24 Things I'm proud of in 2024
Team Letter | December 30, 2024
Happy Monday, Alpaca!
It’s almost time to ring out 2024 but before we gear up for an extraordinary year ahead, I want to take the time to celebrate the big things that happened this year in our company. Put on your party hats, get out your noisemakers — and let’s go!
We grew our Little Wins newsletter from 400 to 7,500 subscribers! That means Alpaca’s resources and celebrations reach thousands of educators every single week.
We grew our library of educator resources from just three to more than 130. Some of our most popular tools and resources now rank at the top of google searches for educators looking for ways to build school culture and improve team morale.
We added 70+ new schools and districts this year, expanding our reach and building an extraordinary knowledge base around teacher morale.
We built and launched Alpaca Pulse, our first software offering, giving schools and districts a new way to listen to and support their educators.
Alpaca’s leaders spoke on stage at 2 major education conferences this year, bringing ideas around semantic pulse surveys to new audiences.
Alpaca grew our revenue by more than twice what we did in 2023. (And we’re just getting started!)
Alpaca expanded to 24 states! We’re so excited to see educators from around the country join our community.
Alpaca was featured on the Cult of Pedagogy podcast to talk about semantic pulse surveys and Jennifer Gonzalez was the MOST fun to work with.
We created sales systems! Specifically, we built a way to meet new educators at conferences, provide them with valuable free resources, and start a conversation about working with Alpaca. When “sales” feels this good and genuine, you know you’re on to something.
We raised our seed round of funding (closing in early January) to fuel our future growth, and through it, we have new partners in the Edtech space.
We hired our first software engineer (and then promptly asked her to launch a software product in 20 days)!
We saw team members break out of their comfort zones and start doing sales demos and events — and one team member signed 20 new customers!
Alpaca’s network of educators wrote 19,600 handwritten thank you notes for educators this year, adding a personal touch to our “celebration packs.”
Alpaca shipped 18,815 celebration packs to educators around the United States (and Canada!) this year.
Our packs got an upgrade when our new customer experience manager built 20 new vendor partnerships to supply amazing, unique items in our packs.
Alpaca’s educator team built an extraordinary knowledge base around school culture and educator morale.
Alpaca attended and sponsored 27 educator events in 2024, from Seattle to Brooklyn, Traverse City to Houston!
We built a new onboarding process to help every principal and school leader learn how to use our unique surveys and celebrate their teachers.
We piloted Substitute Surveys, co-designing an emerging product alongside our customer at High Desert Educational Service District and our friends at Red Rover.
We created a new partnership with the Nebraska Early Childhood Collective, which will build out our teacher wellbeing system for early childhood educators across our state.
We launched beautifully designed products and brand assets by working with extraordinary creatives at Bones Co, Less.Is, and Nimblelogic.
We caught wildlife in our office (true story!) and it was an absolutely hilarious disaster. (Had to check if you were still reading)
We collected more than 30,000 insights from real educators around the country telling us how they’re doing, what they need, and what helps them the most right now. It’s the only dataset of its kind, and we believe it has huge potential for impact.
Alpaca supported more than 7,500 educators every month with our unique system of pulse surveys and celebrations for educators.
Seeing it all listed out — I’m so unbelievably proud of the small but mighty team that accomplished ALL of this in one year. Now we have a big opportunity ahead of us — and I couldn’t be happier to do that big work with YOU.
Let’s KEEP GOING!
KB