Boom company update - 2022 Q2 + Q3
Hey there,
We sent our last company update in May, recapping Q1, and have been deep in product build since then. One quick thing: we recently relocated the company to Austin, TX. If you’re around Austin on Wed, Nov 16, please join us for a super casual happy hour 🍻 (even if only for a few minutes): https://www.mixily.com/event/6554017118643507880
Progress in 2022 Q2+Q3
TL;DR: scaled revenue with no marketing spend, grew our team 50%, improved product capacity and performance to programmatically handle multi-thousands of new paying users monthly, new regulatory tailwinds, runway extended to 38+ months on back of revenue growth. Product and engineering operating at a very high level now, day and night vs. Q1. Product announcements upcoming. Had our first team offsite in Boracay, Philippines (pics below), where we shipped a ton of product. More detail:
Grew revenue by 52% from 2022 Q1 to Q3 → and paying users grew 2.7x. We continued to hold back on marketing spend during this period of product build, but our Affiliate Program + word of mouth continued to drive growth.
Expanded our team → fortunate to have Chris Crump join as our Chief of Staff and a couple fantastic new engineers Sergey Besedin (backend) and Faiz Ahmed (frontend). Has dramatically accelerated our momentum. Of our 9 full-time team members, 6 are engineers.
Scaled backend automation of BoomReport → implemented automated verifications and automated generation and furnishment of Metro 2 files to credit bureaus (we moved off a 3rd party vendor, cutting COGS by 50%), now able to programmatically handle the thousands of new paying users we’re receiving monthly.
Added credit score to our app → we added a credit score to allow users to understand Boom’s impact more directly; we’ll also soon enable B2B partners to track cohort credit score impact.
Acquired Alpaca, a Lightspeed-funded rental startup → not yet announced, but we acquired Alpaca (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/alpaca) and its 850+ Facebook groups. Gives us distribution to >7 million US renters with the largest global social media presence for apartments.
Validated product need with B2B partners → completed meaningful validation and have numerous launch partners for our B2B distribution channels. Learned a lot about competitors and where they are falling short. More to come here.
User experience extended for more product flexibility for direct-to-consumer offering:
Industry news
Significant momentum around rent payment history as a mechanism to enable homeownership. In one of the biggest changes to occur in mortgage origination in years, the FHFA will replace the FICO Classic credit score with FICO 10T and Vantage 4.0 credit scores. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest purchasers of residential mortgages in the US, will require these new credit scores, both of which incorporate rent payments (FICO Classic didn’t). FHFA had relied on FICO Classic for nearly 20 years, so while this change won’t happen overnight, it is has sizable implications and means we need to accelerate our work even faster.
Additionally, the FHA is now including rent payments in its TOTAL Mortgage Scorecard for first-time homebuyers.
Asks
Know a potential Head of Operations (https://angel.co/l/2wqkrG)? 7+ years of experience, ideally with some past MBB experience and has gone on to lead Ops or Strategy & Ops at a mid-stage startup. Austin, TX-based. Check this pre-filtered LinkedIn list: 1st-DEGREE CONNECTIONS HEAD OF OPERATIONS POTENTIAL FITS
Know a Senior Product Manager (https://angel.co/l/2xRDqN)? 5+ years of experience, technical background, Austin, TX-based preferred. Can stretch on title if needed. Check this list: 1st/2nd-DEGREE CONNECTIONS ENG-FOCUSED PRODUCT MANAGER (TX-BASED)
Know a Marketing Advisor/Contractor (consumer)? 10+ years of consumer marketing experience who can spend 2-10 hours per week helping set up our consumer marketing, providing guidance to a more junior ‘executor’. No JD or LinkedIn list for this one.
If you see someone who looks good: pls share link or screenshot, thank you! 🙏
What could be better
Website and external presence remains terrible / nearly non-existent: We’ve been very product focused and not enough energy toward building our external presence, and no marketing underway. This will change in Q4.
Hiring too slowly: Focusing our hiring of leadership roles in person in Austin hasn’t been easy, and haven’t helped ourselves by probably being more picky than we should have in a few cases.
App reviews are terrible: Most reviews are due to past experiences when we were not fully automated and had resulting data issues; and we’ve never requested positive reviews from our users. We’re seeing NPS tick up dramatically now. We’ll wipe reviews and start requesting reviews soon.
What’s next
Our main focus for the next quarter (2022 Q4) include:
Improve the core consumer experience → we’ve made massive strides here but we’re not satisfied; more to go and we want our app reviews to reflect it.
Start consumer marketing → our Boom Affiliate Program has grown to 500+ affiliates, and runs on autopilot. Aside from that we’ve done nothing. We’ll kick off organized marketing efforts in Q4.
Launch new distribution channels and partners → we’ll go live with new interfaces for B2B partners, and launch multiple partners. Product expansion coming soon.
Continue hiring → primarily for Head of Operations, Senior PM, and always looking for talented engineers (full-stack, frontend, backend; geo-agnostic).
Thanks!
Rob and Kirill
P.S. You’re receiving this email because you’re either a current Boom investor, investor we’ve interacted with in the past, or another friend of Boom. ~4 emails per year, unsubscribe at any time, no hard feelings.
P.S.S. A few photos from our first offsite; first of many.
