Project Gemini: Tettra’s Journey to Profitability

It should come as no surprise that a company built on the premise of knowledge sharing and collaboration was founded by two friends that had been doing just that since they were kids.

“Andy [Cook] and I both grew up in Hanover, Massachusetts,” said Nelson Joyce, co-founder and product designer at Tettra, makers of a知识管理软件对于成长中的团队。“我们一起去了同一所中学和一切。”

大学毕业后，库克与他的兄弟（乔伊斯（Joyce）在HubSpot寻求机会之前工作了很短的时间）成立了一家公司，该公司最终被您猜到了，这是您猜到的。

Joyce and Cook worked together for several years at HubSpot where, among other projects, they built and launched Lead-In, a suite of lead generation tools for small businesses.

乔伊斯回忆说：“大卫取消了我们的领导。”“他说，‘你决定这是什么。只要确保它是品牌上的。’”

Together, they ended up working on the project for about two years, at which point both Joyce and Cook had a decision to make.

乔伊斯说：“ HubSpot最终希望将铅置入HubSpot Free产品。”“由于我们不想这样做，而且由于我们俩都想长时间一起成立一家公司，因此我们决定追求对tettra的想法。”

An idea nurtured from the many days, weeks, and months of building Lead-In.

乔伊斯说：“在最初的12-14个月内，建立了牵引力，那只是安迪和我从事该项目。”“一旦我们的老板看到该项目进展顺利，他们就增加了五个人。”

Going from a team of two to a team of seven, overnight, presented some obvious challenges.

乔伊斯说：“我们之间只有我们两个人之间的所有这些积累的知识。”“我们没有写任何东西，因此很难与团队其他成员交换知识。我们看了看，但找不到任何解决的问题。因此，在我们开始使用Tettra之前，我们知道有一个问题要解决。”

如果这听起来很自然，那不是。多年来，乔伊斯（Joyce）和库克（Cook）有很多想法，但是他们的集体实用主义经常胜出。但不是这次。

乔伊斯说：“每当我们有一个想法时，就有99％的时间，我们可以在几分钟之内戳出孔。”“我们尝试了这个想法，但我们只是找不到任何洞。”

So in 2015, Joyce and Cook left HubSpot to start Tettra, the solution they had been looking for, and in spring of that year launched the first prototype, built on WordPress.

“This was around the time when Slack was really blowing up,” said Joyce. “So we would talk to our early users a lot, and one thing we heard over and over was, ‘if this worked with Slack, we would definitely buy it.’”

根据反馈,库克和乔伊斯报废the initial prototype and rebuilt the entire application over a two-week holiday break in December of 2015.

“We launched the first iteration built on Slack in January of 2016,” said Joyce.

Hundreds of people signed up for the application within the first few days.

“We were like, ‘okay, this is good work’’, said Joyce. ‘“But up to that point, we had been funding the project ourselves. We knew if we didn’t move fast on this, someone else with the capital would and they would just crush us.”

Joyce and Cook spent the spring of 2016 fundraising, eventually raising $900k from Boston-based angel investors.

乔伊斯说：“到那时，我们能够聘请第一位工程师，并于2016年5月推出了该产品的改进版本，这也是我们第一个付费客户的时候。”

From Launch to Profitability

乔伊斯说：“我们每月设定目标，但我们也有这些大，毛茸茸的大胆的目标（Bhags），我们喜欢集结团队。”“第一个被称为Redstone Project，以火箭的家族命名，这是我们整个编辑的重写。”

在乔伊斯和库克未能成功筹集一轮资金之后，这种类型的第二个项目始于去年夏天。

“We’re just bad at fundraising,” said Joyce. “We’re not salespeople, we’re just not good at it. So if you’re not good at sales, you’re also pretty bad at convincing people to give you money. We’re more pragmatic about our goals and expectations, and fundraising is not as rational as you would think. It’s emotional, and that’s just not the way we are.

我们只是无法引起任何兴趣，所以我们就像“好吧，我们正在赚钱，如果我们只是尝试的话，我们就有可能。

在尝试筹集更多资金的未成功之后，Tettra现在必须有利可图。等等。

Gemini项目仅仅是仅仅关注盈利能力所需的事情。beplay体育appiosDatabox已成为该项目的视觉表示。

“As soon as we launched Project Gemini, I got our Databox account up and going,” said Joyce. “You need ambient awareness. It’s like a sixth sense. Every decision we make needs to be in the context of the entire business and getting to profitability. Databox helps us do that.

Databox is like having another person in the room. It’s easy to ignore someone that isn’t there, but with Databox, everyone is aware of the top line metrics and how they’re trending.”

乔伊斯（Joyce）的团队甚至使用宇航员的图片来定制其数据库。

A closer look…

“董事会上有八个数字，因此显然这些指标具有特定的重要性。它有助于使每个人都了解业务的发展方式。”乔伊斯说。

Here’s what Tettra is tracking:

• 网站访问者， 来源：谷歌分析
• 总免费试验， 来源：Mixpanel
• 第1天/第7天团队激活， 来源：Mixpanel
  这是在第一天或FI上创建页面的新注册数量的数量第一周。
• 人们查看页面（PVP），资料来源：Google Analytics（分析）
  Tettra的“ North Star Metric”跟踪了该应用程序中查看页面的唯一用户数量。
• 内容发表， 来源：Google表 + Zapier集成
• Current MRR， 来源：通过Profwell进行自定义集成
• 总净新MRR， 来源：通过Profwell进行自定义集成

想跟随Tettra的旅程吗？乔伊斯（Joyce）通过通往上述仪表板的公共共享链接完成这篇文章时给我发了电子邮件。

“I’m cool with including the link to the dashboard as well.”

跟随Tettra Project Gemini的盈利能力之旅，这里。

As to when Joyce and his team expect to hit the goal?

“April should be our first profitable month,” said Joyce. “But we should be break-even before that.”