Vanilla News - September 2019 Edition!

Hi Vanilla!

Welcome to the first edition of what I hope will become a regular newsletter about things happening inside our company. I'm hoping the contents of this newsletter will help us all to stay informed and interested in what other teams are doing, and learn things about Vanilla that we didn't know before.

This is a trial, and I'm very much open to (actively looking for) feedback on the usefulness and structure of this letter moving forward. Turns out, we’re doing a ton of stuff so this newsletter became very long. If the content is valuable and interesting, that’s great. If it's too long, let me know and I’ll make the next one more to the point.

CEO's office

Luc has been working on our plan for 2020. That means high level strategic planning in collaboration with other teams (agreeing on and setting the direction we want to move in), which leads to a staffing forecast and budget to achieve those plans. Vanilla has been doing very well, so these plans call for significant growth and so Luc is working on expanding the Ottawa office to accommodate this growth. Kind of exciting!

The Oracle partnership is starting to show real results, which means Vanilla should soon be listed on the Oracle partners website as a partner with an integration to Oracle's Customer Experience Cloud suite. Luc has been in constant contact with the OPN team to make this happen.

COO’s office

Beyond writing newsletters, I’ve been working to prepare for the growth we expect this year and next. A big part of that is office space, and I’m excited to announce that we’ve signed an agreement to lease the 7th floor of this building. That will make us the second largest tenant at 2045 Stanley, with the largest one being the building’s owners so that basically doesn’t count ;)

We’re also starting to plan for Vanilla Retreat 2020! I won’t spoil it by giving away too much, but I can let you know that we’re looking at similar dates as last year: end of April, beginning to middle of May. Keep your ears open for rumours and whispers about this in the next couple of months.

Accounting

In addition to the "business as usual" tasks of invoicing, collections, and paying Vanilla's own bills, Accounting has been focused on helping Luc to build a budget model for the upcoming year (fiscal 2020), which starts on October 1. This budget model helps us predict and plan for expenses, and tries to forecast revenue generation to give us a better idea of what we can reasonably accomplish.

Sales

The Sales Team is growing! This month we welcome Janie Wall, Enterprise Account Executive, who brings senior sales experience and will be part of us continuing to move up market and close these large MRR deals. Janie's arrival fills our space in the Ottawa office, meaning we will be looking to make a move in the coming months.

Pricing and Competition: Beginning October 1st, we will be increasing our pricing, again. Corporate plan pricing will move from $1,379/mth to $1,889/mth and our Enterprise Plan will move from $6,000/mth to $6,995/mth. These increases are the result of the space gaining momentum and the value we believe our solution provides versus our competition. We have been seeing aggressive sales tactics from our competition in recent months, namely from Higher Logic and Salesforce, however we continue to win more deals than we lose in competitive situations. Khoros is still the industry leader in the Enterprise space, but we continue to take bites out of that pie with deals like MSE and Openet.

Lastly, we continue to wait on feedback regarding potential next steps to migrate Oracles communities from Jive. This deal represents the most complex customizations, migration and negotiations in the history of Vanilla and requires input from many stakeholders here at Vanilla.

Product

The A-Team is working on subcommunity support for knowledge base. This comes with a new way of segmenting subcommunities by product, rather than just locale. The initial goal is to make organizing subcommunities more consistent across our products, but in the future having a product listing as part of our app can lead to more enterprise features.

The Bumblebee Man team is working on customer pain points, support issues, and is closing in on emptying out the HackerOne queue. They've pushed really hard to meet our stated goal of clearing HackerOne by the end of Q3. They’re also working to get the clusters back in sync with the current release, as several have fallen behind.

R&D is collectively working on getting the 3.2 open source release shipped. In addition, the team is replacing TravisCI with CircleCI which will allow continuous integration of more repos (including customer repos!), and working with Operations to identify and implement improvements to the deploy process.

Professional Services

The services team is making improvements to Vanilla’s estimation process, which has gotten a bit slow and burdensome. The team hopes to come up with a new approach that gets estimates into customers hands faster, while also reducing the cost to us of preparing them. When this process is ready, the team will cross-train Sales.

Formal on-boarding of the team’s newest members, Chang (migrations) and Brohman (theming) is coming to an end, and both are making valuable contributions during every sprint!

Support

Support is working on documenting its processes for agents, while we adjust to the new sprint rhythm of working with Bumblebee Man team in sprint cycles. We'll be looking at trends from the last few weeks as we continue to organize and label the backlog to build better data. Laura plans to jump onto dev-client calls for the next few sprints to take notes and prioritize creating documentation to help decrease the need for escalation where we can.

Marketing

We are on the cusp of publishing exclusive research based on a survey of 11,000 opt-in leads. With almost 400 responses, we conclude that online communities do in fact help across multiple challenges faced by businesses. We split out communities into “branded” (owned, served through on their own domain) and “social” (communities exclusively on social media). The report is slated for general release in October and we’re very excited about the impact it will have.

Success

Success is working on a more organized product training curriculum. This is initially aimed at improving the on-boarding of CSMs, but will soon be made available more broadly to the rest of Vanilla.

We’re revisiting and refreshing our customer facing collateral. This involves incorporating our new community strategies, using the new slide deck, and maintaining a common style and high production standard across the team to make the best impression on our customers.

Derrick and Val are working with our ClientSuccess CSM to integrate it with Salesforce. This integration will improve the communication and visibility between Sales and Success which is an important relationship.

Operations

The Operations team has identified an opportunity to improve the way we serve user generated uploads (images). This initiative has the potential to save us a decent amount of money and reduce the loading time of image-heavy pages in our product.

At long last, Jarvis is ready to be rolled out. He is slightly less sassy than before (this is a temporary regression and he will soon be just as sassy, if not more so) but is able to do some of your favourite things, like deploys, trial extensions, spitting hot derricks, etc. More to come!

Over the next two quarters (at least), Ops is tackling the task of removing monitoring blindspots within our environment. There are some pieces of the request chain that we cannot currently view, and the parts we can view are difficult to inspect or difficult to properly link to each other. We’re building a system that consumes all our request events and logs and gives us a comprehensive view of everything!

Some of our customer databases are under stress from being over utilized. Using a beta version of the monitoring system described above, we have been able to develop an updated / modified database configuration that better guards against crashes, so we’re testing that and will roll it out over the coming weeks.

Infosec

Last year we decided to pursue a SOC2 audit as part of our larger initiative to chase bigger enterprise customers. This audit requires us to catalogue and deeply understand the risks associated with our business activities and carefully prepare processes and controls to mitigate those risks. Paul has been working towards readiness for this audit, and has selected an auditing company this week! We’re hoping to have a “clean” audit by late next year.

HR

Lindsay has joined Vanilla, so we’re finally in a position to take a considered, deliberate approach to the culture and work environment at Vanilla. I’m so excited about this and I hope we’ll start seeing some very positive results from this change very very soon.

We have been working hard to select and configure a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) to take over things like time off requests (with WAY better, much clearer information directly at your fingertips), on-boarding checklists, goals and feedback cycles, and a lot more. We’re hoping to get this into your hands within the next couple of weeks!

We’re planning for a spectacular 2020, so Lindsay has been spending time preparing to meet the hiring needs of all the teams at Vanilla. We’re going to career fairs again, boosting our presence on job boards, and we’ve deployed a brand new “working at vanilla” page on our website. We also have a couple of new recruiters in the system to juice the flow of candidates.

If you made it this far you're a hero. Thanks for reading!