we didn’t come this far, to only come this far

it’s been 3 years since we started building leap.club. the journey has been exciting, humbling, tiring, frustrating (and all adjectives that could describe the mixed emotions one goes through as a startup founder). as a second time founder you think you’re better prepared for it by anticipating the ups and downs a little better, but the stress always hits you like a storm and there is no escaping it.

so much has happened in the last 3 years and i’m struggling with where to start so let’s start with the last week

i am usually good at compartmentalising and mostly manage to leave work at work. but the last week got the better of us. we questioned our approach, our decision making skills, our leadership + 100 other things multiple times. we had a few key exits, a (massive) product launch that we are still not able to make noise about since our new app is getting rejected for random reasons for 10 days on the app store, a new membership tier launch that did a lot better that what we thought it would and we were massively under prepared for next steps, couple of features that are crumbling on our app because of high demand, team & strategic realignments that will take revenue down by a large % (in the hope that it scales a lot faster). yes, all of this in the last week and i am pretty sure i am still missing a few points. it’s impossible to not question your entire existence in such weeks.

in all of this we did try and find some bright spots. we did a lot of 1:1’s with the team to explain the team realignments, new direction and we really enjoyed most of these chats. the maturity and clarity of thought was great to see. seems like few of our older folks are passing the baton to the new gen and glad to know they are ready for it. and of-course there is always member-love to keep us going. (these screenshots are from the last week too)

i often joke about how these shoutouts have become so regular for us that we don’t give them the attention they deserve anymore. we have struggled with a lot of things in our journey, but member love has been our constant source of motivation.

as a team, we need to be more proud of what we have built.

when we think of pmf at leap.club, we divide it into two parts — concept market fit and product market fit. the constant member love, 12,000+ paying members, the success of the trial membership we launched <2 weeks back tells us that we have 100% hit concept market fit. our decent retention rates point us towards early product market fit as well, but we are not satisfied (at all) just yet. there is another interesting concept we talk about internally: financial runaway v/s opportunity runaway. financial runaway is easy to calculate but imo, it’s the opportunity runaway that is equally important. for a network effects business like ours, it’s important for us to scale in the next 18–24 months. team and founder motivation also forms a big chunk of opportunity runaway. this was one of the bigger learnings from my first entrepreneurial experience. when we decided to move on in 2017, we still had money in the bank but were out of steam. if you want to build something big, it’s a multi decade journey, so constant energy, motivation, and steam replenishment is key. but of-course, always easier said than done.

we have a massive opportunity in front of us to build leap.club into a big, meaningful business and with that in mind and with a lot of excitement in the tank, we are ready to realign a lot of our macro strategies. before we dive into them, it’s important to remember that -

1. change is the only constant.
2. it’s going to be hard, very hard.
3. all the hard work that we previously put in gives us this opportunity to move towards our goal posts faster. so no work is ever wasted. it’s the past that enables us today to open new doors for the future.

now let’s talk about the new direction -

1. we are retiring our inside sales team. our sales team got us to 12,000 members and we built this engine thanks to a lot of hard work from great folks over the last 3 years. but we are now hitting challenges and the speed of growth is not keeping up with our ambitions. due to various reasons, we have struggled with retention, motivation and scaling of this team and hence it’s important for us to look forward. effective immediately, we are focused on productising new member onboarding. we are seeing great and predictable demand for our trial memberships and the ball is on our court to delight them better/push harder for a better product and convert them to full members. this means more focus on tech and product.
2. we have been a sales focused company from day 1. when we spoke about scale, we spoke about 50 people in the sales team. we are now focused on scaling tech and product. we want to again say that the goal post has not moved. only how we get there has. with this in mind, we will double our tech team and ship quality products much faster. we know that some of the current features need to be upgraded and in the next 6 months, we will deliver an entirely new experience on our platform to our members. if you’re keen to join the tech ship, write to us at jobs@leap.club.
3. we have always relied on word of mouth and social channels for marketing but to scale faster, we need to expand our marketing efforts. we have expanded the team, are hiring a vertical head, are focusing on partnerships and are ready to spend the $$. with our focus on product, and revamped user journey, we are confident the $$ here will be an investment and not a spend.
4. launch of our b2b vertical and jobs. we are insanely excited about this. we have an engaged, active pool of top talent on our platform and it’s obvious that companies want to target them. we have been getting inbounds for the last 2 years + a lot of hiring happens on the platform via members too. in the last 2 months, we have worked hard to build the entire jobs suite (recruiter dashboards, tools to post jobs, scope candidates, user side interface to search and apply for jobs). we have signed 100+ companies to work with us already and are now getting ready to not only offer talent solutions but also a suite of products focused on accelerating diversity, inclusion, women leadership in our partner organisations. we have moved a lot of folks from our inside sales team to our enterprise team. this will unlock a lot of user side engagement and revenue for us in parallel.
5. increased focus to enable folks to do their best at work. a better office in gurgaon, more travel by leaders to non hq offices, hiring for key roles like marketing, tech, design — all of this (and more) coming up.
6. events continue to be a big focus for us in 2023. our members love to meet other members in an offline setting and our calendar for the year is set. in 2022 we were happy with 100–200 members attending our events. for some of our bigger events, our goal is now 1000. we will, of-course, continue to curate intimate experiences , online sessions as well — but everything will get bigger and better.

on some days, it might feel like we have taken a step back, but it’s only so that we can take a pause, re-group and run faster. in the words of everyone at leap.club — LFG!