Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Yeah. That's not, not horrible. Um, and then walk me through again that the second tough decision you guys just made, right? So, I mean, what were you guys paying yourselves and what'd you guys decide to cut it down to?
A Okay. Well, so we, we were paying ourselves, um, We paid ourselves nothing for the first two years of the company. Um, and then as we started generating revenue, we paid ourselves, I don't know, some poverty level salary, like 30,000 dollars, uh, a year Canadian dollars. Um, and then it was 50, and then we got up to like 80, and, um, and, you know, we're trying to recoup some of the debt that we've personally, um, put ourselves into, but, you know, We feel comfortable doing those things because we have generated revenue, um, enough revenue to keep the business, uh, sustainable if we had to cut expenses. Um, but yeah, we cut our, our salaries recently, 20%. Um, but we're in a position now where things look stable. Like I said, it looks like this actually will end up helping us. We're grateful for that. So we're, we're probably going to go back to what we were.
AI assessment note: “we got up to like 80... we cut our salaries recently, 20%.”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 5 4.45
Q Yep. And what is your, you know, you can survive with a lot of churn if you're not bleeding cash to acquire customers, right? So to get a new 400 or 500 dollar a month customer, what are your, what's your fully weighted CAC?
A Yeah, so that's where it's a blessing and a curse for us. So we do not yet know how to take one dollar and turn it into two, which is unfortunate. What is fortunate about our model is that 95% of our sales come inbound organic. So we're relying heavily on existing channels of distribution like the Slack app directory, the Atlassian marketplace, Google marketplace, so on and so forth. We're investing in content marketing and SEO, which seems to be starting to work. But, um, we do not do almost any paid acquisition. We do some experiments from time to time. We do a little bit of retargeting. So I can't actually tell you what our, our crack is.
AI assessment note: “95% of our sales come inbound organic. So we're relying heavily on existing channels”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.00
Q test out the valuation calculator for free. That's NathanLacca.com forward slash F-L-I-P-P-A. Let me see. So what else am I missing here? Right about the story, right? You told us you launched 20 15 sort of messy cap table, but saved you cash early on. 40 customers today, 25 grand in MRR. You're burning right now, which is fine. I mean, what about churn? Churn's critical in a SaaS company.
A Yeah. So, I mean, that took us a while to figure out. So we say that we launched OB in 2017, which is, uh, when we were coming out of 500 startups. That's sort of when we pivoted in into OB away from the onboarding solution. And it took us until last year to figure out churn. We really, that's sort of when we discovered that, uh, you know, we've hit this elucid thing called product market fit. Um, Uh, defined by just surveying a lot of users and, um, and using some of the existing frameworks out there. But now we have churn really stable. It's below three percent a month. So, um, it took us a long time to figure that out though. And, and it's become, uh, the core product when I talk about the mid-market product that's Based on top of Slack, that's very niche for us. And that's why we recently developed the browser extension to sort of broaden our horizon a little bit. Um, but in order to get to product market fit, in order to get that churn down and really understand who a qualified customer was, we had to narrow that scope a lot.
AI assessment note: “now we have churn really stable. It's below three percent a month.”
Partly produced feed
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 4 3.45
Q And, and, well, I mean, a lot of founders did what you did, right? They cut their salary. I mean, out of here, I mean, how do you have the tough conversations about how much you cut your salary and then the decisions about, well, crap, I have real living expenses. I live in Memo Park. It's not cheap, right? I mean, how do you think through all that?
A Yeah. I mean, I think that's what makes our team unique is that we've constantly had to make those tough decisions. Like before we got into 500 startups, the company was almost dead and, you know, we hung on, we bootstrapped, we got really creative with the expenses. So this isn't something that's foreign to us. Um, I, I'm, we, me and my co-founder made the decision to not cut our employees salaries, just our own. So that conversation becomes a little easier to have. Um, but we did set the expectation with the team that if things took a turn for the worst, that that's where it would end up. So just setting the expectations early is, is what we decided to do.
AI assessment note: “made the decision to not cut our employees salaries, just our own.”
