs:
- Over the next quarter, we're going to be evaluating two important factors with portfolio admins, activation, and retention.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading my first update in what feels like years. This was fun and I hope I could shed some light on the inner workings of what I'm personally thinking about when it comes to our product and the future of Paperstreet.
If you have any questions, are interested in creating a portfolio account with us or just want to say, feel free to respond to this email!
Mahalo!
Carter Lathrop
CTO @ Paperstreet
[email protected]