Annual plan for 2026

Annual plan for 2026#

This is our annual plan, and serves as an input to quarterly planning. It is updated more frequently as we learn throughout the year.

Last updated: January 2026.

Current business reality#

We currently have two lines of business:

  • A membership service that doesn’t yet cover its fixed costs. Our membership service involves managing infrastructure for communities, and we do not yet have the volume of memberships needed to cover our costs.

  • A consultative service that is subsidizing the membership service. We perform grant- and SOW-based work that subsidizes the cost of our membership service. This is risky if this work is not aligned with our membership service needs.

Note

We are in the middle of finalizing new financial systems that will sharpen these financial predictions, so dont’ try to get these numbers to add up exactly, and put error bars of a few months on everything here.

  • Revenue ~$172K/month revenue.

    • Small contracts (2%), Medium contracts (11%), Large contracts (48%), MAUs (8%), Fundraising and gifts (32%)

  • Costs: ~$180K/month burn

    • Almost all personnel and FSP fees.

  • 2026 outlook: Provided 2i2c maintains the current customer base, we are set up to operate at nearly break-even through 2026.

  • Future outlook:

    • Our largest philanthropy gift (Navigation Fund) runs out Dec 31, 2026.

    • Creates a -$66K/month gap in 2027.

    • To extend into 2027 with the current cost structure, we must establish monthly cash-flow of $66K/month ($700K annual) in revenue in 2027. Here’s a rough breakdown we imagine:

      • Sell +$300K in Memberships during 2026 so that the resulting revenue continues to flow during 2027. Sales made early in 2026 provide some buffer revenue for 2027.

      • Get +$500K in development commitments from members, either acting as individuals or in syndicates (joint ventures), to pay for Projects (SOWs) with work carried out in late 2026 and 2027.

We have enough runway with current contracts to last us the year, but a $700K annual gap starting in 2027.

Key challenge for 2026#

We must:

  • Align and streamline our membership and our development work to ensure that we have capacity to deliver on both, and to ensure they feed into one another.

  • Create a sales system that reliably generates new funded development opportunities so that we can efficiently drive development opportunities via members.

  • Identify the breakdown of revenue types that is sustainable for us to ensure we focus our sales and delivery growth in the right areas.

  • Grow our member network to generate enough development work so that we have enough sales volume to cover our cost gap in 2027.

2026 strategic focus#

Our service model strategy describes membership, with Premier membership as a strategic option for some communities. In 2026, we focus on building a strong foundation for membership while laying groundwork for future growth in Premier membership options:

Primary focus: Non-premier membership and a co-funding system

  • Build a member network that can be served with one roadmap

  • Systematize sales and delivery for project work via our member network.

  • Prove the co-funding model works at scale

  • Establish efficient operations that can support future growth

Questions we are not prioritizing now

There are two types of service we consider strategically important, but that we aren’t investing time into right now while we focus on sustainability:

  • A maximally-accessible service mechanism, where communities have access to infrastructure for which they could not cover our cost of service. This may be called Essential or Starter, but we need to work out the details.

  • A globally-accessible service, where communities in parts of the world without the funding to cover competitive global salaries can nonetheless participate and benefit from our service.

Major actions to take#

Our 2026 actions are organized by the three strategic priorities defined in our strategy (quarterly estimates are rough, and not set in stone):

Platform and services#

By end of Q1:

  • Wrap up infrastructure reliability work to shift focus to development. Quickly finish our monitoring, reporting, and alerting efforts so that we can safely spend more time engaging in development with member communities. Reliability work will shift to an ongoing baseline rather than a quarterly priority and “push”.

  • Create an MVP system for intentional community engagement. Define a system of actively engaging our network of communities in a way that still feels collaborative with them, and the most important thing to develop first. Use learning from this quarter to decide what to prioritize for Q2.

  • Make our development cycle more participatory and iterative.

    • Roadmap: Our roadmapping and planning must invite regular participation from communities, and should be easy to follow-along as we build.

    • Development: Our design / development / feedback / reporting loop must be tighter, so that we can engage in more development work to sustain the organization.

End of Q2:

  • Speed up the time it takes to deploy improvements to our member network. As new development happens, it must be deployed to our network more efficiently and quickly, so that they constantly feel the benefit of our development efforts.

Business development#

End of Q1:

  • Land our current in-progress sales. This will ensure we have enough revenue to get through the year.

  • Turn our roadmap into a sales asset. It must be accessible, with all the information needed for a community to decide to buy.

    • Proactively use the roadmap. Build proactive roadmap sales efforts into our sales activities.

    • Don’t sell a delivery time, sell a slot in a queue. In our sales work, tell communities that we aren’t selling a specific date. We are selling a commitment that something will be built and we are adding it to the queue.

  • Define a target breakdown of revenue types. It must help us prioritize where to focus our efforts in building team capacity and capabilities, and set sales targets for Q2.

End of Q2:

  • Grow members enough to drive development. Build a member network that can be served with one roadmap. Refine our model of member communities so that one roadmap can be useful to them all.

  • Have reliable financial projections that suggest we are on track. We must make budget decisions by the end of Q2. By this point we’ll need a financial model that helps us decide to continue with our current cost structure, or to change strategies.

End of Q4+:

  • Sell enough development work to cover our cost gap. Leverage our sales system and network of communities to get commitments for funding in 2027 that cover our development costs.

Organization-wide#

End of Q1:

  • Freeze hiring for now. Conditionally freeze hiring for 2026 until:

    1. We have better financial and sales reporting.

    2. Financial models suggest it’s safe to hire.

  • Update our membership value proposition.

    • Frame membership as collectively advancing open source. Revisit our membership value propositions to make sure it is still competitive if we want all members to participate in this SOW process.

    • Use project-based work to highlight the value of membership. Put “participate in our roadmap” as a key value of membership. Use the new development as a key part of membership sales pitches.

End of Q1:

  • Build a sales data system we can use to gauge our progress. Define a source of truth for our business and revenue projections so that we know if we’re hitting the targets we describe below.

Expected revenue growth targets#

2026 forecast

  1. Current base

    • Maintain our current base ARR (target: $1.48M)

    • Close expected NRR deals: $500K (JupyterHealth, IVEDA, NextGen, Usage Quotas)

    • Final Navigation Fund amount: \(700K (NF) + \)500K (expected NRR)

    • Total: $2.7M (some buffer)

  2. New growth

    • Grow NRR/project work to cover $500K in the next year (2027, replaces Navigation Fund)

    • Membership volume sales (target: 20, +$300K)

2027 forecast: \(1.8M ARR + \)500K (SOW) = $2.3M (tight; track 2026 buffer; manage cash flow)

  1. 2i2c will maintain our 2026 base ARR (target: $1.8M) into 2027

  2. 2i2c will actively sell memberships (target: $500K ARR) in 2027

  3. 2i2c will complete delivery on SOWs sold in 2026 in 2027

  4. 2i2c will sell joint venture SOWs for development in 2028 (target: $500K+ NRR).

2028 forecast: \(2.3M ARR + \)500K SOW = $2.8M

Risks#

  • Sales costs

    • Co-funding actually multiplies our sales cost and complexity. It is basically engaging in N sales conversations to co-fund something, rather than a simpler 1:1 mapping. This will grow the complexity and confusion around sales costs.

  • Sales growth

    • We can’t grow memberships quickly enough to hit our targets. The sales cycle is long and low-probability. We may not get it up and running.

    • Communities don’t see enough value in getting a “slot” rather than a guaranteed deliverable. They need more guarantees of the outcomes or timelines and won’t commit funding without a lot of work.

  • Delivery

    • Our delivery team does not have the capacity to deliver SOWs and serve growing member organizations. We learn that we cannot both onboard new member communities AND complete the SOW-based work we’re committing to in 2026 and 2027. We hit a lot of “that can’t be done on time because our team is busy dealing with fires” signals.

    • We force communities into an unrealistic amount of detail before an SOW can be funded. We might over-index on the need for “specificity” and force ourselves into a state where we demand “waterfall-style” project planning before we can engage in an SOW.

    • Contributions from us are rejected by upstream communities. We might take costed work that an upstream community rejects, because we don’t have the alignment with their roadmap or the trust with them.

  • Value proposition

    • WASM-based notebooks will eat our lunch. Enough low-cost alternatives become available that communities don’t see the value of more expensive cloud operations.

Not a focus in 2026#

  • Essential service mechanism: We do not see Essential hubs as a sales target for 2026. We will allow essential-style hubs when a member community does all the sales on our behalf (e.g., CloudBank classrooms). We must revisit the value proposition of Essential when we have a stronger sustainable foundation.

  • Premier membership sales: Organizations that opt for Premier membership require time to develop. We aim to “land and expand” by building trust at the membership level first. We anticipate gradual ramping up of Premier membership option sales but are not prioritizing direct sales in 2026.