Welcome to another Yem Jam, a summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. This will be the last update of 2021 — we look forward to seeing you next year, and thank you for being part of the journey. 🙏
🔨 Product update
We’re now working with a dozen paid newsletters and continue to have a solid impact, driving an average lift of +7.4% in subscription revenue. We're maintaining our impact into the 2nd and 3rd months for longer-tenured customers. Below is a chart showing revenue growth for a couple of our earlier customers:
This past week, we launched an email editor in the Yem app. The editor gives customers a suite of templates and the ability to adjust subject, copy, and other details. We had our first customer go through the entire automated flow: create a Yem account → set-up API access to Substack & Stripe → edit and finalize their subject, copy, etc. → launch their messages. For someone well aware of how arduous this process used to be, watching it happen in real-time was magical.
🤜🤛 The team doubles
It’s my pleasure to introduce Luis Del Giudice, who’s joining Yem as my co-founder and CTO.
We had our first call back in September. Luis quickly grasped Yem's long-term goal and what we were trying to do with the initial product. His enthusiasm was palpable. After our first call, he spent the weekend rebuilding our product to be more resilient and scalable, enabling us to onboard more customers.
Shortly after, Luis came to Santa Barbara to stay with me (and my girlfriend) for a week. We spent a lot of time building, but also got to know each other during bike rides, hikes, and walks around town.
Before Yem, Luis was a founding engineer at Pinwheel and an early engineer at LedgerX (acquired by FTX). He also built a SaaS product that reached $1M in annual recurring revenue. Luis has an entrepreneurial backbone, a relentless drive, and a buoyancy that helps plow through the inevitable troughs.
Luis is an exceptional technical problem-solver and has been the driving force behind our recent progress. I'm excited to see what we can do together.
👀 Eyes to next year
We’re aiming for a run rate of $100,000 in annual revenue by the end of March ‘22, roughly 4x where we are today. Our focus moving into next year will move through:
Fortifying the existing product and continuing to onboard paid newsletters
Expanding product features to support free newsletters and non-Substack newsletters
Launching new products with an eye towards helping newsletters grow their email list
It hasn’t been easy, but we’re happy with our progress so far and thrilled to carry this momentum into next year. From our experience, we know what a growth function looks like within a major media company. We're one small step towards building a growth function for a more decentralized, creator-centric world.
Have a lovely holiday and we’ll see you next year!
PS - Luis is fond of kite surfing, below is a picture of him in a recent competition:
