Mylance Update - November 2020
Team Updates, Fundraising, and Learnings
Welcome to the November Mylance Update! This update covers:
Mylance Team Updates
Fundraising
Learnings
Mylance Team Updates
Assembling the right team is arguably the most important piece of any start-up, and we've taken big steps forward in the past few months.
I could not be more excited to announce that Mylance has a co-founder! We've welcomed Parker Wilf to the team as co-founder and Head of Product. He's been in Product at Dropbox for the past 4 years, with his work including shipping and scaling the new desktop experience to millions of customers, and leading growth initiatives generating millions of dollars in net new recurring revenue.
In his words, "I've always been passionate about helping individuals live more authentic, fulfilling lives. When I first met Bradley, I immediately felt that he was on to something special with Mylance. From that moment on, every day I worked with the Mylance team and every customer call I participated in fueled a growing conviction that we had the potential to truly change people’s lives. At the end of the day, how could I say no to working on that? That’s why I’m beyond excited to join the Mylance journey and turn these early opportunities into validated products that can help our target customers at scale."
Further, as we invest in building and scaling Mylance, we're "practicing what we preach" by bringing in incredible talent in a contract way until we are large enough to bring them on full-time! To that end, we've welcomed Samantha Tiller-Schenck to lead our Marketing efforts, and Austin Bauer to lead our coaching offerings! I'm excited to work with them both as we build world-class products to enable millions of skilled folks to sustain flexible, fulfilling lives.
Fundraising
To date, we've bootstrapped the business intentionally: I wanted to learn what customers wanted, and if we could deliver on that value before we raised any money.
Over the past 9 months, we've done that. We've crossed $50k in revenue, we have an engaged community, and dozens of happy customers. Further, the average Mylance customer has spent over $700 with Mylance! They're happy, and they're engaged, and that shows me there's demand for what we're building, and we can deliver a clear value. Further, the market is enormous (freelancers is the US brought in $1.2T in 2019 and make up 6% of the US GDP!), and thus the potential for $1B+ in value is there.
To that end, we're well positioned to take on some funding to invest in technology and marketing to scale up this business. We're in the process of raising an Angel round in the form of a SAFE, and already have some very excited and enthusiastic investors that have agreed to join us for this ride.
If you are interested in hearing more on the investment side, respond to this update or shoot me an email at bradley@mylance.co and I'm happy to jump on a call with you.
Learnings
Knowing how hard it is to build a two-sided marketplace from scratch, we've always had the plan to build a community of consultants first by offering them value-added products and services, and then bring them projects.
As we've built up our community, what's starting to happen is our customers, who have some incredible consulting clients, are actually bringing new projects into the community! Because they're so close to the company they're working with, they're in-tune with the company needs, and thus are able to bring projects where their expertise isn't a match. This past Monday alone we had 4 new high-profile projects brought to the community!
It's been incredible to see how our members have engaged in the community, and excited to build on that with the learnings we have.
That's all for now! If you have questions, feedback, or are interested in getting in for this Angel round, please shoot me a note!
Best,
Bradley Jacobs
Co-founder and CEO, Mylance
Sign up for Mylance today: https://mylance.co/