80k supporter update

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Benjamin Todd

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Mar 10, 2018, 4:10:39 PM3/10/18
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Hi everyone,


Here’s our update for the last 2 weeks.


Summary metrics


Financial

All figures are approximate, based on end-Jan-18


Cash reserves

$1,752,986

Costs last month

$84,443

Cash reserves divided by costs last month

21

Months’ runway (rough estimate based on expansion budget, including commitments to donate)

18



Staff


# of salaried employees (FTE, excluding freelancers)

5.6

Freelancers

10 (2.85 FTE)

Morale (on a scale of 1-10, full-time staff average)

8.6



Primary growth metric

Change in total impact-adjusted significant plan changes


Monthly growth rate:

4 weeks on previous 4 weeks (ending 2018W09)

349%



Annual growth rates:


Period

Change in total IASPC

Growth in TTM compared to this period

Last 12 months

2365.1

NA

2017

2262.2

5%

2016

1180.7

100%

2015

664.8

256%

2014

244.7

867%



Monthly growth chart - increase in IASPC per month



Progress in 2 sentences

We’ve wrapped up planning and are pushing ahead with our key projects for the bout, such as job matchmaking and the podcast.



-----------------------Full update -----------------------


Story of a plan change

Matt took a job as CEO of Founder's Pledge USA. Founder's Pledge has raised over $400m of legally binding pledges from startup founders, and aims to encourage effective giving.

Matt first found out about 80,000 Hours and effective altruism through Will's podcast on the Tim Ferriss show. After exiting from a startup, he was unsure what to do next. After the podcast, he reached out, spoke to me one-on-one, then attended EAG and spoke to another one of our advisors. He thinks there's about a 50:50 chance he wouldn't have taken this job (or a comparable one in the community) without 80,000 Hours.




Weekly targets - IASPC


Over the bout, we’re aiming to ramp up to 130 IASPC per month, which is a “do nothing” baseline of 45 plus an extra rated-100 plan change per month. We want to hit this level within 5 weeks.


We also recorded two new rated-100 plan changes at the start of the bout, but we’ve added these to our baseline, so they don’t count towards our target.


So far, we’re slightly behind our targets.


Week ending

IASPC delta

IASPC cumulative

Target IASPC delta

Target cumulative

Actual minus target

2018-02-18

92.1

92.1

97.5

97.5

-5.4

2018-02-25

90.1

182.2

97.5

195

-12.8

2018-03-04

11

193.2

15

210

-16.8

2018-03-11



15

225


2018-03-18



15

240


2018-03-25



15

255


2018-04-01



32.5

287.5


2018-04-08



32.5

320






Weekly targets - lead metrics


Over the bout, we settled on the following targets for the research team:


  • 3 new content releases per 2 weeks

  • 200 new subscribers per podcast episode released


For the in-person team:


  • Brenton’s key focus is matchmaking, so we decided to focus on “number of promising people who applied for a job” due to our recommendation, with a target of 3 per week.


  • We’ll also aim to spend 2 days on coaching per week, talking to about 5 people per week, but that’s a secondary goal.


So far, we’re on track for all of these targets.



At end 4-March

Target

Difference

New content releases running total

4

4

0.0

Total podcast subscribers, rising 200 per episode

5658

5355

303.0

Total # of promising ppl caused to apply to a job - 3 per week

0

0

0.0


In the last two weeks, we released:



We also coached 12 people.



High podcast completion rate


Apple has released new podcast analytics for people who listen on the iTunes app. It revealed that on average people who start an episode listen to 55% (weighted by episode length), with 30-45% making it to the end. This was higher than we expected given that the average length is 1h40m. This suggests each podcast leads to about 4,000 listening hours in its first month (as well as some people reading the transcript).


Since written articles often only have an average reading time of 3-15 minutes, one podcast is equivalent in terms of engagement time to an article that receives 16,000 - 80,000 views. This is more than a new article typically receives, suggesting that engagement time per podcast is higher, even though our web traffic is lower. The podcast also takes less time to make than a typical article.


The listening percentage drops gradually as the episodes get longer - from 60% for a half-hour episode, to 45% for a 3 hour episode. This suggests that the length of an episode which would maximise total listening time would be almost 6 hours long!



Other key progress


  • We wrapped up our planning cycle - as well as our plan for the bout, we also thought about our plans for the next 3 years and rest of 2018. We’ll talk more about this in future updates.

  • We overhauled our metrics sheet, automating many more fields.


  • Podcast - we’ve recorded 8 more hours of podcast content, promoted Kieran to podcast producer, and assembled a group of 26 listeners in our target audience to give us advice on how to make the show better.

  • We attended the CEA individual outreach retreat, and Accelerate Global conference.

  • We made a plan for our job board.

  • We advised Will on a new TED talk about EA.



The plan


Some key projects include:


  • Training Brian to do career coaching for China specialists.

  • Releasing a survey about talent bottlenecks in AI policy.

  • Releasing 3 more pieces of content.

  • Releasing an update to the job board.


Have a great week,


Ben




--

Benjamin Todd | CEO & co-founder  | 80,000 Hours
www.80000hours.org    |    b...@80000hours.org

80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales, Registered Charity Number 1149828
Centre for Effective Altruism, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK

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