What it says
What this says
Current to 11 Oct 26Final board pack from CEO Nell Ashcombe for the quarter ending 31 Dec 2023. It reports contracted ARR of £76,050 from executed order forms, four customers and a headcount of nine, and sets a four-action plan.
What it is: an internal board pack issued 17 Jan 2024 by Nell Ashcombe, giving the board a short account of the quarter. It states that "ARR is the contracted annual figure from signed order forms. It is not a CRM estimate and it is not cash received."
Claims: contracted ARR of £76,050 across four customers, and a headcount of nine. The pack names concentration, key people and evidence of value as its worries.
Plan: four actions, all owned by Nell Ashcombe, covering monthly usage records, value summaries per account, documented customer set-ups and reconciling ARR to invoices.
Not settled: the pack is a snapshot at 31 Dec 2023 and is not current. It names no individual customers and gives no usage trend, because usage measures were not yet recorded.
As found in this document
The document
Body
BB-Demo - Board Pack - quarter to 31 Dec 2023
Status: Final Prepared by: Nell Ashcombe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Issued: 17 Jan 2024 Period covered: the quarter ending 31 Dec 2023
Purpose of this pack
This pack gives the board a plain account of where BB-Demo stands at the end of the quarter. It is deliberately short. The company is small, and the numbers that matter fit on one page. Where we do not yet have a measure we trust, the pack says so rather than guessing.
The rule for the pack is the one we apply to customers: say what happened, say how you know.
Headline numbers
| Measure | At 31 Dec 2023 | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Annual recurring revenue (contracted) | £76,050 | Executed order forms |
| Customers | 4 | Live contracts |
| Headcount | 9 | Employed staff |
Three things to note about these figures:
- ARR is the contracted annual figure from signed order forms. It is not a CRM estimate and it is not cash received.
- Customers means organisations with a live contract at the quarter end. Anyone still in a trial or a conversation is not counted.
- Headcount is people employed by BB-Demo at the quarter end, including the founders.
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Commentary: revenue
Contracted ARR stands at £76,050 across four customers. That is a small base, and every account is therefore material. One renewal or one upgrade moves the total visibly, in either direction.
We earn money twice: a fixed-fee implementation when a customer joins, then the annual subscription. At this size the subscription is the number to protect, so the priority for the coming quarter is keeping each of the four accounts healthy and giving each of them a reason to grow.
Commentary: customers
Four customers is enough to learn from and too few to generalise from. What we can say with confidence:
- Each customer has the brain running inside its own Snowflake account, which is the part of the proposition buyers respond to most.
- The accounts are looked after personally. I still sit in the exec-level conversations, and the team knows each customer by name.
- We do not yet have enough history to compare usage month on month across the base. We will start recording questions asked, active users and connectors configured for every account so that the next pack can show a trend rather than a snapshot.
Commentary: team
The company has nine people. The team is small enough that nobody is more than a conversation away from a customer problem, and that is an advantage we want to keep for as long as we can.
The risk of a team this size is dependence on individuals. We should be honest that a few people carry a lot of knowledge about how customers are set up. Writing that down is a priority and is on the plan below.
What went well
- The contracted base is on paper: every customer is covered by an executed order form, so the ARR figure above can be defended line by line.
- Customers are using the brain on their own data, and the conversations we have had about it are about their work, not about our product.
- The team has stayed together and focused through the quarter.
What worries me
- Concentration. With four customers, the loss of any one would be a large share of ARR.
- Key people. Customer knowledge sits in too few heads, on our side and on theirs.
- Evidence of value. Customers like the product, but we cannot yet show each of them, in numbers, what the brain is worth to them. That will matter at renewal.
Plan for the coming quarter
| Action | Owner | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Record usage measures for every customer each month | Nell Ashcombe | Gives us a trend and an early warning |
| Write a short value summary for each account | Nell Ashcombe | Prepares the ground for renewal conversations |
| Document each customer set-up so that no one person holds it alone | Nell Ashcombe, with the team | Reduces key-person risk |
| Keep the contracted ARR reconciled to invoices | Nell Ashcombe, with our finance support | Keeps the headline number trustworthy |
Asks of the board
- Challenge the plan above, in particular whether four actions are the right four.
- Tell us which measure you would most want to see on the next page of this pack.
- Note the quarter-end position: contracted ARR of £76,050, four customers and a headcount of nine.
Closing note
This is a modest quarter on paper and a sound one in substance. The base is small, the contracts are signed, and the job now is to make each account clearly worth what it pays.
Best, Nell