Biggest Risks

We frequently get asked questions like:

• What are the biggest risks to the company?
• What are your top concerns?
• What are your biggest fears?
• What keeps you up at night?

On this page, we document the biggest risks for the company itself and each of our products and how we intend to mitigate them. We also have a biggest tailwinds page [TODO] to see what waves we are riding in our current market.

Biggest risks have numbers attached to them for ease of reference, not for ranking.

Lovia, The Team

1. Lowering the hiring bar

As we continue to grow our company, there is pressure on departments to meet their hiring targets. It is better for us to miss our targets than to hire people who won’t be able to perform to our standards since that takes much longer to resolve. To ensure the people we hire make the company better, we:

1. Have a standard interview structure
2. Have a standard scoring system within a function; in other words, a “Strong Yes” should mean the same thing to every interviewer in Marketing.
3. Ensure that interviewers are scoring candidates consistently. Some teams are actively doing this
4. Review the interview scores of new hires to look for trends
5. Identify and take action on underperformance
6. (make this unneeded) Have the CPO and CEO sample new hires and review manager, staff engineer, principal product manager and up hires
7. Compare the external title with the new title being given
8. Conduct bar raiser interviews
9. Review cohort performance in the company (completion of onboarding tasks, bonuses, performance review, 360 feedback, performance indicators)

2. Underperformance

In a similar vein, it is important that we do not slow down, which means being very proactive in addressing underperformance. We should identify and take action as early as possible.

3. Ineffective onboarding

We are onboarding many people quickly, making it easy for things to fall behind. Therefore we:

1. Measure the onboarding time
2. Measure the time to productivity in sales (ramp time) and engineering (time to first MR, MRs per engineer per month)
3. Make sure we work handbook-first, so the handbook is up to date.

4. Confusion about the expected output

As we add more layers of management to accommodate the new people, it’s easy to become confused about what is expected of you.

To make sure this is clear we:

1. Document who is the DRI on a decision.
2. Have clear KPIs across the company
3. Have Key Meetings
4. Have each job family include specific performance indicators
5. Have a clear org-chart where each individual reports to exactly one person
6. Have managers regularly ask team members if they understand job expectations and close any gaps in understanding.
7. Ensure that at least 90% of the population responds favorably to the Engagement Survey question “I know what is expected of me to be successful in my job.”
8. Celebrate our growth in revenue when we hit $100M in ARR instead of 1000 people. We put our attention in celebrating our output instead of input, per our results value.

5. Loss of the values that bind us

It’s easy for a culture to get diluted if a company is growing fast. To make our values stronger, we:

1. Regularly add to them and update them
2. Find new ways to reinforce our values

6. Loss of velocity

Most companies start shipping more slowly as they grow. To keep our pace, we need to:

1. Ensure we get 8 Merge Requests (MRs) per engineer per month
2. Have acquired organizations remake their functionality inside our single application
3. Have a quality group that keeps our developer tooling efficient
4. Achieve our category maturity targets
5. Ensure each group has non-overlapping scope

Note: GitLab voted The World’s Most Productive Remote Team by HackerNoon.

7. Security breach

Our customers entrust their application code and data to Lovia. A security breach that erodes that trust is a significant risk. To ensure we safeguard our customers data, we:

1. Maintain a strong Security Operations team [TODO]
2. Hit our Application Security remediation SLAs[TODO]
3. Ensure our developers complete secure code training [TODO]
4. Regularly perform internal application security reviews [TODO]
5. Utilizing bug bounty programs like HackerOne [TODO]
6. Conducting threat intelligence [TODO]
7. Have an internal Red Team [TODO]

10. Economic Downturn

An economic downturn will likely prolong our sales cycle. Our opportunity should still be there since:

• For Lovia Counseling: the demand for online counseling should be increasing.
• For Lovia Edu: more people are considering and looking for education alternatives from home.
• For Lovia Jobs: the supply of job seekers are increasing, hence the demand for job vacancy apps and career development.
• For Miluv: With reduced social activites, singles need another way to meet candidate soul mates.
• For Soluvas Chat: Companies need ways to communicate effectively between employees, vendors, and customers.

In order to counter this risk, Lovia:

• Maintains a healthy amount of cash on our balance sheet
• Makes short term commitments so we can correct course easily
• Is as small as we can be, while still being able to execute our product vision
• Can slow operating expense growth to match any decline in revenue, if required

COVID-19 and impact of a pandemic:

As a remote first company, we have the tools and culture to work from home and be productive during this unprecendent time of COVID-19.

Here are the things we can do at Lovia counter this risk:

• Empower our team members to take care of themselves and their family so we keep them safe [TODO]
• When speaking with customers, lead with empathy and help support their transition to remote
• Be the example for how to be even more effective as a remote company

11. Competition

See Competition risks for individual products in their own sections below.

Operational excellence

We will always have competition. To deal with competition, operational excellence can be a surprisingly durable competitive advantage.

We encourage operational excellence in the following ways:

1. Efficiency value [TODO]
2. Long Term Profitability Targets [TODO]
3. KPIs [TODO]
4. How we make decisions

High Ambition

Our focus on improvement and commitment to iteration keep us rooted in what’s next. This could result in us lowering our ambition. While we focus on what’s next, we must also maintain a level of ambition to compete in the future in places where others might not think it is possible today.

Serve smaller users

We have large competitors and smaller ones. The larger competitors naturally get attention because we compete with them for large customers. According to the innovators dilemma: “the next generation product is not being built for the incumbent’s customer set and this large customer set is not interested in the new innovation and keeps demanding more innovation with the incumbent product”. So it is really important that we also focus on the needs of smaller users since the next generation product will first be used by them. If we don’t do this we risk smaller competitors gaining market share there and then having the community and revenue to go up-market.

We serve smaller users by having:

1. [Soluvas Chat, Soluvas Open Source Low-Code Application Platform] A great free open source product that gets the majority of new features.
2. [Lovia, Miluv, Soluvas] A tiered pricing model with a very low price point for our lowest tier. Additionally, free tier rewards are possible with merit-based gamification.

13. Handbook Second

We work Handbook First. As GitLab says,

Having a “handbook first” mentality ensures there is no duplication; the handbook is always up to date, and others are better able to contribute.

If we work handbook second, we risk losing these benefits.

To ensure we avoid this risk, we:

1. Ensure all new hires read and understand the communication guidelines [TODO], as part of their onboarding [TODO]
2. Make the ability to coach team members to work handbook first a requirement for promotion to Director or above
3. Explicitly ask CEO Shadows to promote working handbook first
4. Empower all team members to help promote our communication guidelines [TODO]

14. Key people leave

Key people may leave as they vest and achieve their economic goals.

As reflected in our compensation principles, we don’t want people to stay because they feel like they have golden handcuffs, but we do recognize the alignment that comes with options vesting.

There are many things about the spirit of a startup that we can maintain, notably:

• our high ambition
• our iteration value
• keeping up velocity
• our direct communication practices

Keeping the feel of a small startup, despite a growing headcount, may help retain employees who would otherwise leave.

Lovia, The Product

1. Competition

Lovia Counseling

After counselors at hospitals and clinics, Lovia Counseling’s competitors include: HaloDoc, Riliv, DocsApp (India, Rebright Partners). In order to counter this risk, Lovia Counseling will:

1. Collaborate with government institutions, non-profits, and healthcare providers, to increase outreach
2. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition

Lovia Jobs

Lovia Jobs competitors include: Glints (500 Startups, Monk’s Hill Ventures), Urbanhire (Convergence VC), Jobs.id, JobStreet, SmartHR (East Ventures), Talenta (East Ventures, Skystar Capital), LinkedIn Recruiter, JobPal AI (500 Startups), JobsDB, Karirpad, Kalibrr, Qerja, LinovHR, KaryaOne, Gajimu.com, Ekrut, Studilmu, Nurtr (India, Rebright Partners). In order to counter this risk, Lovia Jobs will:

1. Provide career development incentives for job seekers
2. Provide integration with HRIS and ATS to increase adoption by employers
3. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition

Lovia Edu

Lovia Edu competitors include: Rencanamu.id (a.k.a. Youthmanual, Skystar Ventures), CariKuliah.com, CariKuliah.co, AyoKuliah.id, Cermati (East Ventures portfolio), EasyUni, Kampupsyuk, Yooreka, Educenter.id, KampusAja, PakBudi, Mamikos, Berkuliah, Renesia, Jurusanku. In order to counter this risk, Lovia Edu will:

1. Provide career development incentives for job seekers
2. Provide integration with HRIS and ATS to increase adoption by employers
3. Collaborate to increase outreach with institutions such as university CDCs, RuangGuru, Pintaria, Quipper, Zenius, KelasPintar.id
4. Provide free passion & talent tests
5. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition

Miluv

1. Competition

After the local taaruf communities, our competitors include: RumahTaaruf, Taaruf.com, TaarufOnline.id, Mawaddah Indonesia, AyoNikah, IndonesianCupid, KelasCinta, Bridestory+Parentstory (Tokopedia, previously Rocket Internet Group, Sovereign’s Capital, East Ventures, Fenox VC, Lippo, SkyStar Capital). In order to counter this risk, Miluv will:

1. Increase security & fraud prevention+management measures
2. Attract and nurture members with high quality personality
3. Increase compliance with sharia practices
4. Provide free personality & relationship quizzes
5. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition

Soluvas

1. Loss of the open source community

1. Keep our promises
2. Keep listening
3. Assign Merge Request Coaches
4. Have contributing organizations

2. Competition

Live Chat

Competition in Live Chat include: Tawk.to, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Talkdesk (500 Startups), Vlocity.

In order to counter this risk, Soluvas Chat will:

1. Soluvas strives to have popular and high quality vendor integrations in the marketplace.
2. Soluvas is focused on the SMB use cases, but can be used for enterprise.
3. Soluvas is independent of the hyper cloud providers and the best way to be multi-cloud.
4. Leverage Rocket.Chat community to deliver new stages, categories and features faster
5. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition

Low-Code Application Platform

Competition in Low-Code Application Platform include: Joget, Appsheet, Airtable, OutSystems. And in some ways: Notion (reason), Airtable, Coda.

In order to counter this risk, Soluvas Open Source Low-Code Application Platform will:

1. Soluvas strives to have popular and high quality vendor integrations in the marketplace.
2. Soluvas is focused on the SMB use cases, but can be used for enterprise.
3. Soluvas is independent of the hyper cloud providers and the best way to be multi-cloud.
4. Leverage our community to deliver new stages, categories and features faster
5. Continue to focus on operational excellence to out ship even substantially better financially resourced competition