2023 W18 - Reduce Burn!

Humberto Ayres Pereira, CEO of Rows.com

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

Last week we optimized our burn a bit.

On our Board, we committed to higher discipline on the cost side and reduce 10% of burn there.

To cut, we looked at costs and optimized tactically:

We rented a part of our office, which lowers the total cost for us. As we're remote, this also invites more people in!
This includes subletting some empty space we have outside the office for parking. We made this change easy on us, with bulk contracts and 6 month terms so that our ops person doesn't waste time chasing payments.
We applied for more discounts and grants from our cloud providers - and got them!
This is more of a lucky one, but recently the local government in PT made a change in labor law reducing a part of the social security contribution. Bonus burn contribution!

Revenue will also contribute to burn reduction:

Our continued user growth will mean more upgrades. Our bold upcoming improvements in conversion rate (!) will certainly help there too. New features will be critical to both efforts.
We will also rethink a part of the pricing experience, to have a more thoughtful upgrade path that makes sense for more users. Here, too, features will be super important.

At Rows we have always been on the lower end of costs, with 2 exceptions: we invested quite a bit of money in our office in 2019, and that gave us access to super-low rent, for a long time; and we did our rebrand to Rows.

See you next week!