Number 1 for me is market share - Profit is important but it is a much easier proposition if you have a defensible % market share as a result of you having a larger audience to introduce new monetisation features into. This is a very sticky market, people with reasonable holdings think very carefully before changing brokers.
One thing that they have to remember is that their strategy to date has been a pure commoditisation play. Take an expensive product and use Schumpeter's Gale theory to "creatively disrupt" that product by turning it into a commodity.
The allocation for the previous fundraising makes me worry that some of this focus has been lost as the hallmark of a successful commoditisation play is to aggressively grow market share whilst keeping your cost base as low as possible and some of the line items seemed expensive to my eyes.
$7.3 in Technology Development over 18 months is an astonishing amount of money to spend on Dev - It indicates an additional 15 to 17 headcount which, unless they have something incredible coming up, seems like overkill for an application this size.
I wouldn't mind betting that $7.3m is about what they would have spent on dev in the entire life of the business so far.
It just isn't that big of an application, challenging and complex to build yes, but not big. It means you need a small number of highly talented devs, not a horde of mid-level churning out pull requests.
I would prefer they spent the money on UX and front end whilst aggressively seeking a refund from whoever it was that was giving them UX advice to date.
Number 1 for me is market share - Profit is important but it is...
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