19 Jul 2022
Uncommon Purpose Response
3yThanks for taking the time to share your feedback. I think what you are referring to is the winding down of our operations in India, which we announced this week. This was a tough business decision given the quality of work and the personal relationships we have with our team members in India. After the acquisition by Salesforce.com in April of this year, we endeavoured to bring along as many people as we could to Traction's product arm, which we renamed Uncommon Purpose. We had a very optimistic plan where every part of our business had to hit all goals for us to be financially viable. We staffed accordingly.
Many would argue, we had too many resources out the gate. Nevertheless, our model of offsetting the costs of bringing our portfolio of new products to market through marketing services revenue, just hadn’t materialized in the timeframe that was needed.
Economic conditions have radically changed.
The economy is slowing down overall with speculation of an impending recession. Inflation is rising and we are still feeling significant impacts of the pandemic and supply chain issues.
Because of this, Venture Capital funding has dried up and companies, especially tech startups, are hunkering down to make sure they can weather the next two years without more funding.
We needed to de-risk our business.
Frankly, we didn’t have enough buffer in our original plan to accommodate for unpredictability. There are always variables in timing of product market fit and adoption. This new plan gives us much more of a ‘war chest’ to handle variability in each business as well as be in a position to incubate new worthwhile product initiatives, and keep us focused on our vison of creating 100 companies in 10 years.
In the last month, we took a hard look at the trajectory of all of our businesses and it was clear that we were not on a sustainable path forward. We now have a plan that would see us not requiring more funding for at least the next two years