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COMING IN HOT TODAY 💥 

🌎 Athyna in 2023: Wins, losses and what’s to come in 2024.
🐣 And a few holiday tweets: Just for fun today.

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PARTNERS 💫

Today’s edition is presented by The Startup Podcast. Skip all the rookie mistakes and learn the secrets to building a venture-backed startup, the way they do it in Silicon Valley.

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BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Athyna 2023 Year in Review

Today marks the first building in public post for my startup, Athyna. For those that don’t know, I write Open Source CEO in my spare time when I have a moment to breathe from being Founder & CEO. This is usually on a Friday afternoon into the evening. And a Saturday morning, into the afternoon and sometimes … evening as well.

It’s amazing writing Open Source CEO as founder of Athyna. The newsletter allows me to network, learn, synthesise and then teach. All while building a big community of allies. It really does compliment incredibly well.

I had a great reception to my first building in public post on the business of this newsletter. So I thought it made sense to see if Athyna posts might be interesting from time to time too.

The answer was a resounding yes, so my plan is to write one or two posts per year talking about the success and failures we go through at Athyna. Enjoy!

Overview & recap

The past 12 months for us, from a macro view, were good. Ask me six-weeks ago and I would have told you we were on track for great. But unfortunately, we got burnt by churn to finish the year.

Comparing 2023 though to 2022 … oh dear lorrrrd I take 2023. After a frantic 2022, we were able to get back to building this year and get back to business as usual. Business as usual for us is strong growth, happy customer and a vibrant culture.

Our (new) tagline - Athyna is the platform matching incredible talent, with AI precision at lightning speed. 

In simple terms, we help job seekers find amazing jobs. An example of what we do is matchmake sales, marketing, product and engineering talent in South America with roles in the US. Talent gets paid 40-50% more, company saves 50-60%. Win-win.

How we set goals

We use goals and OKRs at Athyna. Starting at the organisation level, we meet as leaders and brainstorm which goals we should address for the coming period. These are usually big themes. High-level, macro ideas.

Once we are settled on the organisational goals, we then pass it to our department heads who will do another exercise from the bottom up. These will not be high-level goals, but rather defined OKRs, with every objective flowing from the over-arching company goal (here is a tool to do it yourself).

We like this structure well enough for the moment. We’ll most commonly set three to five goals for the organisation. Goals lead into objective, which lead into key results. Goals and OKRs really though, are a direction. A thinking exercise. Let’s take a look at how the year went overall.

Key metrics

• Monthly NRR - 101% up from 97% last year.

• ARR - $6,132,888 up from $3,642,559.

• ARPU - $7,407 up from $4,743.

Q1 - Close seed, churn, then mega-growth

The best way to start the year is on fire. The next best is to start well. We, though, lost 5% of our revenue in Jan. Yep, we went backwards. We put in sooo much work in 2022 that having a terrible start to the year was a bitter pill to swallow. But the year was surely not going to be as bad as 2022. At least that is what we had hoped.

Q1 also brought a lot more good news. We closed our Seed Round ($500k), we begun refinancing some pesky debt we had on our books, we started to rebuild V2 of our platform and we hired a new senior leader, Rob, to lead customer success.

Overall, the start to the year was decent. But everything was about to change.

CODE RED: Panic stations

Before I get into our one code red for the year, I need to explain our GTM strategy. You see, Athyna, is world-class at one thing - outbound sales. So much so, that 80% of our pipeline today can be attributed to our outbound engine.

What do I mean by outbound? Well, it’s two-fold. Firstly, we are great at grunt work business development. Our sales team know how to prospect, hunt and close accounts. Secondly, we have built an outbound engine at Athyna that would break your brain to envision the scale.

In 2019 I read the book Predictable Revenue, a great read on how Salesforce scaled to $100M ARR. The first to do it, and it came behind massive outbound efforts. This was day one, week one at Athyna and we decided we were going to do the same.

I know what you are thinking … you are thinking ‘but every VP of Sales I follow on LinkedIn say that spray and pray is dead’. The fact of the matter is, if you say mass outbound is dead, you are simply doing it poorly.

Any good outbound sales motion has two key elements. One is a high-touch, bespoke, multi-channel prospecting for your highest value accounts. The other; automated, mass, personalisation-at-scale outbound to fill the rest of your pipeline.

We began the year sending 300k emails per week and we finished sending 1.2M per week. All with world-class low spam reports (important to outbound). But as the saying goes; to make a good omelette you need to break a few eggs.

The eggs in this particular case were Athyna’s site and 80% of Athyna’s pipeline.

It was Friday morning when I noticed something was amiss. I had zero emails in my inbox after 1am. Usually I’d have dozens of emails ready to read through one-eyed as I roll out of bed. But there was nothing. Then I saw our site … 404 … oh shit. This seems serious.

Over the course of the next 72 hours I pulled in some of our senior leaders to dive into the issues.

It seems that one of our campaigns had emailed a company that sold spam reduction software. We were sitting ducks. They reported us and Webflow put a block on our site for a number of hours.

But at the same time a load of others things broke. Scrambling all weekend, we managed to move everything from our old domain (.io) to a new domain, Athyna.com. Finally everything was back up and running.

But that wasn’t all. Our outbound engine was now dead in the water. Before the site went down, pipeline was at record levels and were building for a sustained period of growth.

We had a decision to make. Rebuild everything the way it was and go back to V1, or build V2 so that we bake in redundancies so that this never happens again. We made the intelligent choice and chose the latter.

This meant not only rebuilding everything, but rebuilding everything in silos. If one section falls the rest won’t go down with it. This meant a slower rebuild and it also lead to very little, to no pipeline for a couple of months in the middle of the year. Which hurt us.

The key takeaway here is for mission critical systems: you need to have a backup plan. And the second takeaway is to be diversified.

Q2 - 1M emails a day + record engagement

Since we had rebuilt our outbound, along with multiple redundancies, it actually meant we could be more aggressive again with our outbound. So we embarked on an adventure to reverse engineer what it would take to move from 300k outbound emails per week to one million per day.

So that’s what we did. We now have a fully mapped out plan for how we could, if we really wanted, further scale our current 1.2M per week to 5M outbound emails per week.

I am going to write on outbound sales and our system over time. I plan to detail what you can to do get to ~250k emails per week (you can just Google it). And maybe, just maybe, from 250k → 1M → 5M. They are different systems and you cannot skip the line, but if you want help with your outbound, let me know here.

Jumping back into our timeline - Q2 was great for a few reasons. The first of which was that our engagement scores were back in the nineties. 91% to be precise. To put that into perspective, engagement at 80% is considered excellent.

If 100% is perfection - Athyna’s culture would sit between excellence and perfection. Our averages, historically, over 3-years are 90% … far and away my proudest achievement.

Growth wise, in April we grew 18.5%, our biggest month of the year. In the same month, we passed $5M in ARR, which meant the team got the day off on Tuesday to eat tacos on us (we have Taco Tuesday celebrations at $1M, $5M, $10M, $25M etc.). Little things like the Taco Tuesday celebrations are an incredible part of what makes Athyna fun, and brings the team together.

Come June, we smashed through our previous record of outbound and also surpassed 500k weekly sends. Overall, Q2 was the perfect blend of horror-story-shit-show with immaculate execution. As if the Heath Ledger’s 2006 esoteric drama, Candy, was a quarter in business.

To churn is to die

Let’s take a moment to discuss our god metric at Athyna, net-revenue-retention, or NRR. Most companies see churn as an issue to be solved, something to constantly chip away at over time. But churn, in my opinion, should be the ubiquitous god metric for subscription businesses.

Just as predictably as death and taxes … if you have churn, your business will stagnate, atrophy and eventually die.

Here is some cold hard facts about churn, your growth wall and your growth ceiling from the team at Nickelled, along with a calculator to figure out how much time you have left.

So in summary: to churn is to die. It may be slow, it may be painful, but if you have churn per month, or sub 100% NRR, your growth wall is coming, and your growth ceiling after that. Act accordingly.

Q3 - Business as usual

The third quarter for us was very much back to business, with some bright patches. We made some major talent upgrades to our engineering department, we hired Leandro, our new Head of Talent, Head of Growth, Simmie, and we welcomed back a familiar face in Juan ‘Oti’ Otaño.

In relation to product - by the third quarter, our platform was taking shape behind the bet that if we have incredible talent, matched with AI-precision, at lightning speed, we will win.

But how do you get to lightning speed. Well, firstly, you need to take the heavy lifting away and vet and match by machine - by AI. Second, you need deep talent pools to choose talent from. And third, you need to build indicators in which you understand when talents are active rather than passive.

This is our Venn diagram and we have big releases planned for the first half of 2024 to drive all of these three forward.

Returning home to Athyna

I mentioned briefly above that my proudest achievement is the fact that we average 90% engagement across our team - and I mean it. How proud can you be of growth, revenue, capital raising etc. if your people come to work miserable every morning.

Obviously timing and need are not always aligned, but a sign of an incredible culture is one where when people leave, they want to come back.

Q4 - A big, fat, churn-filled record

Coming into the home stretch of 2023, I was confident we could push hard enough to double in 2023. And until the last six-weeks of the year that was on track. But November and December were both painful months.

I feel like we had avoided ‘the market’ this year as we seemed to just slowly power along, but it all came to a head in November. We were smashed with churn. Luckily we still finished with ~100% NRR but growth was stagnant for two months.

So although we finished the year poorly, we are set up for a great start to 2024.

Things that worked in 2023

• Culture. I believe in a very simple equation. When great brand and incredible culture collide you can do amazing things. It’s a credit to our team that our culture continues to be the gift that keeps on giving.

• Clients. This year we had some great results with our clients. Below is a snapshot of one of our clients. We have a copywriting clients with 20 content and marketing hires through us. A dev shop that has 15 cloud engineers. Incredible growth of our partnerships.

• Growth. The state of the market in 2023 was bearish. Everything felt like a slog as you can see in the image below from a recent OpenView (RIP) report. We would be touching the lower end of the top quartile of company growth and although it felt a slog, we did well.

• Process. We started the year with some real deficiencies in different departments. From recruitment, to customer success, to marketing, to ops. Everywhere really. But we hired a number of senior leaders and worked our asses off to improve and that we did.

• Tech talent. We continue to get stronger and stronger in delivering truly world class technical talent to early stage startups. Not only were we placing frontend, backend, full-stack but Cloud Engineers, Blockchain Devs and many more bespoke talents.

• AI. Today in certain industries artificial intelligence is already table stakes. Not in the talent space. We are uniquely positioned from the work we did this year to add real value to talents and clients. Incredible talent, with AI precision at lightning speed.

Things that didn’t work

• Newsletter sponsorship. One of the channels we are most bullish on internally is newsletter sponsorship. So far though, we have spent a bunch of money with very little to show for it. We are still experimenting.

• Partnerships. We were let down massively by one of our investors this year. It was a vendor investment with one of the leading dev shops in South America. We did a small equity for dev support deal and as soon as it was signed they dropped the ball. We were burned and we learnt our lesson.

• Enterprise. Although we made significant progress we fell pretty short of where we wanted to be. We closed two enterprise clients though and are in contract stage with a Fortune 500. We laid the groundwork for a big 2024 here.

• Outbound architecture (V1). As we have discussed already, sub-domain do not cut it at the scale we operate at. Again, lesson learnt.

2024 and beyond

In 2023 both of our OKR cycles had multiple organisational goals. Which is fine. But for the first half of next year we have one clear line of focus; to become un-fuckwith-able.

If we are able to execute on or near to those goals we will be in a great position come mid-year, and in for a massive 12 months overall. Wish us luck!

And that’s it! You can find more about how Athyna can help you to build a high-performing global team here.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Dogs are literally legendary.

A pot of sats at the end of the Bitcoin rainbow.

David Bowie predicting the future.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we use inside of our businesses. Today we are highlighting Apollo. We use Apollo to send part of our 1.2M outbound emails per week. The tool is best-in-class and is the best starting point if diving into outbound sales.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

I want to be a trusted resource for you. If you think anything I know in relation to brand, culture, global teams, sales and growth would help you unblock a problem in your weeks shoot me a line.

Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it from me. See you next week. 🫡