Rumble Studio Update - Q3 2021

 Fundraising

- We received the first €60,000 of the €90,000 Bourse French Tech Emergence grant from the BPI.
- Our application for ~€200,000 of convertible notes progressed. The final documents were submitted to the BPI French Tech Seed program, and we await their decision on the amount they will loan us.
- We raised another €10k from an angel investor, bringing the total to just under €150k.
- We’re still open to angel investment. While our official angel round has closed, we remain open to investment via the BSA AIR convertible equity scheme, and would be grateful for any introductions to your network. Here is our Investor Deck. (Cap: 5M, Floor: 2.5M, Discount 20%, minimum ticket 10K)

Customers

- We made our first sale. To gain revenue, case-studies for marketing, and product feedback, we are now offering a ‘done-for-you’ podcast production service. Our first customer is a startup who purchased a podcast launch package of six episodes. We have a growing funnel of companies interested in our offer.
- We presented to Havas Media and their clients. We are in advanced discussions with a number of agencies and high-profile enterprise clients, thanks to our participation in the Havas Startup accelerator. The need for more efficient audio content production is clearly evident from our conversations.
- Sales training and funnels. We are being coached by an experienced sales trainer, thanks to an introduction from one of our investors. We have also benefited from go-to-market coaching via the Wilco incubator program. To convert website traffic to leads and sales calls, we have implemented Intercom and are configuring Hubspot.

Growth Team

- We are hiring an experienced podcast producer to help us deliver our first orders, and innovate on asynchronous audio content formats.
- Jowie and Laetitia converted to alternants, combining study and working as our audio engineer for the next 12 months.
- Nived is now working with me on sales, and continues to do an excellent job with the social media and newsletter.
- New intern, Emily, joined to help us with our social media.

Marketing

- Released our first season of our fully asynchronous podcast, Audio Leads. Jowie and Laetitia are working on season 2 as we speak. 
- Grew our social media presence. Twitter and LinkedIn both have 1000+ followers, and our newsletter is gaining recognition. 
- Appeared on French TV. Joris presented Rumble on TV channel BSMART, with famous presenter Jean-Marc Sylvestre. Watch the video with English subtitles.
- Presented at events Podcast Movement Virtual 2021 and Voice Tech Summit Middle East, and were guests on a couple of podcasts (here and here).
- Joris and Nived pitched in Norway. Thanks to our participation in Media Motor Europe, we had the opportunity to pitch Rumble in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
- Presenting at IBC Amsterdam. Thanks to our participation in the Media Motor Europe program, we will be pitching and selling at IBC in Amsterdam in December, one of the largest media, entertainment and technology conferences.

Development Team

- 4 new developer hires. Thanks to our new funding, our tech team swells to five: Helmy, Senior NLP Data Scientist; Iskandar, alternant NLP Data Scientist; Mathieu, Senior Front-end Developer; and Sébastien, alternant Front-end/Full-stack Developer. Our SaaS product development is set to accelerate, and the work on our conversational A.I. is about to begin.
- Lucas, Ismael and Maxwell completed their internships and moved onto new pastures, having made some excellent contributions to our code base.

Product

Front-end UI

- Significant progress on the new version of the application, including the new text-based script feature.
- Fall objectives are almost reached and the new hires (2 front-end developers) will certainly speed up delivery.
- Public share feature is now implemented, which allows creators to easily invite guests with a single link, rather than invite them individually using their email address.
- New features to manage teams and brands have been added, to cater for our agency and enterprise customers. This allows for branded interviews with brand palette and context.
- App is following all up to date patterns with CI/CD, in particular using a modular Nx workspace for easier integration of new features (and new team members!). 

Backend code

- New backend now based on production grade services and providers (PostgreSQL from Digital Ocean & Compute Engine from Google Cloud Platform and Docker base to name a few), ready to scale for thousands of new users.