From the archives: Goodbye, Remi 💔 hello Range 👋🏻🌟
From the archives: Goodbye, Remi 💔 hello Range 👋🏻🌟
We have big news to share: we're announcing today that Remi has been acquired by Range, and with that, we will be shutting down operations on August 31st 2022.
We're writing this with both a laughing and crying eye. Building Remi has been one of the greatest privileges of our lives. The number of milestones we reached and ceilings we shattered is still amazing to us, even now. We’ve learned so much in an incredibly short amount of time, and we would do it again in a heartbeat.
Why we decided to stop working on Remi and sell the company
Founding a startup is one of the hardest and most rewarding things a human can do. During two intense years, we
raised a €1.2 million pre-seed as an all-female team, from the most amazing and prolific investors across Europe and the world ( representing a small 2% of all-female, VC backed startups)
built our MVP ourselves with no-code tools like Figma, Bubble and Zapier - with the skills we learned in On Deck's No-code Fellowship - no previous design or technical skills.
launched a new product idea in a newly emerging market.
built a rockstar team of 10 builders, marketeers and operators - fully remote, from more than 8 nations across Europe and Asia, and a wonderful community of remote workers, people managers and thought leaders
acquired an amazing set of 80+ teams and got our first paying customers - asking us to pay (that's a pretty good sign of PMF)
But the circumstances were still tough, and timing can bite you in the ass. We got ready to raise our seed round just when the market dynamics started turning. We'd made great progress to show to investors, but we were still early stage - and the decreased appetite for risk did not match the opportunity we offered.
We also faced some strategic challenges. Despite adding 80+ teams within 6 months and great usage and retention signals (3+ days/week usage and 75% 6-months retention for our power users), we still struggled to answer the following questions with the clarity and conviction we would have needed to push forward:
Who is the primary user? Who is the product cheerleader?
Who is the buyer? What is the long-term willingness to pay? How can we keep this from turning into "last in, first out"?
We're in the business of networks. How can we create a habit-forming product and effectively manage our dependency on network effects (see Meerkat effect) over the long term?
How can we defend Remi's reason to exist (and the user to invest) to an already tool-overwhelmed user? Is Remi a replacement to a Social intranet, an add-on to Slack or something completely different?
We still very much believe that the pain point we tried to solve is a big, and an urgent one. There's no doubt in our mind that remote work is here to stay. But for a Culture-as-a-Service product to be successful in the market, we needed to prove that it could serve not just as a lagging, but a leading metric - and proving that required more time.
We still very much believe that our approach to building a remote culture product (async, bottom-up vs. top down, short but habitual interactions) was the right one to create a distinct value prop. But we also saw a lot of productivity tools adding culture-focussed features, and in the fight for attention in a very tool-oversaturated market, it would be a continued struggle to successfully defend a standalone tool.
Finally, our vision to create the leading Culture OS for the new era of remote and hybrid work was an amazing north star in many ways, but we would have needed a clearer wedge to focus our product and GTM efforts, learn faster and get to PMF faster.
Why we decided to partner with Range
We still very much believe that remote culture building is the next big frontier in the future of work market. With that in mind, our key goal for Remi's acquisition was to ensure we find a partner that shares our values and mission to make remote work more human and connected. We found this partner with Range. Like Remi, Range's mission is to help teams build trust and connection in just a few minutes each day, no matter where they're working. We're super thankful for the Range founders Jen and Dan for their trust and partnership, and we know they will take great care of our users in the future.
What's next?
Building a startup is no joke - it's been an intense two years. We both need a break. But we're both relentless doers who can't sit still for too long, so we already have a few projects in mind, and one very concrete one planned:
We want to collect our learnings from taking Remi from 0 to 1, and share them with fellow and future founders. We've learned so much along the way - and we think that this knowledge should be accessible to anyone. It's the knowledge we wish we would have had when we started Remi - sometimes concrete insights (How to get your first investor to say yes), sometimes it's that extra sprinkle of "yes, you can do this, just take that little extra step here and you'll get there" without which we would have probably stopped long before. We'll be sharing a mix of both concrete instructions and a healthy dose of being real and supportive talk on our channels. Beyond that, we’re also keen to help startups in more concrete ways to tackle their challenges - we’ll be offering consulting or brainstorming sessions. Keep your eyes peeled, more on this soon.
Parting thoughts
What brought us this far is you, our dear customers, users, investors, early supporters as well as our amazing community of remote lovers. We can’t thank you all enough for your trust, early support and feedback - without you we wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Let’s keep in touch and see you soon 👋🏻
FYI: this article is cross-posted from Linkedin and was written in August 16, 2022.