Report for 2Q 2023.
Dear ccFound investors and fans!
1. Where are we - statistics
We have 28,661 registered users on the portal with confirmed registration (out of 40,030 registrations in total). Since April 1 this year, 3,745 people have confirmed their registration on the portal. 323 users created an account from the referral program on the portal. (Please note that we are not currently promoting registration on the portal, focusing rather on protecting capital and redirecting it to advertising the marketplace in the coming months).
For the last 3 months, we got 12,000 clicks from Google for 249,000 ccFound impressions in search results. The average CTR is 4.8%. We can see an upward trend - the number of clicks for the first quarter was 5.2 thousand. with a CTR of 2.3%. So we saw a two-fold increase in clicks from the search engine, despite the perturbation of abandoning the “beta.ccfound.com” subdomain and shifting indexing to the main domain. We also see registrations from unspecified sources ranging from a few to 80 per day (probably from Google).
The progressing internationalization of search results is the most pleasing. For Q1 we had 213 entries from France, 144 from Spain, 114 from Great Britain, 106 from Germany, 72 from the USA ... For Q2 we have 1100 from France, 451 from the USA, 321 from Spain, 269 from Great Britain, 239 from Germany, and therefore more than double the presence in foreign search engines. The proportion of entries from Poland to other countries is 60% - it's still a lot, but it fell from 76% for Q1!
A total of 5,503 publications (questions, articles and entries) were written on ccFOUND, and we received 1,139 of them in the second quarter alone. The number of comments published on the portal since April this year amounted to 10,825. paid question. So far, we have published 42 of them with a total value of $215.
On April 20 this year, I wrote that our marketplace was launched . So far, 38 trainers have joined our platform and published 82 products, including 12 ebooks and 5 English-language courses. We also offer 10 items that are free. More publications will follow in the coming weeks. As of June 30, 2023, the value of all rates listed on the ccFound marketplace is $3,210 (PLN 13,109). In the past quarter, we sold 1,086 courses for a total of $5,698.
As part of our activities, we tested the best solutions and designed a promotion process that will allow us to effectively acquire as many clients as possible for trainers cooperating with ccFOUND.
Currently, 19 trainers have agreed to join the affiliate program where they offer us an additional commission so that we can advertise them ourselves from the ccFound budget. Thanks to this, from the second half of May on our social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) we started the "Meet our trainers" series, in which we publish several posts a week presenting the profiles of trainers and their courses.
So far we have published 32 posts, including 9 about trainers and 20 about courses. We reached almost 34,000 people and generated 284 visits to course pages. 13 courses were purchased directly from clicks on ads. Thus, we smoothly move to the details…
2. Promotion and advertising
Any trainer who decides to work with ccFOUND to promote courses will be subject to the same promotion process.
- A series of posts on FB, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok - we create posts with the silhouette of the trainer and separately posts about each course. In the case of TikTok, it will be one video about the trainer and the courses. Posts will lead to a landing page that promotes the purchase of courses of a given trainer.
- Landing page - landing pages promoting the purchase of courses will be created for each creator. It is to the landing page that we will direct the recipients of the advertisement, and from the landing page we will directly lead to the purchase of the course along with the possibility of registration.
- Webinars - we will enable trainers to conduct webinars in order to sell courses on the platform. We will invite ccFound users and advertisers to the webinars.
- Mailings - additionally, once a week a mailing will be sent about the selected author and courses of our authors.
This is all a pilot advertising program to develop good practices and processes. Therefore, for the time being, expenses have been kept to a minimum and will be gradually scaled up. A few more elements were needed to develop the ad:
- Affiliate program that increases the platform's commission (20%) to levels that allow you to take advertising risk with your own capital (at least 50%). We solved this problem by making appointments with trainers individually. An affiliate program is being created in the meantime and will enable all ccFound users to earn from marketplace referrals.
- Registering from the level of a filled cart in the marketplace - both for paid and free products. The marketplace version of MVP did not include this. Only now can we gain new users for the portal by advertising courses.
- Advanced attribution system so that we can accurately attribute which ad the buyer came from. The systems built into FB or Google Ads are very inaccurate. We are currently implementing the most advanced attribution system on the market.
In addition, we create the functionality of thematic groups within which people who purchase the course will be able to count on the support of the trainer and each other. Creating a thematic group for a course (or a group bringing together participants of several courses) is completely optional; at the beginning we start with open groups, we will create closed groups for paid courses in the second place.
Open groups are of course another advertising opportunity for ccFound and will be tested for conversions in acquiring new users.
We also invite new trainers to list their courses on the ccFound marketplace. You just need to be a user of the platform to use it. To establish closer cooperation with us, write to the e-mail “support” in the domain of the ccFound platform.
3. Roadmap and IT progress
On June 15th, I published an update of our roadmap on ccFound - so I won't repeat myself in terms of what we are planning, but I will focus on the summary of things completed. Let me just remind you that the priority is the thematic groups mentioned above, ultimately related to the courses - and subscription products.
In recent days we had a crisis situation - Stripe terminated our account due to the abuse of users who tested stolen payment cards on ccFound. Stripe blocked our funds and refunded everything to users, including those who honestly bought a course on the platform. (We are contacting all individuals individually to request a refund.) We were going to stop working with Stripe anyway due to high transaction costs of 4%. Therefore…
- After a long struggle, we managed to implement Zen as a payment processor. As of today, we have 3 payment options: ByZen, bank transfer and blik. We are still waiting for the payment card terminal to be launched.
- I have already written above about the launch of the marketplace and the fact that we have added the option of creating an account when buying products or downloading a free product.
- The mobile app for iOS is basically ready. We are currently going through the obstacle course of getting Apple's approval.
- Additional options in advanced sorting: paid questions only and 18+ content. We are in the process of adding: Valuable only, Personal, Timeless, Outdated.
- We have finished translating all content into Hindi and launched this language on the platform. This required optimization of translation costs, which reduced them by two orders of magnitude. The cost of translating ccFound into Hindi was €40. (Next: Chinese).
- We updated the daily report with additional items - courses and ebooks.
- We have enabled bank transfer withdrawals from the platform and have disabled cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals due to abuse.
- We changed the operation of the mobile application, the operation of the platform as not logged in and the operation of comments to be more user-friendly.
- We have added transaction history in the marketplace with the option of adding and downloading invoices. We have launched automatic invoice generation for course authors. (We're also in the process of adding statistics for authors in the marketplace.)
- We've updated the author listing in the course view.
- We added the ability to add funny gifs and a gallery of many graphics in questions, articles and comments.
- We've added a quick support button.
- We've added an "After Hours" tab.
- We have added conversion of prices to PLN in the marketplace. (The next step is to add the second currency - PLN).
- We added a banner informing about the possibility of downloading the mobile application in case of entering ccFound on a mobile device.
- We have enabled ChatGPT's one-time query by commenting on its answer to the question.
- We have enabled product suggestions on the home page.
- In addition, we fixed at least 50 reported bugs. More important: we increased the number of indexed pages on Google, which fell to 12,000, back to 34,000.
We continued to optimize the work processes of the IT team. The team is working in an increasingly repetitive and structured way, which has led to better code quality and fewer bugs than in previous months. We have also reduced the unavailability of the website due to errors and glitches.
A retrospective made at the end of each sprint showed a 70% reduction in the number of reported problems to be solved in the team. Most of the artificial problems arising from communication problems, silos and imperfect management of the information flow and the team itself have been eliminated.
We have implemented end-to-end testing mechanisms. Goal - to test all key platform processes automatically before uploading any changes to production. Not only did we create the first dozen or so tests in cooperation with an external consultant, but we trained an internal employee (non-programmer!) who takes over this task.
Simplification of the tech stack - we removed java completely, we removed 90% of python. Thanks to this, the additional cost of maintenance in these technologies has been reduced to practically zero.
The actual cost after optimization of the Azure cloud environment for June was €2340 (pre-optimization €4015). Google's cloud costs will also be drastically reduced.
We tried to audit our mockups and UX/UI components. Our auditor, however, after inspecting the portal, does not see the need for auditing (sic!). He believes that the portal is made with art and in line with current trends. Of course, this doesn't mean that all features look perfect, it just means that we should focus on user testing, and we are.
4. Capital, costs and financing
After paying the salary for the last month, we have PLN 3,574,564 in capital. (At the time of writing, USD costs PLN 4.1). It is no small achievement that we managed to reduce the costs to the level of about PLN 250,000 per month. Let me remind you that they have already reached the level of PLN 0.5 million. ccFound as a startup still does not make money - sales on the marketplace are symbolic. All this means that if we do not start earning, we have the funds to operate until September 2024.
We have three aces up our sleeve to get funding to further develop ccFound.
- We aim to publish hi-ticket products on ccFound. Courses sold for PLN 200 will not provide enough turnover to maintain the platform. We adjust ccFound so that specialized programs worth PLN 5-15 thousand and even more are published here. It is on them that the largest revenues are generated in the education industry. We keep in touch with users who run such courses and adjust ccFound to their requirements.
- We are striving to obtain funding from VC again , this time positioning ccFound not as a social medium, but primarily as software for creators to sell their content on the internet in accordance with the idea expressed above.
- Recovery of funds from the Tax Office. We are fighting to recover three different tranches of overpaid taxes:
- nearly PLN 2 million for the fundraising campaign in 2020-2021, which is related to the change in FOUND coin's classification as a multi-purpose voucher, the sale of which by definition is not income, and therefore taxes are refundable (unfortunately it will take about two years),
- nearly PLN 2 million for VAT on invoices in 2021-2022 - this is VAT that we could not deduct from revenues, because we did not generate them (we should recover them within half a year),
- PLN 480,000 for undue tax, which the Tax Office has recently charged us - which shows clerical pathology and deserves a separate publication about our country, and we are actually preparing one (this is also to be recovered in a few months).
To sum up, we have about PLN 4 million to recover from the Tax Office. I would like to generate PLN 1-2 million for ccFound with our own hi-ticket product, which we are striving to create. VC financing, on the other hand, in the event of success, can raise USD 1-2 million.
5. Summary
Of course, we are not just trying to survive with a few million zlotys in the coming years. What we are implementing now is another pivot aimed at creating a business worth billions of USD.
We are moving away from emphasizing social media, because this concept has not worked so far. The increase in the number of users is linear, and the engagement is average. There is no viral effect and WoM (word-of-mouth) commands. Let's be honest - ccFound users aren't particularly interested in gathering knowledge in a question-and-answer format. We don't have any monetization from paid questions, PM4A or paywalls.
Thematic groups can help you find people with similar interests and increase your involvement in good company. In addition, we are just getting started in the implementation of the multilingual platform by adding Hindi and Chinese (and more) languages, thanks to which SEO will work better and better. So there is still a chance that the platform will get a snowball effect. However, you cannot delay - we are looking for how to help it - from the other side.
Recent months have shown that we are solving the problem of one, only target group: trainers looking for software to put their courses for sale ... and their teachers. We got almost all of our trainers through acquaintance with a teacher teacher - a person who teaches people how to sell their knowledge online.
Our slogan on the new pitch deck is “AI-driven content monetization platform”. There are already unicorn start-ups in this field around the world, e.g. Kajabi is used to publish online courses, costs USD 100-400 per subscription and is worth USD 2 billion after a funding round of USD 550 million.
We add to this the magic of artificial intelligence, offering authors what we already do in social media: automatic translations of courses into other languages. There is already technology that makes this possible, not only in dubbing, but also with new language voice generation and lip-syncing!
But the most important thing is that we stand out with the social aspect, which will be strengthened by trainers building their micro-communities on ccFound ... And then vice versa: the ccFound community will strengthen the sales of more trainers that will appear on the platform. It's win-win.
So we continue to connect two worlds - the sale of education (information products with communities of engaged learners) with one global ccFound international community.
Nothing like this is currently being done by anyone in the world and we believe that in this way we will solve the global problem of creators of valuable content struggling to reach new audiences today.
Dear ccFound investors and fans!
1. Where are we - statistics
We have 28,661 registered users on the portal with confirmed registration (out of 40,030 registrations in total). Since April 1 this year, 3,745 people have confirmed their registration on the portal. 323 users created an account from the referral program on the portal. (Please note that we are not currently promoting registration on the portal, focusing rather on protecting capital and redirecting it to advertising the marketplace in the coming months).
For the last 3 months, we got 12,000 clicks from Google for 249,000 ccFound impressions in search results. The average CTR is 4.8%. We can see an upward trend - the number of clicks for the first quarter was 5.2 thousand. with a CTR of 2.3%. So we saw a two-fold increase in clicks from the search engine, despite the perturbation of abandoning the “beta.ccfound.com” subdomain and shifting indexing to the main domain. We also see registrations from unspecified sources ranging from a few to 80 per day (probably from Google).
The progressing internationalization of search results is the most pleasing. For Q1 we had 213 entries from France, 144 from Spain, 114 from Great Britain, 106 from Germany, 72 from the USA ... For Q2 we have 1100 from France, 451 from the USA, 321 from Spain, 269 from Great Britain, 239 from Germany, and therefore more than double the presence in foreign search engines. The proportion of entries from Poland to other countries is 60% - it's still a lot, but it fell from 76% for Q1!
A total of 5,503 publications (questions, articles and entries) were written on ccFOUND, and we received 1,139 of them in the second quarter alone. The number of comments published on the portal since April this year amounted to 10,825. paid question. So far, we have published 42 of them with a total value of $215.
On April 20 this year, I wrote that our marketplace was launched . So far, 38 trainers have joined our platform and published 82 products, including 12 ebooks and 5 English-language courses. We also offer 10 items that are free. More publications will follow in the coming weeks. As of June 30, 2023, the value of all rates listed on the ccFound marketplace is $3,210 (PLN 13,109). In the past quarter, we sold 1,086 courses for a total of $5,698.
As part of our activities, we tested the best solutions and designed a promotion process that will allow us to effectively acquire as many clients as possible for trainers cooperating with ccFOUND.
Currently, 19 trainers have agreed to join the affiliate program where they offer us an additional commission so that we can advertise them ourselves from the ccFound budget. Thanks to this, from the second half of May on our social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) we started the "Meet our trainers" series, in which we publish several posts a week presenting the profiles of trainers and their courses.
So far we have published 32 posts, including 9 about trainers and 20 about courses. We reached almost 34,000 people and generated 284 visits to course pages. 13 courses were purchased directly from clicks on ads. Thus, we smoothly move to the details…
2. Promotion and advertising
Any trainer who decides to work with ccFOUND to promote courses will be subject to the same promotion process.
- A series of posts on FB, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok - we create posts with the silhouette of the trainer and separately posts about each course. In the case of TikTok, it will be one video about the trainer and the courses. Posts will lead to a landing page that promotes the purchase of courses of a given trainer.
- Landing page - landing pages promoting the purchase of courses will be created for each creator. It is to the landing page that we will direct the recipients of the advertisement, and from the landing page we will directly lead to the purchase of the course along with the possibility of registration.
- Webinars - we will enable trainers to conduct webinars in order to sell courses on the platform. We will invite ccFound users and advertisers to the webinars.
- Mailings - additionally, once a week a mailing will be sent about the selected author and courses of our authors.
This is all a pilot advertising program to develop good practices and processes. Therefore, for the time being, expenses have been kept to a minimum and will be gradually scaled up. A few more elements were needed to develop the ad:
- Affiliate program that increases the platform's commission (20%) to levels that allow you to take advertising risk with your own capital (at least 50%). We solved this problem by making appointments with trainers individually. An affiliate program is being created in the meantime and will enable all ccFound users to earn from marketplace referrals.
- Registering from the level of a filled cart in the marketplace - both for paid and free products. The marketplace version of MVP did not include this. Only now can we gain new users for the portal by advertising courses.
- Advanced attribution system so that we can accurately attribute which ad the buyer came from. The systems built into FB or Google Ads are very inaccurate. We are currently implementing the most advanced attribution system on the market.
In addition, we create the functionality of thematic groups within which people who purchase the course will be able to count on the support of the trainer and each other. Creating a thematic group for a course (or a group bringing together participants of several courses) is completely optional; at the beginning we start with open groups, we will create closed groups for paid courses in the second place.
Open groups are of course another advertising opportunity for ccFound and will be tested for conversions in acquiring new users.
We also invite new trainers to list their courses on the ccFound marketplace. You just need to be a user of the platform to use it. To establish closer cooperation with us, write to the e-mail “support” in the domain of the ccFound platform.
3. Roadmap and IT progress
On June 15th, I published an update of our roadmap on ccFound - so I won't repeat myself in terms of what we are planning, but I will focus on the summary of things completed. Let me just remind you that the priority is the thematic groups mentioned above, ultimately related to the courses - and subscription products.
In recent days we had a crisis situation - Stripe terminated our account due to the abuse of users who tested stolen payment cards on ccFound. Stripe blocked our funds and refunded everything to users, including those who honestly bought a course on the platform. (We are contacting all individuals individually to request a refund.) We were going to stop working with Stripe anyway due to high transaction costs of 4%. Therefore…
- After a long struggle, we managed to implement Zen as a payment processor. As of today, we have 3 payment options: ByZen, bank transfer and blik. We are still waiting for the payment card terminal to be launched.
- I have already written above about the launch of the marketplace and the fact that we have added the option of creating an account when buying products or downloading a free product.
- The mobile app for iOS is basically ready. We are currently going through the obstacle course of getting Apple's approval.
- Additional options in advanced sorting: paid questions only and 18+ content. We are in the process of adding: Valuable only, Personal, Timeless, Outdated.
- We have finished translating all content into Hindi and launched this language on the platform. This required optimization of translation costs, which reduced them by two orders of magnitude. The cost of translating ccFound into Hindi was €40. (Next: Chinese).
- We updated the daily report with additional items - courses and ebooks.
- We have enabled bank transfer withdrawals from the platform and have disabled cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals due to abuse.
- We changed the operation of the mobile application, the operation of the platform as not logged in and the operation of comments to be more user-friendly.
- We have added transaction history in the marketplace with the option of adding and downloading invoices. We have launched automatic invoice generation for course authors. (We're also in the process of adding statistics for authors in the marketplace.)
- We've updated the author listing in the course view.
- We added the ability to add funny gifs and a gallery of many graphics in questions, articles and comments.
- We've added a quick support button.
- We've added an "After Hours" tab.
- We have added conversion of prices to PLN in the marketplace. (The next step is to add the second currency - PLN).
- We added a banner informing about the possibility of downloading the mobile application in case of entering ccFound on a mobile device.
- We have enabled ChatGPT's one-time query by commenting on its answer to the question.
- We have enabled product suggestions on the home page.
- In addition, we fixed at least 50 reported bugs. More important: we increased the number of indexed pages on Google, which fell to 12,000, back to 34,000.
We continued to optimize the work processes of the IT team. The team is working in an increasingly repetitive and structured way, which has led to better code quality and fewer bugs than in previous months. We have also reduced the unavailability of the website due to errors and glitches.
A retrospective made at the end of each sprint showed a 70% reduction in the number of reported problems to be solved in the team. Most of the artificial problems arising from communication problems, silos and imperfect management of the information flow and the team itself have been eliminated.
We have implemented end-to-end testing mechanisms. Goal - to test all key platform processes automatically before uploading any changes to production. Not only did we create the first dozen or so tests in cooperation with an external consultant, but we trained an internal employee (non-programmer!) who takes over this task.
Simplification of the tech stack - we removed java completely, we removed 90% of python. Thanks to this, the additional cost of maintenance in these technologies has been reduced to practically zero.
The actual cost after optimization of the Azure cloud environment for June was €2340 (pre-optimization €4015). Google's cloud costs will also be drastically reduced.
We tried to audit our mockups and UX/UI components. Our auditor, however, after inspecting the portal, does not see the need for auditing (sic!). He believes that the portal is made with art and in line with current trends. Of course, this doesn't mean that all features look perfect, it just means that we should focus on user testing, and we are.
4. Capital, costs and financing
After paying the salary for the last month, we have PLN 3,574,564 in capital. (At the time of writing, USD costs PLN 4.1). It is no small achievement that we managed to reduce the costs to the level of about PLN 250,000 per month. Let me remind you that they have already reached the level of PLN 0.5 million. ccFound as a startup still does not make money - sales on the marketplace are symbolic. All this means that if we do not start earning, we have the funds to operate until September 2024.
We have three aces up our sleeve to get funding to further develop ccFound.
- We aim to publish hi-ticket products on ccFound. Courses sold for PLN 200 will not provide enough turnover to maintain the platform. We adjust ccFound so that specialized programs worth PLN 5-15 thousand and even more are published here. It is on them that the largest revenues are generated in the education industry. We keep in touch with users who run such courses and adjust ccFound to their requirements.
- We are striving to obtain funding from VC again , this time positioning ccFound not as a social medium, but primarily as software for creators to sell their content on the internet in accordance with the idea expressed above.
- Recovery of funds from the Tax Office. We are fighting to recover three different tranches of overpaid taxes:
- nearly PLN 2 million for the fundraising campaign in 2020-2021, which is related to the change in FOUND coin's classification as a multi-purpose voucher, the sale of which by definition is not income, and therefore taxes are refundable (unfortunately it will take about two years),
- nearly PLN 2 million for VAT on invoices in 2021-2022 - this is VAT that we could not deduct from revenues, because we did not generate them (we should recover them within half a year),
- PLN 480,000 for undue tax, which the Tax Office has recently charged us - which shows clerical pathology and deserves a separate publication about our country, and we are actually preparing one (this is also to be recovered in a few months).
To sum up, we have about PLN 4 million to recover from the Tax Office. I would like to generate PLN 1-2 million for ccFound with our own hi-ticket product, which we are striving to create. VC financing, on the other hand, in the event of success, can raise USD 1-2 million.
5. Summary
Of course, we are not just trying to survive with a few million zlotys in the coming years. What we are implementing now is another pivot aimed at creating a business worth billions of USD.
We are moving away from emphasizing social media, because this concept has not worked so far. The increase in the number of users is linear, and the engagement is average. There is no viral effect and WoM (word-of-mouth) commands. Let's be honest - ccFound users aren't particularly interested in gathering knowledge in a question-and-answer format. We don't have any monetization from paid questions, PM4A or paywalls.
Thematic groups can help you find people with similar interests and increase your involvement in good company. In addition, we are just getting started in the implementation of the multilingual platform by adding Hindi and Chinese (and more) languages, thanks to which SEO will work better and better. So there is still a chance that the platform will get a snowball effect. However, you cannot delay - we are looking for how to help it - from the other side.
Recent months have shown that we are solving the problem of one, only target group: trainers looking for software to put their courses for sale ... and their teachers. We got almost all of our trainers through acquaintance with a teacher teacher - a person who teaches people how to sell their knowledge online.
Our slogan on the new pitch deck is “AI-driven content monetization platform”. There are already unicorn start-ups in this field around the world, e.g. Kajabi is used to publish online courses, costs USD 100-400 per subscription and is worth USD 2 billion after a funding round of USD 550 million.
We add to this the magic of artificial intelligence, offering authors what we already do in social media: automatic translations of courses into other languages. There is already technology that makes this possible, not only in dubbing, but also with new language voice generation and lip-syncing!
But the most important thing is that we stand out with the social aspect, which will be strengthened by trainers building their micro-communities on ccFound ... And then vice versa: the ccFound community will strengthen the sales of more trainers that will appear on the platform. It's win-win.
So we continue to connect two worlds - the sale of education (information products with communities of engaged learners) with one global ccFound international community.
Nothing like this is currently being done by anyone in the world and we believe that in this way we will solve the global problem of creators of valuable content struggling to reach new audiences today.
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