Applied: 24.04.2024
APPLICATION
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less
📎
Slack alternative with built-in management tools
https://orch.so/
What is your company going to make?
Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
💡
We are building Orchestra, an all-in-one team communication tool with built-in management features and AI agents.
Orchestra integrates chats, voice/video calls, projects & tasks, docs, CRMs, and calendar into a seamless workflow.
It eliminates contexts fragmentation between different tools and reduce “work about work” problem (that costs up to 60% of work time). And it allows to turn any discussion into an actionable task and navigate it in a project management flow.
Orchestra consolidates all corporate contexts into a single "source of truth," empowering teams with AI agents that are both self-developed and built by third-party developers.
Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product?
Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain.
💻
Both of tech co-founders write ~80% of all code.
Other full-time dev team members (1 frontend developer and 1 QA engineer) help them to concentrate on the most critical aspects of the product.
No agencies.
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?
Have any of the founders not met in person?
🙌
We are 4 founders.
Sergie (1) and Eli (2) are 3rd-time co-founders that work together for the last 8 years—4 years on a product development agency, and 4 years on 2x startups.
In 2020, they hired Miro (3) in logistics startup, that have been sold in 2022.
In 2021 they met Vadik (4) during Startup Leadership Program (https://www.startupleadership.com/) right after his edtech business exit.
We made solid relationship through organizing local Burning Man events, then started to work on Orchestra. PROGRESS
How far along are you?
📈
⋅ The product is launched, available via free 5-days Trial (open beta)
⋅ Web, iOS/Android, and desktop apps are released
⋅ Generated over $7,500 with a pipeline potential of $220k ARR.
⋅ Great metrics: 0% churn rate after successful onboarding, account growth from 5 to 35 members in 2-6 months, 1h+ daily spend time
How long have each of you been working on this?
How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
📅
We started to research the problem in 2022. But launched the closed beta 7 months ago (Sep, 23). Since we are all-in.
How many active users or customers do you have?
How many are paying? Who is paying you the most, and how much do they pay you?
📈
Our current $1,4k+ MRR is driven by 17 active customers with ~190 paid users, a total of ~320 MAU (including free trial users).
Our largest customers, a game development studio with 32 members and an e-commerce builders studio with 23 members, contribute about $250/mo at rates of $7 and $10 per seat.
This month we plan to expand a couple of acquired accounts with a headcount of 70–100 people (with the potential for $700–$1000/mo monthly check from them). And recently we've sold an annual subscription worth $1040 in a 1 day (and we've got some cash!).
Do you have revenue?
Yes
Where does your revenue come from?
If your revenue comes from multiple sources (ex. multiple products, multiple companies or a mix of consulting and this product), please break down how much is coming from each source.
💲
100% from direct SaaS subscriptions by customers. No consulting or other services.
Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
💲
1. Building alternatives to Slack or ClickUp is not an overnight task; the productivity market demands product maturity. For such a small dev team (and bootstrap approach), the results are impressive. Bets are paying out now: teams are already switching to Orchestra from established products like Asana, Trello, Slack, and Discord.
2. Before scaling up, we do things that don’t scale to build the product our customers really want and can rely on. Our hands-on approach (manual onboarding, weekly success calls, weekly product updates, etc.) led to great achievements: users daily spend is 1 hour+, 0% churn in 6–8 months after activation, and 60% of new trials come from existing customers
If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change?
If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
1️⃣
The idea is still the same, but we:
⋅ signed up the second tech co-founder,
⋅ upgraded the product with mobile/desktop apps, built-in calls etc.
⋅ increased pricing
⋅ found a way to grow in revenue 50-100% MoM
If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.
IDEA
Why did you pick this idea to work on?
Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
🚀
1. We're scratching a personal itch. We’ve been running teams of up to 120 members for 12 years. We’ve tried 20+ tools in different combinations, but met the same issue: a disconnection between chats, tasks, deals, docs and calendar. That led to a lot of “work about work” (and operational costs) to keep the business running.
2. After 100+ product discovery calls with other teams, we identified a core problem: “fragmented work contexts." 70% of managers reported struggling with related issues: chaos in chats, overwhelm with “monkey-job”, app-switching, data losses, endless "zooms,” etc.
3. Vadik has already built (and sold) a $2M business, that helped 3000+ businesses connect their productivity apps with no-code tools. And knows: teams spend thousands on building and maintaining these API integrations between chats, CRMs, & tasks (but still, they are not working well and need maintenance).
4. This discovery has generated a waiting list of potential customers with a potential of ~$200k ARR. We still convert them to paid (and happy) every month.
Who are your competitors?
What do you understand about your business that they don't?
🚀
The productivity landscape is crowded. Our main competitors are:a. Communication tools: Slack/Discord
b. Management tools: Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp etc.
What do we understand:
1. The context fragmentation problem is real and not yet solved. 70% of our prospects are struggling with that. After switching to Orchestra, our customers send us kudos almost every week!
2. Legacy. Major players like Slack or Asana were launched 10-15 years ago for office usage, where fragmentation could be solved offline. But today, in remote-first era, we need new tools (like Loom) to deal with new challenges.
3. Collaboration (chats and calls) and Productivity (tasks) are not separate processes; they are the two sides of the same coin. Most of the current big players are focused on only one of these work aspects (that still leads to fragmentation)
4. Orchestra, as an all-in-one workspace app, took the best pros and eliminate the cons of both tool groups:
⋅ Comparing to Slack, it’s super structured with task-focused communication. Maximum transparency. No noise.
⋅ Comparing to Asana, thanks to being “center of gravity”, data is always up-to-date: nothing is lost or outdated. No app-switching. Save time.
5. The AI workforce revolution is real. With a context-centric approach, Orchestra is a foundation for human and AI synergy.
How do or will you make money?
How much could you make?(We realize you can't know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
🔄
We're adopting classic SaaS pricing:
⋅ Per seat subscription tiers: $10–15/mo
⋅ Add-ons (such as AI-employees as a service or storage plans)
⋅ Premium/enterprise features plans and services
For our current ICP, we are targeting ~$2,4B market:
⋅ Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), 11 employees in av.
⋅ Technology, marketing, and advertising companies
⋅ Already implemented remote or hybrid work formats, 40%
⋅ Geographic: North and South America, Europe, 3M
Calculations:
⋅ With the cost per seat $15 per month,
⋅ There are 1,2M prospects (3M * 0.4)
⋅ ARR per customer: 11*$15*12 = $2034
⋅ TAM is 1,2M * $2034 = 2,4B,
⋅ To reach $100M annual revenue, we need 50k customers
How do users find your product?
How did you get the users you have now? If you run paid ads, what is your cost of acquisition?
🪴
Half is outreach via Twitter, LinkedIn and the startup community, the other half is a content marketing. But, currently, 60% of the new trials come from existing customers.
If you track metrics around user engagement and retention, what are they?
🪴
We’re still “doing things that don’t scale” stage, keeping in touch personally with every customer.
We didn’t integrated a deep analytics yet, but we track manually:
⋅ Onboarding time: switching customers from other tools in 1 hour
⋅ “Last seen” in Orchestra: keeping an eye on daily usage of every user
⋅ New paid members per week by workspace: watching how accounts expands
Next month, we will implement analytics to accurately track:
⋅ Workspace events (messages sent, new tasks created/resolved etc.),
⋅ Daily engagement time (now it’s around ~1h+ per day for activated users)
⋅ MAU/DAU aiming to 30-50%
⋅ 90-days retention
EQUITY
Please list all legal entities you have and in what state or country each was formed (e.g. Delaware C Corp, Mexican SAPI, Singapore Pvt Ltd, etc.).
This might include subsidiary companies, legal entities you formed in other markets to do business, entities you created before a pivot, or legal entities you set up to employ developers or other service providers.
💡
Orch Inc., Delaware C Corp
