Q3 Investor Report
October 15, 2024 | Team Letter
Hello Alpaca!
I am so excited to share with you our Q3 Investor Report.
We built our own survey & insights software, sold it to 40+ NEW schools and districts, launched it across 70 paying customers, collected 36,000 insights from teachers, combined it with our packs to create an incentive to participate, and delighted thousands of teachers along the way. With our new offerings, we are now poised to be the top choice for employee engagement tools for K-12 educators.
It's been a big quarter. Let's dig in:
GROWTH
Our traction in Q3 is unprecedented. Here’s how we grew:
Added 41 new school and district customers
Launched Alpaca Pulse, a survey software product for K-12 educators
Launched a paid pilot of Pulse for Substitutes with 12 districts in Oregon
Built a database of 36,000 insights from real teachers about their experience as teachers.
Added 2 new team members (we have a software team now!)
Supported 4,000+ teachers with Back to School packs
Published a library of 100+ Employee Engagement resources for school principals and leaders, and a newsletter with 5,000 monthly subscribers.
Pitched at EdTech Week in New York City, gaining investor interest from 3 edtech venture funds.
SOFTWARE: WELCOME TO ALPACA PULSE!
So what is Alpaca Pulse? We can’t wait to show you! Alpaca Pulse is our own survey and data software that leverages thousands of insights from K-12 educators to ask teachers once a month simple questions about their wellbeing at work and the support they need. We deliver actionable insights back to school principals and districts from that monthly data.
According to the Principal Supervisor at Council Bluffs Community Schools: “We’ve never seen data like this before. We put it to work immediately, and we see the changes in how we support our teams.”
Ready to see a demo? Check it out here.
PACKS
Do we still do our Alpaca Packs? Yes! We ship thousands of packs, every month, to teachers across the country.
But now, they’re smarter. Now, they’re part of an incentive to help teachers participate in their school survey, offer feedback, and get the support they need. This way, school principals use our sureys to LISTEN to their staff, and then our packs to RECOGNIZE and reward their teams.
The best part? Our customers love it:
”You just don’t even know the impact this appreciation has on my day, week, and month. It’s the pick-me-up we all need!”
Q4 LOOK AHEAD
In Q4, we continue the move from being a “teacher celebration subscription box” company (a nice-to-have, hard to scale physical goods company), to an “employee engagement platform for K-12 educators” — a scalable software company addressing the critical problem of teacher attrition.
Here are a few of the changes our new product offering and positioning gives us as a company:
Customer clarity: We sell to both schools and districts in 2 distinct motions. We enable fast B2B sales with single schools, followed by enterprise sales with school districts. Land and expand.
Demand Gen: Our free resources for school leaders and weekly newsletters creates a demand generation go-to-market motion that enables selling to schools and districts.
Software scale, software margins: Obviously, software is infinitely more scalable, with far better margins. We’re seeing that benefit already.
Data opportunities: We are only beginning to see the future with the insights we’re building about teacher wellbeing with our surveys. Each month, our database grows by 10,000+ insights — and at a time where districts are looking for answers to the question “How do we keep our teachers?!”, it’s never held more potential.
FUNDRAISING
Alpaca closed 70% of our fundraising goal in Q2 and then paused for the summer to focus on sales ahead of the 2024-25 school year. (We’re glad we did!) We are now looking to close the remainder of the round.
We are having very promising conversations with a few funds to close this round, specifically focused on education technology companies. We are planning to close the round by November 10, and I am actively seeking conversations with potential investors, and happy to pass along the terms and deck! If you know investors that might be excited about our new direction, I’d love to have those conversations.
TEAM
Our team is small but mighty, and looking to grow. As we get this fundraising round complete, our next two hires will be for sales roles. Our clarity of product, sales motion, and pricing gives me high confidence that these hires will be huge for our Q4 and Q1 growth.
We remain proud community members at Millwork Commons, where we work and grow together as a team. Come see us! We’re the most ambitiously cheerful team you’ve ever met.
THANK YOU
In our first 2 years, we’ve turned Alpaca into something we are proud of and absolutely energized to see grow.
Today, Alpaca supports more than 6,500 teachers every month in 250+ schools and 70+ districts, in 20 states (and four countries!). Our new software product is taking off, building an incredible new future for Alpaca as a vital Employee Engagement tool for K-12 school leaders.
We are just getting started in this new chapter. Thanks for supporting and believing in us!
Onward!
KB
