We always start with a recap section. This has two things: 

Links back to previous company updates for the year and other important notes. 

A 1-2 line summary of each of those updates. 

In a growing company, every time you have an update a % will be new employees that don’t have the context others have. 

So provide an easy way for them to get it.

Some context about how we do company updates. Rather than creating presentations we: 

Publish it about 48 hours before a company all hands meeting to give people time to read it, absorb it, and drop in questions. 

Use the live time to discuss those questions. 

Produces a better form of communication. Writing = thinking. 

Creates an easy history log of communications that the team can go back to. 

Focuses the time on meaningful conversation vs me speaking from a “podium.”

Every so often, there will be something important enough to issue a company communication out of the regular update cadence. 

This was one of those times as the macro market started to deteriorate in technology. We knew it was on everyone’s mind and decided to address it directly with folks.

That’s me. I’m the CEO. This is a section for a note from the CEO. 

The rest of the update is fairly mechanical. So this is a space to make room for “what is the CEO thinking about.”

This top section might seem a bit silly. But I’m trying to accomplish two things: 

1. Add some personality. People connect with people, not notion docs. So in a remote environment the person can get lost behind the doc some times. Be vulnerable, share some personal things. JD Sherman, the COO of HubSpot while I was there did this really well. He always had a few jokes in his updates. 

2. I’m trying to involve others. I ask people to start a comment thread and drop in their activities. It’s a way for teammates to learn something small about each other.

Never bury the lead. Start with a one sentence summary of your key metric for the business. It should include: 

#1 and #4 are the most important. Where you ended the month doesn’t mean much unless you compare it to what you thought you would do. Otherwise, people won’t know if thats a good or bad number.

This was during a time where the macro market was getting worse and it was all the news was writing about. 

Once again, don’t bury the lead. Address the elephant in the room head on.

We are trying to get into the habit of updating our 3 year vision with visuals every year. I went around to each team to do mini presentations and conversations about the vision and how it impacted them. “BalTour” was a name given to this by one of the other leaders on our team because of my last name BalTour instead of BalFour 🤦‍♂️

One of the pieces of feedback I’ve received is that it is hard for people to understand how I’m thinking about things since I’m not super emotive. So rather than leave people guessing, just come out straight and say how you are thinking about things. And it doesn’t need to be always positive.

Great team members always ask what they can do to help. A lot of times they don’t know how to help. So tell them specifically. 

This time around since the market was on the decline, I decided to focus on how they should think during uncertain times.

One of the things that I find difficult is remembering to “beat the drum” and repeat the most important things. That includes the quarterly goals. So even if it feels repetitive and not new information, always start with that.

Make sure you give an easy to read and visual way to understand what is behind and what is on target. 

I’m a believer that if you are on target for everything, you probably aren’t being aggressive enough with goal setting. If you are behind on everything, then you don’t know your business well enough to set goals.

The customer can sometimes get buried in an update with tons of metrics. Bringing the voice of the customer to the top can help with this. We are still looking for more ways to do this better. This section has a couple of things: 

The actual words from customers can be videos of interviews, quotes from emails, etc.

If it is a problem, where possible, include how many users it may be impacting.

The images below are video clips in our actual document from customer feedback interviews. Tools like Gong are super helpful for this.

Sometimes it is hard for the company to understand the severity of the pain. So it can be helpful to communicate how many users it is effecting.

In this section we go through each of the key metrics. The metrics flow from high level outputs (like ARR) down to the key inputs. Each metric has a few things: 

A summary sentence of where we ended and how we performed to plan.

A visual that shows the metric and ideally that metric against plan. People often don’t read, so use visuals.

Any key notes on things shipped or reasons why we over performed or underperformed.

This visual gives a really quick summary of: 

What we’ve achieved so far this year (blue bars).

How we’ve performed to plan. The number in the bottom bar is actuals. The number at the top of the bar is plan. If we were underperforming there would be a gap between the grey outline and blue bar visually showing the delta.

What we are expected to do going forward for the rest of the year.

Sometimes you need to remind folks why a metric is important so that they understand why we are reporting on it which is what this sentence does.

Metrics that mature on a cohorted basis are probably some of the toughest ones to report on to a company and usually need the most explanation. In our case, members continue to convert over a very long period of time and is highly seasonal. So just looking at the conversion within the month window doesn’t tell a compelling story.

One of our difficulties is that we have a seasonal business around our cohorts. One metric that we report on occasionally, but not in every company update is satisfaction with programs.

At Reforge we are very transparent with the company. Some companies are less transparent. But overall we report on cash, the major uses of that cash, and the months of runway in the bank.

Brian Balfour

At Reforge, I wrote this monthly update in June 2022 to transparently share major happenings, metrics compared to plan, and other thoughts with the whole team.

The Future Of Reforge: Reforge is building a professional network that helps professionals learn, build, and monetize their expertise.

Company Update - Jan/Feb 2022: In Feb, we gained a lot of learnings around our new plan and leading indicators for the year. We were hitting our ARR goal but had some work to do on a few levers such as apply to buy.

 In March, we entered our Spring cohort period and ran our largest cohort ever.

Company Update - April 2022: We continued to see ARR growth and updated our Q2 goals to focus on the levers that were underperforming. We also noted the beginning of a macro market decline.

: In late April, macro market conditions started to get worse at a faster rate. We discussed how we were in a great position as a company to weather the storm, and that we needed to remain adaptable due to the uncertainty of what was to come.

⛱ Company Update June 2022: In June, we did a look back on Spring Cohort performance and learnings and how that would translate to the fall cohort.

Summer is officially here. It’s my favorite time of year so before diving into details, I thought it would 

 your favorite summer activity here in this comment thread. I’ve got two:

⛱. The Beach - I’m a sucker for warm weather. My family and I recently moved out of SF up to Marin to get a little more heat in our lives. My son is also at an age where he is 

 the beach. Who knew digging a giant hole in the sand could entertain for hours?

☕️ Morning Coffees Outside - It’s usually too cold in the morning in the winter months, but in the summer it is perfect outside on the porch in the morning to enjoy coffee.

we ended May at $[redacted]M ARR, 191% YoY, +[redacted]% MoM, and 101% of plan

. We also wrapped up our largest cohort ever with meaningful improvements in program satisfaction 💪. All and all, we should see May as a strong month and be proud of what we accomplished as a team.

 market conditions in technology have gotten worse

. There is continued pressure on technology companies to demonstrate a healthy business, and execute more effectively than ever. The good news is we are very well positioned for this downturn. We raised capital at the right time, have kept burn low relative to the industry, and as a result, have years of runway and plan on continuing to add to the team throughout the rest of the year. But the environment is still volatile, and we need to keep adapting.

Our first step on that path to adapting is helping build understanding of where we are going. In the coming month I will be going on tour across the company 🎸 talking about the vision and the opportunities for each team. I’m looking forward to the conversations.

I strongly believe that companies who can pull together and power through a down market come out bigger and stronger. 

 In fact, I got into startups to solve hard, complex problems - and this is most certainly one of those. I believe that this upcoming time period will be a key moment in our careers and Reforge, and one I hope we look back on and be proud of how we rose to the challenge ahead of us.

I’ve been asked a few times what you can do to help keep us on a great trajectory. Every company is in a different situation. For our specific situation, I’d love help in avoiding these traps:

Just Because We Have Money, Doesn’t Mean We Should Spend It - 

Spend company money like it is your own money - essential tool, contractor, equipment, etc expenses. These might seem small, but it adds up to large amounts across the company.

Just Because We Have Time, Doesn’t Mean We Should Take It

 - [redacted] years of runway might sound like an eternity. But it will fly by fast and the bar of what all companies have to achieve in the time they have has increased. We have to have a sense of urgency around all of our initiatives. You should be asking - how could we ship X sooner?

Just Because We Have Plans, Doesn’t Mean We Should Keep Them - 

Your team’s headcount plans, initiatives, and roadmaps are all likely to change. We’ll keep evolving them as the market changes and we learn things. Stay flexible, and embrace the change.

Just Because There Is Down Market, Doesn’t Mean It’s The Cause - 

If a metric is down or initiative isn’t going well, don’t assume it’s because of a down market. That assumption can hide the things that are within our control to change and improve.

As always, I want to say thank you for joining me on this Reforge journey. It is never a dull moment. We have an incredibly talented team that I’m thankful to be a part of every day.

The most common request we continue to get from churning members is [redacted]

Time constraints are impacting customers’ ability to take advantage of learning opportunities.

“Customer Quote” - Person - Role - Company - Reforge Member Since Date

 tickets come in regarding Account Management issues (inclusive of login trouble, duplicate account merging, oauth issues).

We’ve seen a steady incremental increase in requests for monthly/split payments.

We ended May at $[redacted]M ARR, 191% YoY, +[redacted]% MoM, and 101% of plan

. While we are behind in a few places of our plan, we are on plan for ARR and members due to some large group deals. A few examples of deals we’ve closed recently are [redacted].

We closed out May with an email audience of [redacted] total emails against a forecast of [redacted] representing [redacted]% MoM growth. 

 our content, our programs, and overall product. It is a leading indicator of future ARR growth. In Q2 we’ve focused on the inputs of email growth including:

In 2022 we have generated [redacted] applications against a plan of [redacted]. In May we generated [redacted] applications vs a forecast of [redacted]. This represents 98% YoY growth, and 88% of plan.

Through May 2022 we’ve had [redacted] accepted applications ([redacted]% YoY). The accepted applications increase was driven by a [redacted] increase YoY in applications submitted and a [redacted] (absolute) increase in acceptance rate. Despite the lift in accepted applications, we’ve seen a drop in conversion to members. We identified this earlier in the year and discussed in our last update here.

The Product Growth team led by Ginny and the Member Growth team led by Alvin have launched a number of experiments in this area that are showing great improvements. We continue to see this area as a key part of our growth model that we can improve. The stronger we make this area now, the more tailwinds we’ll see later

So far this year, ARR Renewal is [redacted]% against a forecast of [redacted ]%. In May, we renewed [redacted] % of ARR against a forecast of [redacted] %. Renewals continue to vary by group size. We did further analysis on renewal rates this past month and found that [redacted]. We are working on building a more robust view of our retention metrics by various cuts which will be shared with the company as soon as it’s available. Retention makes or breaks companies. The market conditions will place even greater emphasis on needing great retention. But as we lay out a plan for the next couple of years, we expect retention to continue to be a focus.

In May we wrapped our Spring 22 cohort. [redacted]K members enrolled in the Spring 22 cohort compared to [redacted]K in Fall 21. We saw a meaningful increase in program satisfaction. 94% were satisfied or very satisfied in Spring 22 compared to 91% in Fall 21. [Redacted] was the highlight out of the new programs receiving solid satisfaction scores. Our other new programs did well in addition.

Enrollment for our first ever summer cohort has begun. It is still early, but so far enrollment looks solid with [redacted]K people enrolled. We do expect summer cohort enrollment to be smaller due to timing of the year, reduced program slate, and other factors.

We ended May with ≈$[redacted] M in cash against a forecast of $[redacted] M and [redacted] months of runway (based on avg. projected cash burn for June - December). The waterfall chart below summarizes the cash inflows and outflows by key category from May 1 - May 31.

So far in 2022, we’ve added [redacted] people to the team, against a hiring plan of [redacted] bringing the total team size to [redacted]. We’d like to welcome the following new folks to the team!

Company update at Reforge

⏮ Recap + Context

📝 Note From Brian

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