2021 in Review

Foreword

Firstly, I must start by saying how incredibly proud I am of everyone at Athyna this year, individually and collectively as a whole. To start the year with a scrappy team of 8 people and to have bootstrapped ourselves to a team of 58 incredible contributors was amazing to see. And the best thing of all was, we maintained a world-record (self proclaimed of course) high internal culture.

Anyone that knows me knows that I have shouted from the rafters since day 1 that all I care about is brand and culture, brand and culture, brand and culture. In most cases if you have a great culture and if you have a great brand and a great culture you are a beacon for amazing individuals. And in business and in life when you are surrounded by incredible people. Anything is possible.

To our team...Athyna is the equivalent of lightning in a bottle. Enjoy it for however long you are part of it because something like what we are building does not happen often.

Here is the overview of the year…

2020 v 2021 Stats

• MRR = $28,153 v $159,524
• ARR = $337,836 v $1,914,288
• ARPU = $1,173 v $2,615
• LTV = $8,853 v $24,680
• Marketing = $1,850 v $7,500 p/m
• CoH = $22,466 v $188,660
• Headcount = 8 v 58
• Engagement Score = 93
• Pipeline = NA v $6,026,800
• Pipeline to close = NA v $2,175,865
• 12-Month Rolling NRR = 98.1% v 92.6%
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Meaning…(growth)

• MRR = 466%
• ARR = 466%
• ARPU = 122%
• LTV = 178%
• CoH = 739%
• Headcount = 625%
• Engagement Score = 93
• Pipeline = NA
• Pipeline to close = NA
• 3-Month Rolling NRR = -5%

Note on stats

Pretty super growth let’s be honest, 466%...not bad. Once Jan starts this figure should rise to $2,250,801. 🔥

So…What worked?

Well, nearly everything everything nearly...

✨ Brand (fancy part) | We undertook the world’s longest brand ‘refresh’ in 2021. What started as ‘upgrading our colour palette’ turned into a full makeover and one that sets us apart from most, if not all brands. We created the worst most beautiful brand (in my un-humble opinion).

⛰️ Brand (foundation) | Equally, if not more importantly, we were able to build the foundation of what a brand really means. The why we exist. This was an amazing and collaborative process between the whole team through our Brand Values and Brand Impact sessions. We crafted a brand from start to finish that we all love (I hope) and we should be proud of.

💸 CoH | Last year we had no money in the bank. This year we sat around 12 months of runway and between $200-400k in the bank. This is a big win.

❤️ Team | This year we added talent from Amazon, Rappi, Oracle, Ualá, Uber, SAP, WeWork (x1000), PWC, Media Monks, Gympass, Aerolab, DiDi, TripAdvisor, Oracle and more. READ THIS LIST BACK TO YOURSELF AGAIN. 🤯 The best thing is we added people with zero experience and no big names on their resume as incredible contributors as well.

🎉 Culture | Not only did we add the above we added those talents to a culture and maintained an awesome vibe.

📬 Outreach | We have gotten our outreach campaigns dialled in so well that we get leads for around $20 which is super impressive. Plus this method of growth is evergreen and doesn’t need much maintenance.

📈 Sales Lead Growth | Our team have lead the growth. Pure hustle and BD work executed super well.

Seems a bit too good to be true doesn’t it?

📈 Ads | We have very strong results in the digital space with most metrics but for whatever reason, we have not closed many deals although there are what seem to be very qualified leads coming through the campaigns.

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Where are our opportunities for improvement?

🧛‍♂️ Churn (kinda) | As you can see from the report churn is heading in the wrong direction. As we add our 3 new products I think churn will lower but the Workforce product (Talent-as-a-Service) has always had some level of churn and the drop between years of 97% > 92% shortens our ability to scale (on a time scale) by what’s likely years. This could be a sales, recruitment, CX, ops or general strategy problem and quite possibly it’s a little bit of all of it. Something we will never be able to stop focussed on.

🖥 Platform | Our platform is finished (MVP) and like all MVP’s there are bugs. And lots of them. We are now a software company really and the idea of an MVP is to release it when it’s s**t really. The saying goes ‘if you are proud of your MVP then you waited too long to release it’. 2022 will be about turning our MVP into something we are indeed super proud of.

💼 Operations | Our Ops Department has overseen an upgrade of late and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The wheel shaking is good but things were starting to get a little too messy and I probably waited a little longer than I should have to send reinforcements there but at least now we have the team we need.

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What can we expect in 2022?

💲 Investment | This is the one element admittedly I have never been settled on but am leaning much more heavily into us getting investment. More for security purposes than anything else. We are super investible so I think the terms would be favourable should we decide to go this path.

⚡ Impact | Nul + Climate + Employment Opportunities + Helping Startups Scale + Investment Into Impact Driven Startups & Climate Tech. Nuff said.

🌱 B-Corp | We still plan to become a certified B-Corp in 2022. It would have happened this year if Carmela had come back but was shelved for the time being. We will look hard into this again in the new year.

☄️ Product Lead Growth | Expect us to push much harder into the SaaS realm in which customers come to us, use our products, get value and purchase. We have built it...now they must come.

🗣 Marketing |  We have had somewhat of a reserved marketing budget this year. Now the the brand and platform have been released expect us to be absurdly aggressive in this domain. We’ll be serving ads to the space station and beyond. Alpha Centauri and onwards.

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Summary

I couldn’t be happier with 2021 as a whole and I think 2022 is going to be a phenomenally exciting year for us as a team. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!🔥 🚀

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