3. Team Growth
• We grew by 4 full-time
developers in Q3/Q4 and one
already in Q1
• In terms of raw “hours of
coding per week” we’ve more
than doubled!
• We’re starting to look for a
senior marketing manager and
another developer in Q1
4. Product improvements
• Q3 and Q4 were rather quiet in terms of feature
releases
• Timur & Kolja on vacation, we had just lost Damien,
Per on sick-leave a lot
• Some nice features made it though, many smaller
improvements too (and major work in progress)
11. MRR growth
• Our most important metric: How much do we make per month, with
annual payments broken down per month.
12. Customers - overview
Nov 14 Dec 14
Customers 439 452
Bronze 115 113
Silver 135 137
Gold 189 202
NPOs 33
0
125
250
375
500
Nov 2014 Dec 2014 Jan 2015
202
189
137135
113115
Bronze Silver Gold
United States
62,5%
Australia
14,2%
United Kingdom
4,6%
Canada
4,6%New Zealand
2,2%
Germany
1,7%
Switzerland
1,0%
13. Outlook
• Collected $180k in January already
• Current 52 week window: $1.82m (up from $1.72m)
• $170k in outstanding invoices (a lot)
• Goal for 2015: $3m revenue (75% growth)
14. In summary
• It was an awesome Q3/Q4
• Not because of the stuff we shipped, but because
we prepared for massive improvements in 2015
• And we have the money to fund it :)
16. User Import Rewrite
• Import must become scalable and performant for
larger clients too. It’s very limited right now.
• CSV Import needs to become self-service, it’s taking
too much time on our end
• We want new integrations (Workday! OneLogin! Okta!)
• While at it, we’ll drop lots of old brittle code
• Andi started in Nov, now joined by Kolja and Michael
17. Cycle Roadmap
• Robin worked on this under guidance of Timur and
Sebastian
• Almost ready for prime time, but we need feedback
from CS team and from clients!
• Once we’re happy, it will be centerpiece for admin
dashboard and cycle administration
• Demo Time! Robin!
19. Objectives: Not user-friendly
enough
• It needs to get easier to view, create and edit
objectives
• Commenting “pollutes” the messaging stream
• There’s no change log. (We don’t have that
anywhere, but it hurts most in objectives)
20. • Very cycle centred
• Hard to see what my team/ manager/ coworker are
up to
• Not possible to sort by due date
Objectives: Not discoverable
21. • OKR
• Company/ team objectives
• Alignment
• …
Objectives: Currently missing
22. • It’s a huge task, but we’ve started working on it
• Focusing on view, edit and create right now
• Prototyping team/company goals and KRs
• Will take several months to complete, but the “living
prototype” looks quite neat already:
Objectives overhaul needed!
26. Mobile App Beta –
finishing touches
• All basics apart from 360s are now working
• First real customer to test: Dean from Rockend
• Cosmetic changes and improvements needed
• Beta launch planned for end of Q1
29. Competition heating up
• We’ve survived other competitors, and none of the
above are exactly in the same space. No need to
panic. But we need to take these seriously
31. Some SI features look old!
• Our user profile pages look really quite terrible
• Our dashboard isn’t that hot
• Evaluator experience far from awesome
• Many workflow steps are too complicated
• This is hurting our conversion rate. Customer
retention remains very high, but that’s not sufficient
32. Tech debt
• Lots of “founder code” in backend
• FC helped us get started, but frustrates dev team
• Still too much reliance on Wicket AJAX (instead of
Angular) which doesn’t work that well on complex
screens.
33. What will we do?
• Improve code so we can scale the team
• Improve code to reduce support challenges
• More and better functionality!
• Changes will confuse some existing clients
• But to compete, we have no choice
• Improve communication regarding changes
35. Considerations
• So many projects to pick from, need to strike balance
• Keep existing & growing clients
• Must attract evaluators, look great for marketing
• Fix architecture and reduce code debt
• Improve supportability
• Prioritise some easy wins
36. Considerations
• Roadmaps change!
• Nothing of the following features is guaranteed to
ship, better ideas may pop up
• But the following list is a good approximation
• Definitely no ETA’s!
37. Audit log
• Each cycle and each user should display audit
logs, so clients can figure out problems by
themselves, and have confidence in product
• Common question: “was an email sent to XY? We
don’t see it”. Audit log for cycle and user will help
• We track the data already (activity observer), need
a nicer presentation format. Not super easy, but not
that hard either
38. Guidance feature
• Tell admins about challenges and problems
• “You have too many/too few HR admins”
• “No upcoming objectives cycle”
• “5 managers not notified about reviews yet”
• Start with cycle and user overviews, longer term on
dashboard
39. Even better release notes
• We finally ship more and more nice features
• Need to alert customers using a bell
• Ideally present changes on a neat overlay -
triggered manually by clicking bell, and
automatically for large scale features
40. User Management
• “Hipster view” tab like on our SI “about us” page
• Display user statistics over time
• General usability
• Fairly easy to code, nice screenshots for marketing,
and very useful for end users too
41. Messages rewrite
• The focus will be to recreate similar functionality,
plus important improvements:
• Praise multiple people
• Share with management chain (so future
managers see this)
• Better and faster browsing and filtering, improve
1:1 notes experience
42. User Profiles
• Improve profile view and timeline
• The most important evaluator & end-user feature
• Use the timeline to generate the digest mails
43. Dashboard Preparations
• Rewriting Dashboard is huge undertaking
• Most likely outside Q2 scope
• But we have to get started!
• Key ingredient is the todo-list, so we start with that
• Later on, we’ll combine cycle roadmap, guidance
feature, timeline view and todo list in some
awesome way. But not in Q1/Q2 yet
45. Status quo of Freshdesk
tickets
Category
# of Tickets
mid Oct - mid Jan % of Total
Uncategorized 213 24,90%
Billing 200 23,40%
Administration 151 17,70%
Performance Reviews 89 10,40%
360 Feedback 79 9,20%
Objectives 40 4,70%
Trial Extension 30 3,50%
Password Probs 16 1,90%
Website Issue 15 1,80%
Messages 11 1,30%
Email Probs 11 1,20%
Total 855 100,00%
Trial Extension
4%
Objectives
5%
360 Feedback
9%
Performance Reviews
10%
Administration
18%
Billing
23%
Uncategorized
25%
46. Next steps for Freshdesk
• Simpler categories to track important messages
• Avoid uncategorised tickets > digging deeper
• Billing – mainly renewal, followed by customers
then payment questions > automation?
• Administration – integration questions and user
management
47. Rewriting ‘pre sales’ emails
as well as ‘post sale’
• Targeting specific usage (small trial group vs large,
many log ins vs few)
• Including new materials available
• Creating emails post purchase to keep
conversation going
48. Starter guide
• What is SI, how to trial it and how to purchase
• Explaining cycles
• ‘Did you know?’ sections
• All important links in one document
49. Planned projects
• Case studies/How to’s - first up bottom up reviews
• Videos (user directory, end user views, objectives)
• Documentation overhaul
• Migration to Highrise
51. 2015 is the year!
• Freelance project
• Blogging and thought leadership
• Social media marketing
• PR and exposure
• Communities
• ?
52. Improvements
• Customer testimonials – diversity in location and
industries
• News section > mentions of SI
• Interesting reads > External articles as reference
• More newsletters!
• Twitter and LinkedIn