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January 2018 Advisor Update

Happy 2018!

We're looking forward to an exciting year with developments in product, marketing, and sales.

Product

* Soft launched to AXA (80 alumni). Adapting product to feedback. Expected to complete rollout by end of January.

* Launching to DREAM (first paying customer) next week.

* AXA successfully raised $3000 through Elodyn in a week, using the email and donation features. This will be a useful case study for sales.

Marketing

* Ongoing name change. Want to resolve confusion around current name and create a stronger brand.

* Ongoing website redesign. Will launch simultaneously with new name.

* Expected to go live in ~1 week.

Sales

* Plan to ramp up sales now that product us usable.

* Plan to reach out to 20+ new customers/week in 2018. Reached out to a total of 16 customers in 2017.

* As we increase volume, we will focus on making sales more efficient.

Our revenue goal is $100k in ARR by end of 2018, and we will use that to guide our decisions this year.

Looking forward to seeing what the new year brings!

Chris

December 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all -

Please see below for the November / December Elodyn update.

Sales and Marketing

In the past two months, we’ve tapped our network to generate warm leads and engaged these potential customers in a high touch sales process. Our goal is to deeply understand their needs, while continuing to improve the product, and complete rollout with our existing pilot customers. We are focusing on quality over quantity until we have a repeatable and effective sales process. In addition to our 2 confirmed pilot customers, we have engaged 13 new organizations. Of those, 4 will likely convert to customers, 7 are still early in the funnel, and 2 have said no.

In addition, I gave a half-day, in-person demo of Elodyn to 7 Dartmouth administrators. The demo was positioned as a feedback session. We are currently not a viable option for Dartmouth as a whole, but we received promising, positive feedback and got the go ahead to work with select campus organizations.

Users

We have 20 admins/users on the platform and are rolling out to ~100 users in the next week. We are waiting to rollout to the other 4k constituents until the organizations are set to launch.

Product

We launched our multidirectory search which allows people with multiple groups to search all of their communities. ~30 constituents have access to this functionality right now. We believe leveraging multidirectory is the competitive barrier we have to other directory-type products and will make our solution a sticky people search product. We also launched our onboarding flow and have worked a lot on UX design.

That’s it for now!

Chris

October 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all -

Joe and I started working together 6 months ago. We mainly build product and talk to customers and users. An updated demo is https://demo-college.elodyn.com/login/demo. We recently received our first signed annual contract for $1800 with DREAM.

AmeriCorps-Utah emailed us saying “One thing I was hired on to do (among a million other projects haha) was to revamp our alumni directory. We have 1,600 AmeriCorps members participate in our programs every single year, and no one is keeping track of that data at all. I feel like we are really missing out on connections, funding streams, creating a sense of community among our AmeriCorps alumni, and learning about how AmeriCorps service impacts career paths.”

Between DREAM and the inbound interest from AmeriCorps-Utah (demo in November), we know there is a market for our product and that people will pay for it. This obviously excites us. We plan to step up sales and marketing when we are confident we have satisfied our current customers.

We still have not had a demo with Dartmouth. I have not pushed it because our product improves daily and we have enough work with our current customers.

We still have a long runway, burning less than ~$2k a month.

Hope all is going well.

Chris

Runway

Q3 Goals:

• Start assessing / fine tuning SaaS metrics such as LTV, CAC (Failed - too early)

Q4 Goals:

• Understand profit margins on data enrichment, software costs.

Sales and Marketing

Q3 Goals:

• Standardize branding / name. (Failed -- naming is not a top priority)
• Lock down more paying and non paying customers. (Complete)

Q4 Goals:

• Get some good case studies from our initial pilots for future sales.

Product

Q3 Goals:

• Productionize Multi Directory Experience. (Failed - delayed because our current pilots don’t need it)
• Launch Product in September. (Complete)

Q4 Goals:

• Productionize Multi Directory
• Launch alumni product to alumni (currently launched to admins)
• Improve design (learn design/hire a designer on a consultant basis)

Revenue

Q3 Goals:

• Get MRR>$1k. (Failed)

Q4 Goals:

• 10 signed contracts / verbal LOI with paying customers.

September 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all -

August went by quickly, but we moved our platform forward dramatically. In customer news, we are releasing our platform to AXA's board in the next couple days and are getting a contract signed with DREAM next week. We have a demo with Dartmouth, Tuck, and Thayer administrators at the end of this month. We will ramp up sales at end of month.

Please check out our demo. To provide context, you are logging into the group "Dmouth" and have administrative privileges (though some admin actions are disabled) to this group. You have some groups you are associated with and can search, donate, or update your data. We are interested in any and all feedback. Please see below for the demo and click "Demo Login"

https://dmouth.elodyn.com/login/demo

A couple things to note:

• We know our search isn't perfect yet (for instance it doesn't know that when you search "lawyer" you mean "attorney", so only "attorney" works), but it should be illustrative of what we can do as we work on the fringe cases.
• We have done limited browser testing, so there are certain browsers that might look weird. If you see anything let us know!
• There are a few features that need some tweaks so may not be enabled, but will be updated shortly.

Let us know if you have any feedback.

Thanks,

Chris

August 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all -

Please see below for more in depth details and as always let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Chris

(Big Wins) and Questions and Concerns

We have significant interest from many organizations at Dartmouth. We are moving forward with AXA after a successful demo and are getting the sign offs from many athletic teams and class years. We have so much interest that we are interacting more directly with the Dartmouth administration.

I recently received an email from Judy Doherty, the Director of Information Management Systems at Dartmouth, telling us that we should hold off on getting more groups excited until we have spoken with her and discussed how we will manage our data with Dartmouth. I had previously chatted with her in person and on the phone; she knows what we are doing, and she has been a great resource. We are optimistic that given our good relationship with Judy, we can pilot our platform to a few small diverse types of organizations, and if all goes well, roll it out on a larger scale later with administration approval. Conversations like these are high stakes and will have significant impact on our product roll out strategy.

Runway

$184K IN BANK, $2K/MONTH BURN ~4 YEAR RUNWAY.

Expenses were <$1000 in June. In August, we start paying payroll to reimburse for healthcare and dental coverage. This will increase costs by ~$1000 a month through November, and then ~$1800/month.

We experimented with using contractors as remote researchers this month. These contractors help source some of the data (email, location, career etc) that we can't find via APIs. We may use them further, but we found that they were slightly expensive on a per record basis.

Last Month Goals:

• Fine tune contractor spend. (Not Complete)

Q3 Goals:

• Start assessing / fine tuning SaaS metrics such as LTV, CAC

Month Goals:

• Iron out payroll / healthcare reimbursement.
• Draft Y Combinator Application

Sales and Marketing

DEMO VIDEO CREATED. MORE CUSTOMERS

DREAM, a national non-profit mentoring program is looking to move forward with us. They have ~3000 people across 10+ schools and will be a good model to test our product with non profits.

We created a basic video to show off our demo. Please view it here. (and we finally have professional headshots).

Last Month Goals:

• Lock down more paying and non paying customers. (50%)

Q3 Goals:

• Standardize branding / name.
• Lock down more paying and non paying customers.

Month Goals:

• Refactor website to better communicate product.
• Finalize launch plan / date with existing customers.

Product Update

EMAIL AND EDIT OTHER PROFILE COMPLETE

We have made it very easy to email people off of a search query. The emails are branded with the customer's theme and picture and make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

It is now easy for administrators to directly edit other people's profiles to keep their data up to date.

We are almost done with handling some of the standard processes of creating accounts, changing passwords, forgetting passwords etc.

Last Month Goals:

• Productionize Email Feature. (Done)
• Fine tune search. (50%)

Q3 Goals:

• Productionize Multi Directory Experience.
• Launch Product in September.

Month Goals:

• Search.
• Finalize/test product for launch in early Sept.

Hiring

CREATING FRAMEWORK FOR FALL HIRING

Joe and I are doing well building product and selling to customers. However, once we launch in September, we will need more help to handle our customers while moving product forward.

We are leaning towards hiring a full stack engineer with 1+ years of professional engineering experience. Ideally this engineer has an eye for design and is particularly good at front end work. If you know of anyone that we should be speaking with, please email me.

We know that hiring will take up a lot of resources, and that on-boarding our first hire will take a while. We don't think we need to hire immediately, but would like to have another engineer fully on-boarded by January.

As an organization, we want to prioritize diversity and inclusion from the start. Joe and I come from similar backgrounds, and we believe that adding diverse perspectives to the team will benefit our product development and strategic decisionmaking. We also believe that getting diversity and inclusion right in the tech industry would be a significant competitive advantage as we look to hire and retain top talent. As we move forward with hiring, we will balance hiring quickly with finding hires that can complement our experience.

Month Goals:

• Draft initial job application / goals for new hire.
• Start networking to find appropriate candidates.

July 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all –

After a whirlwind tour of the East Coast, I am finally back in SF building product with Joe. My June travels went really well. Over two weeks, I met advisors and customers in Princeton, New York, Boston, and Hanover. Our biggest news is that we sold a $2k/year contract to the Pennington School, a top tier boarding school in Pennington New Jersey. We did not expect to generate revenue from this trip, but doing so this early in our company life is promising.

Please see below for more in depth details and as always let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Chris

Runway

$185K IN BANK, $2K/MONTH BURN ~4 YEAR RUNWAY.

We continue to fine tune our runway. Expenses will start to increase as we use data entry contractors in India/Phillipines. Additionally, Joe and I are about to get healthcare because we both are turning 26 soon.

Last Month Goals:

• Keep expenses down. Continue to tune costs / budget. (Completed)

Q2 Goals:

• Tune projections / runway. Keep expenses down. Keep legal expenses that are not customer related under $6k if possible. (Completed)

Month Goals:

• Fine tune contractor spend.

Q3 Goals:

• Start assessing / fine tuning SaaS metrics such as LTV, CAC

Product Update

DEMO BUILT. 2/3 OF PRODUCT PRODUCTION READY.

Demo built. Having a tangible product makes it easy to show people what we are doing.

Donations and updating information features are mostly done. The only major feature that needs to be refactored/productionized is Search.

We have started UX feedback sessions where we roll out a new feature and put it in front of a couple people. They are incredibly helpful to see how people intuitively use our tool. We will try to do these once a month.

Last Month Goals:

• Finish Demo (Completed)
• Have a fully launchable product - search, data enrichment, donations. (2/3)

Q2 Goals:

• Use alerts tool and directory with customer data and get customer feedback. (Completed)

Month Goals:

• Productionize Email Feature.
• Fine tune search.

Q3 Goals:

• Productionize Multi Directory Experience.
• Launch Product in September.

Revenue

ONE PAYING BOARDING SCHOOL.

Our current pricing is 50 cents/constituent/year for institutions (high schools, non profits). We will likely increase this to $1/constituent per year after Sep 1. Some users are free users, some are paid. We will need to standardize what features are available in each tier soon.

Our biggest expense with customers is data enrichment. We are using APIs and freelancers to enrich / check the data. Data enrichment will likely cost ~50cents / constituent, so at this price point most of our profit will come after a year.

Last Month Goals:

• Generate interest and feedback from revenue generating customers. (Completed)

Q2 Goals:

• Book revenue for the directory tool with a high school. (Completed)

Month Goals:

• Book revenue with another entity (high school, non profit)

Q3 Goals:

• Get MRR>$1k.

Big Wins

WE HAVE REVENUE

Initial revenue is huge.

Product is moving along nicely.

We have had over $4000 transacted over our platform.

Last Month Goals:

• Product market fit. We don't expect to reach it, but get closer with continual focus on speaking with customers / interested parties. (50%)

Q2 Goals:

• Product Market Fit. It is hard to assess when we will hit product market fit, and it will be a continued goal to maintain fit. We will know when we are close to fit when Elodyn spreads by word of mouth organically. (50%)

Month Goals:

• Lock down more paying and non paying customers.

Q3 Goals:

• Move from initial idea stage to a growth stage.

Sales and Marketing

WE HAVE A STRONG PIPELINE AND INTEREST.

We had four conversations with high schools. Pennington is sold. Saddle River and Chapin are strong possibilities, that I hope to lock down before September. Hun wants more high school validation before adopting.

We have had initial conversations with decision makers at Ski Patrol (250 ppl), Dartmouth Lacrosse (750 ppl), Dartmouth Rugby (750 ppl), Class of 1986 (1,000 ppl), and Class of 2014 (1100 ppl). I have a strong pipeline of additional decision makers at other Dartmouth organizations.

We have numerous high school leads, but am holding off until our platform is more stable and we have launched it with customers this fall.

Our website continues to improve. The biggest piece of feedback we get is that we need better headshots, which we have scheduled.

Last Month Goals:

• Optimize Website - Demo video, head shots. (50%)
• Generate and track inbound traffic.  (50%)

Month Goals:

• Lock down more paying and non paying customers.

Q3 Goals:

• Standardize branding / name.

Questions and Concerns

Our liaison to AXA has not been able to effectively communicate with the rest of the board. It turns out some AXA board members may want to prioritize other board initiatives before our rollout. Regardless, they are interested in using our platform, but the question is whether it will be in the next month or 6. We are demoing our product to them July 24 and will get a better sense of timing then.

PDS is still slow moving with data / contracts. While we don’t need their data right now because we have many other things to do, it would be nice to secure that relationship.

June 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all –

Elodyn moved forward dramatically in the last month. We built out our initial platform and started receiving feedback. Customer feedback has been positive and constructive. We have three core areas of our platform:

1) Search.  Alumni search with one search bar. Our goal is to have our search bar return results with the same confidence as a Google search. Instead of website results, we return people results.

2) Data. Alumni need to update their data seamlessly. They need to have a clear understanding of where there data is going and why it is used. Organizations’ data need to be held separately and securely.

3) Donations. Alumni need to be able to give money from any device super easily. Organizations need to have a very easy onboarding experience and see increased donations.

Please see below for our in-depth June advisor update.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns.

Chris

Runway

$187K IN BANK, <$1K/MONTH BURN, 4 YEAR RUNWAY

We have less than $500/month in software costs right now. These expenses are stable, but will grow as our platform grows. Sample size is still pretty small to get accurate projections.

There were no big expenditures this month on legal/insurance.

Last Month Goals:

• Fine tune software costs / budget. (50%)

Q2 Goals:

• Tune projections / runway. Keep expenses down. Keep legal expenses that are not customer related under $6k if possible.

Month Goals:

• Keep expenses down. Continue to tune costs / budget.

Product Update

INITIAL PRODUCT BUILT. DONATION PLATFORM LAUNCHED.

Please checkout our donation demo: Donate. Please do not actually put a credit card into the platform. FAQ and Other Ways to Give language will change.

We built out a donation tool for AXA to use as their donation platform. We have $750 already transacted over the platform and are rolling it out to 1300 people this week.

Customer feedback on the overall donation platform is positive. Every customer conversation helps us refine our product significantly.

Our reporting and alerts tools work really well and let us know whenever a bug occurs.

Last Month Goals:

• Q2 Ditto (Complete)

Q2 Goals:

• Use alerts tool and directory with customer data and get customer feedback. (Completed)

Month Goals:

• Finish Demo
• Have a fully launchable product (search, data enrichment, donations)

Revenue

NO REVENUE. SCHEDULED HS CONVERSATIONS.

I have conversations with 5 private high schools when I am back in NJ. While ideally these conversations will book revenue, I do not expect them to. I hope they generate interest, feedback, and future conversations.

Likely we will not generate revenue in June.

I have a few conversations with smaller Dartmouth organizations.

We will get pricing wrong. However for these initial high schools, we plan on charging $200/month with a 3 month period in which they can get their money back, no questions asked.

I expect we could charge a lot more as our feature set grows.

Smaller organizations will have a set of features for free. AXA would fall under this category.

We hope to start charging initial customers in September.

We have donations flowing through our platform, but are not charging for this feature.

Last Month Goals:

• Set up initial conversations with high schools for early June. (Completed)
• Have first conversations with small student organizations. (Postponed – conversations scheduled for June)
• Generate revenue through the donation part of the directory tool. (Failed)

Q2 Goals:

• Book revenue for the directory tool with a high school.

Month Goals:

• Generate interest and feedback from revenue generating customers.

Sales and Marketing

UPDATED WEBSITE. SCHEDULED CONVERSATIONS.

We updated our website. It still needs improvement with more product screenshots and better headshots.

This upcoming month we will start marketing our platform more aggressively. We will be able to demo our product in earnest.

In addition to meeting with the high schools, I have set up over 10 conversations with potential investors and advisors on the East Coast. I am not looking to raise money, simply generate feedback and interest.

Month Goals

• Optimize Website (Demo video, head shots)
• Generate and track inbound traffic

Big Wins

ELODYN HAS REAL USERS DONATIONS.

We have actual dollars flowing through our platform. We are releasing our donation platform to ~1300 people in the next two days.

We have shown adaptability and speed, being able to change priorities and help out AXA.

Product development is speeding up.

I had an hour and a half conversation with Judy Doherty, the head of Dartmouth's Alumni Network / Directory. She is more than willing to be a resource for us.

Last Month Goals:

• Roll out alumni directory and get initial feedback. (Completed)

Q2 Goals:

• Product Market Fit. It is hard to assess when we will hit product market fit, and it will be a continued goal to maintain fit. We will move towards it by maintaining a short feedback loop with customers. We will use that feedback along with our deepening industry knowledge to create products users love. We will know when we are close to fit when Elodyn spreads by word of mouth organically.

Month Goals:

• Product market fit. We don't expect to reach it, but get closer with continual focus on speaking with customers / interested parties.

Questions and Concerns

BUGS ARE ANNOYING AND STRESSFUL

We turned around our donation platform quickly. However, in our first roll out there were some bugs our testers encountered. Nothing major, but these are unfortunate, and we hope to minimize them. We need to set appropriate expectations with these initial customers that our platform is still in beta.

Now that product is being used publicly, we have additional responsibility to minimize errors and down time.

PDS is reviewing our contract as we speak. They are taking longer than expected, but their slowness has not slowed down our platform.

May 2017 Advisor Update

Hey all,

Elodyn is moving along well here in SF. Joe and I have now worked together for a month and are well on our way to building production versions of our alumni directory and alerts tools. Please see below for our in-depth May advisor update!

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns.

Chris

Runway

$187K IN BANK, $4K / MONTH BURN, ~4 YEAR RUNWAY

Please see attached for the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet

We paid up front ~$2k for a million dollar Cyber / Professional Liability policy that includes General Liability.

Last Month Goals:

• Keep expenses <$5k/month (COMPLETED).
• Identify how large customer legal expenses will be (In Progress).
• We haven’t finalized our contract with PDS yet because we are satisfying their security concerns.

Q2 Goals:

• Tune projections / runway. Keep expenses down. Keep legal expenses that are not customer related under $6k if possible.

Month Goals:

• Fine tune software costs / budget.

Product Update

ROLLED OUT ALERTS TOOL, MADE SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS ON DIRECTORY.

We built the alerts tool (Shinigami), then quickly moved away to focusing more effort on the directory (Taborlin). We believe that a donation platform coupled with an alumni directory will be more compelling than a life alerts tool.

The alerts tool was a great way for Joe and I to learn how to build a product together.

The directory has been completely overhauled from the previous prototype. We are now using react/redux and have used material design principles across our UI.

We hope to release the directory to AXA in the first two weeks of May.

Last Month Goals:

• Build / Use alerts tool. (Complete)
• Establish / Use security protocols. (Complete)
• Start building directory. (Complete)

Q2 Goals:

• Use alerts tool and directory with customer data and get customer feedback.

Month Goals:

• Q2 Ditto

Revenue

NO APRIL 2017 REVENUE

Previously we planned on a subscription enterprise sales model. We may still sell our platform that way, but our initial approach will be by taking a cut of donations that flow through our platform. By reducing cost and linking our service more directly with donations, we believe that it will be an easier sell to organizations and high schools at this early stage.

Last Month Goals:

• Start generating revenue on the death alerts tool (Postponed).
• The death alerts tool might be able to make $5/month from customers and is not worth the significant time and energy it takes to market it. We are focusing our efforts on building our more defensible, higher value, alumni directory.

Q2 Goals:

• Book revenue for the directory tool with a high school.

Month Goals:

• Set up initial conversations with high schools for early June.
• Have first conversations with small student organizations.
• Generate revenue through the donation part of the directory tool.

Data

RECEIVED 2 ORGANIZATIONS’ DATA (1400 CONSTITUENTS IN TOTAL). ADDRESSED SECURITY CONCERNS.

We spent a significant amount of time understanding the security landscape. We established a data access use policy, a network accessibility policy, and updated our contract to better support our customers.

We talked with security consultants and have security standards that meet best practices.

There are security audits for well established companies that our customers have asked about. These security audits cost ~$30k. We are working towards these audits, but are not ready to make that expenditure at this early stage. If these security audits are a deal breaker for the universe of our customers, we will reassess.

Last Month Goals:

• Address security concerns (completed).
• Store 8500 constituents data (in progress - ⅔ of organizations and 15% of goal records)

Q2 Goals:

• Have total booked constituents >25,000 from >6 organizations (booked means verbal agreements or signed LOIs)

Month Goals:

• Store PDS data. Create / use ontology of data for user auth / user queries.

Big Wins

Joe and I are getting into a rhythm together and are on the same page about company goals / future.

We learned a lot and have a deep understanding of the technologies required to build our product. Future product / feature rollout will be expedited.

We had an interview with Y Combinator. Though we did not make it to the next round, the head nod from a highly selective accelerator at this early stage was motivating.

Last Month Goals:

• Roll out initial versions of our products to customers and get initial feedback (Failed)
• We are still building product. We have refocused our efforts from the relatively simple death alerts tool to the more defensible alumni directory tool, delaying our product roll out.

Q2 Goals:

• Product Market Fit. It is hard to assess when we will hit product market fit, and it will be a continued goal to maintain fit. We will move towards it by maintaining a short feedback loop with customers. We will use that feedback along with our deepening industry knowledge to create products users love. We will know when we are close to fit when Elodyn spreads by word of mouth organically.

Month Goals:

• Roll out alumni directory and get initial feedback.

Questions and Concerns

BUILDING PRODUCT TAKES A WHILE, DEADLINES GET PUSHED.

I worry that we are making serious headway, but that it is taking us too long to build product and get it in front of people. I want to make sure that we release quickly, but I understand that we need to have solid fundamentals before establishing a framework for our tools.

Last Month Goals:

• Identify terms of service landscape and how best to design around them. (Completed)
• Enriching data is expensive and will only get us so far. We are moving towards incentivizing user input to generate better data. This requires more effort on the part of the user, but we believe this is the best source of data.
• Identify procedures to lessen customer security concerns. (Completed)
• We implemented a wide range of security procedures to diminish our customer concerns.
• Monitor legal expenses. (Completed)
• Legal fees were ~$2k in March and are expected to be low in April.

Q2 Goals:

• Ping advisors as questions/concerns arise.

Month Goals:

Stay on top of deadlines.