Out of the Valley of Death
🖤 Connor Borrego
BTS
On this page
We sent our last investor update out back in May of 2025, before being booted from our beehiiv account on my flight back from Greece.
So many things have changed since then (I’m a dad now), but the thing that has remained consistent is that playhaus has been gaining momentum, and growing. Perfect timing too, because the AI harnesses, cost saving AI conversations we've been selling against have finally materialized. Something we called here back in 2020.Â
In July of this year, we doubled our MRR on our core offering, the playhaus white label business intelligence portal, that externally we market it as our growbot software. This is a huge milestone for our nearly 6 years of operating history. And none of it would have been possible without the addition of our COO Britt Huffman, who herself joined as an investor and full-time co-founder earlier this spring, after working with us in a contracting role for much of the last year. We also welcomed Frank Peterson, now a full time student at Georgetown Business School, as an Account Executive who was responsible for doubling our MRR.
To say that we are excited to be back, and delivering this to your inbox from OUR OWN INFRASTRUCTURE is an understatement.
*if you need a refresher, we’ve been on a mission to build a smart wallet for digital identity since October 2020, because, especially in the age of AI, we believe people should have full ownership over their data & digital breadcrumb trail.
playhaus BTS
September saw the start of a strategic advisory partnership: we deliver lead flow and portal access in exchange for Sales Pipeline mentoring and strategy, plus a revenue share agreement upon conversion of one of the leads we deliver. It is a new approach we are taking to let businesses experience our solution and drive value before we collect our first check.
Key Metrics - September MoM
- MRR: $7,000; unchanged
- Paid Contracts: 2; unchanged
- Unpaid Trial: 1; new
- Discovery Calls: 8; +100%
- Paid Proposals: 1; unchanged
Wins
- Relaunched Agency & Brand sites on our product's CMS tool suite
- Our lead generation bot, has added over 100 potential prospects to our internal CRM for our sales pipeline and you are reading this newsletter off from our email management solution.
- Finished the Accounting & Project Management Tool Suites and are exclusively running financial & admin operations in platform
- Signed a referral-based partnership implementation with Haystack Group; a white-label portal we get commission upon new customer flow
- Concluded the NXTUS Enterprise Sales Engagement Series; we are currently still working through follow ups from pitch day
Challenges
- Our primary sales rep started a full time MBA program and has less bandwidth than expected to advance new deal flow
- Self serve onboarding remains unavailable, but it would open up a lower price point of entry for clients, and also allow us to raise our agency rates
Since we last checked in (May 2025), the business has been through a fair amount of highs and lows. We had some good wins early in the year of 2025, and thought we were gaining momentum. But we were booted from our primary growth platform; locked out from exporting our user data (looking at you beehiiv; we'd recommend not using them), which is the explanation for the unsubscribe over spam request at the top of this newsletter. Also last spring, an AI startup that we had signed a great deal with and had been working for several months, ran out of runway. Atrophying to a much humbler version of our former selves by the end of the year. As a result we had to put a lot of work with our contractors on hold and pay down past bills.
We made it to a second version of product around April of this year as Britt Huffman was joining full time as an owner operator. And this second version has made it possible for us to collaborate and build on it better, an issue we had been having with many engineers prior to Britt joining. Since then we’ve taken our data warehousing backend brain far beyond analytic reporting to a full automation and business intelligence software interface. You can truly just connect the tools you love, and use this God’s eye view of your business to make changes directly in those tools all without leaving the dashboard, or drop those software costs entirely. And our AI is actually smart, because it minimizes token consumption.
Our work wasn't all hacking at a computer in a poorly lit room though, we managed our cashflow, recently doubling it in June, which right sided the rest of our business’ cost operations, and are in a much healthier position to scale moving forward. Our pipeline is far from full, but it’s also a local maximum with the number of deals we are actively working at this time. And our efforts on outreach are now sustainable thanks to improvements from our software to automate and manage much of the work.
Everything from this newsletter, to our website, to our internal tools take advantage of our playhaus software. Something we are truly proud of. Losing our main community platform last year, was a real blow in many ways. But this sort of deplatforming scenario is one of many reasons why we’ve been building towards web3 backend infrastructure, so that other businesses never suffer the same fate. And we're going to lean into that as a part of our sales messaging because it really made the pain point personal.
MONEY MONEY MONEY
| TOKEN | PRICE CHANGE | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
| Solana ($SOL) | +6.04% | $109.56 |
| Bitcoin ($BTC) | +4.88% | $82,455.63 |
| Ripple ($XRP) | -1.98% | $1.39 |
| ZCash ($ZEC) | -4.70% | $1,212.32 |
(Price changes reflect 1 Month — placeholder)
NFA We were wrong last year that Solana was going to hit $500 - 1000, which is painful to admit, but then again we always claimed to be product not finance people. This is a technology we believe strongly in and have built our platform on, but the market can be irrational longer than one desires — never pull your entire bag, we are glad we didn't, but that's why we always say NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.| SPONSORED BY PLAYHAUS · playhaus | |
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Meet growbot Your digital growth co-pilot from playhaus. We save businesses 30% or more on average. Try growbot |
playhaus ASKs/REQUESTs/INTROs
Looking forward to the start of Q4, the end of the year advertising holiday rush, and our own company’s goals, playhaus intends to push even harder on their top of funnel efforts to secure paid customers and partnerships to pilot playhaus’ AI harness with their businesses. With a goal to close the year with 6 clients under contract. We are looking for more pilot customers, if you know of a business that’s struggling to manage their sales pipeline, or fill it with leads, we’d love to talk about what playhaus can do to address it. Referrals would not only be appreciated, but handsomely compensated (10-30% of first 3 months revenue).
What's Next
- Execute against Q4 goals of increasing client count to 6 and MRR to $40k with increased pricing from $3,500 / mo to $10,000 /mo
- Finish the CMS front end to enable outbound email marketing in the form of automated campaigns and content series
- Relaunch automated outreach sequencing to capitalize on the 100+ influencer agency leads our automated tool has provided us with
- Utilize our Social Media Marketing suite to boost and grow our content marketing audience with the relaunch of our weekly content series
- Launch self serve offering at $50 - $300 / mo
Asks
- Referrals to businesses with more than 10 full time employees who are looking for automation or growth services (we offer commission for the referrals)
- Introductions to angel investors that come from a digital marketing or advertising background
- Introductions to angel investors who speculate on crypto, bitcoin, or blockchain based opportunities
AFTER THOUGHTS
playhaus has organically earned 3 major spotlights in the Kansas City local business press over the quarter for being top finalists in hackathons and participating in prestigious business development programs. Read them below:
