Hi Rett, congrats on all your progress and the recent Techstars selection! Following up with some questions on behalf of my investing community, Doriot Venture Club (ventureclub.beehiiv.com). Thanks in advance for your responses. 1) Your campaign shows your revenue streams as employee benefit coverage and the $997 Sholder training fee. Can you give examples of how these are currently implemented with customers? 2) From signup to receiving their first paycheck, what is the average onboarding time for “sholders-in-training”? Is this scalable with rapid increases in user demand? 3) Are you able to share metrics like customer acquisition cost, user retention, and customer lifetime value? 4) Can you share more details on your B2B sales process? Of the $2.4M in your sales pipeline, what stages are they in and what is needed for them to convert to customers? 5) Are you currently raising any additional funds off Wefunder from private investors, and do you expect to reach your $50k minimum RegCF goal? I’m confused because your page shows your lead investor (Michael Silverman) as having invested $25,000, but it only shows the current RegCF total as $9,400. Thanks!
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Co-Founder; Chief Executive Officer
Hi Dan. Thanks re: Techstars, and I appreciate the patience in my response. Happy to share more here. 1. The $997 price is used for corporate training sales and full price consumers seeking personal growth and skills development. We currently discount the $997 training fee for anyone seeking to become qualified as providers on the platform, and we plan to offer the ability to "pay with future (platform) earnings". Regarding employee benefits, we bill as a standard monthly fee (or PEPM) plus per-session fees based on utilization. 2. Sholders are independent contractors, therefore each situation is different. That said, the minimum amount of time would be around 8 weeks from initial training. For someone seeking qualification for paid work on the platform, the initial training is followed by a minimum of 6 weeks of skills practice to demonstrate proficiency before a final qualification assessment. A new sholder can be booked immediately after becoming qualified, and earnings are paid out every two weeks with a gap of a few days between last earnings day and payout day (5th and 20th of each month). Today, we have capacity to serve over 20X the ARR we're doing and we have high confidence in our ability to attract great sholders and scale. 3. We're currently leveraging relationships, channel partners, and events to drive early customer growth, so CAC is a bit nuanced; best discussed in conversation. We track user retention and LTV, and while we're not publishing these numbers, we do benchmark them against performance of more traditional licensed therapy platforms and we're doing extremely well. 4. We sell as an employee benefit, which is often an annual sales cycle. Several recent customers in our pipeline opted to roll us out mid-cycle for specific reasons, so we've been gathering great insights to help shorten our sales cycles. One use of funds for our current raise is building sales & onboarding automation that will allow us to handle large numbers of smaller companies, which are easier to sell mid-cycle. 5. Yes, we are raising off platform (ref: Investor Presentation Slides). This crowdfund was done primarily for our community and providers. While we are not running a formal process or marketing strategy around it, we will absolutely put at least 50K through it. The campaign went live on March 11 (our team's first week of Techstars) and it will close on April 29. 80% of our communication will go out in the final 3 weeks before it closes, so may look a little different than other crowdfund efforts on this platform. Regarding our lead, Michael, you are correct - he invested directly into the business on the same terms, not through this portal. I appreciate you asking these questions and I responded to your previous note via email. Thanks, Dan.