On the brink of failure - Anonymous Tropic Employee Review

I’ve seen a handful of posts here say that Tropic is failing. If I were a candidate, I would certainly want to know whether or not that piece was true. My responses to these reviews are so that candidates can see the full picture and draw their own conclusions about what working at Tropic is like after hearing multiple perspectives. The reality is that anyone can write anything they wish on Glassdoor. The best thing for any candidate reading this to do is probably just to reach out to people who currently work here and see how they feel. Tropic has two businesses: an Act 1 “legacy” all-in-one SaaS/services product built to capture as much market share and data as possible, and an Act 2 standalone SaaS business designed to drive our go-forward strategy by productizing act 1. 100% of the Q4/Q1 thrash placed on our business has been a process of us learning how to navigate the transition from Act 1 to Act 2. We didn’t realize how hard it would be and made mistakes as leaders - staffing, goal setting, etc. All in all, when the market shifted, we were not set up to operate as a SaaS business, and without painful decisions to manage gross margin and burn, we would have hurt Tropic’s long-term prospects for success - despite healthy overall growth. These were decisions I made that likely put some people through hell. Had I known, we would have handled this transition very differently by planning upfront, and I’m sorry to those people for the fallout from my learning curve. However, on the topic of company health, I think we need to be extremely clear and refer to the data similarly. Our goals in transitioning to a SaaS-forward model were to: (1) unlock efficiency gains, (2) unlock hyper-growth, and (3) lock in high retention Efficiency gains: Tropic grew gross margin 20% during this period and is in a very efficient spot. Growth: Sales attained 115% of our Q1 target, and retention has grown meaningfully as we migrate customers to our SaaS platform. We have also maintained a strong runway and cash position. We have shared and will continue to be transparent about these numbers with the entire company at our All Hands. - Dave (CEO/Co-founder)