We created this company for one reason and one reason only: to help business founders and executives (just like us!), reduce their operational burden so they can go back to doing what they do best – focus on their product and customers.
Every founder is anxious about the unknown unknowns in running their business.
We're here for you. Take a deep breath.
Instead of asking your investors (it can feel embarrassing!) or your lawyers/accountants (it’s expensive! and you get the runaround, not an answer), we built AbstractOps to help you proactively understand and manage the administrative and tactical aspects of running a business, on autopilot.
AbstractOps offers three tiers of plans — I’ll Do It, Help Me, and Handle For Me — for a flat monthly subscription fee. Fees are based on the buckets defined in the table below which are determined by your company's stage, and pricing automatically scales up or down. No hourly billing, no surprises. Visit our pricing page for more details.
Great question! All clients start on a three-month contract, which then converts to a month-to-month contract. Yep. No annual contracts here. We don’t believe in them.
It’s our job to prove the value of AbstractOps to you every single month. If we’re not doing that, then we don’t want to keep charging you. We’ll miss you and think deeply about how we failed you but you should only be our customer if we’re an absolute no-brainer of an ROI.
We realized that creating a million tabs and flows and mental models for each thing you need to do (hire, pay, issue contracts, filings, etc.) is a huge frustration. That’s why we turned every single thing you need to do into a simple checklist.
Just search for what you want to do — whether you search for hire an employee or offer letter or onboard... we’ll intelligently show you the “right” workflow, and navigate you through the steps needed to get it done. Search for pay and we’ll show you the ability to pay a contractor or pay a vendor or service provider, you name it. Search for send and we’ll show you the ability to issue anything from common stock to an NDA. All from one place.
There are a few ways to store and find information about your company.
There’s a Quick Reference section on your dashboard, where frequently used information (your EIN, shares outstanding, 409a, etc.) lives.
There’s a File Vault where all of your documents live: neatly classified, tagged by the recipient (or “counterparty”) to those files, and their dates. The best part? You don’t have to log in to add files to your vault... during onboarding, we set it up so that forwarding a file to ops@acmeinc.com gets your files to show up in the vault (and we get it all tagged for you, with our proprietary machine-learning model and human-in-the-loop review).
There’s a Stakeholders section where you can look up any business relationship your company has: employees, vendors, contractors, investors, regulators, you name it. We think this is game-changing. You could never find that cross-section of information for a business in a single place before! And when you pull up a stakeholder’s page, you can see all their context — personal information, related documents, historical workflows, etc.
No need to go to 7 different tools to gather basic information for a routine task. Welcome to AbstractOps.
Customers in I’ll do It get a white-glove onboarding, email support, and access to our Slack community (moderated by expert Operations Partners)
Customers in Help Me also get a dedicated point of contact (an Operations Partner or OP) in addition to the ability to delegate routine tasks such as hiring, contract management, state registrations, vendor payments, etc.
Customers in Handle For Me also get Slack support, proactive oversight from our OPs, handling of more complex cross-functional projects (e.g., support with equity management, project managing your taxes, supporting a fundraise diligence, etc.), and bi-weekly / monthly calls to make sure your operations are in great shape.
The AbstractOps Operations Partners Team is made up of skilled generalists, who can handle a wide range of HR, finance, and compliance requests and projects.
Additionally, we enable your company’s operations to be world-class through:
Finally, we’re building this to suit your needs and scale with you. We’re a team of serial entrepreneurs; we’ve served as founders or execs at companies worth >$1B. On the other hand, we know that the key is operational excellence that just happens without you spending too much time on it. We check-in when we need your approvals or decisions so that you think about it as much as you need to; no more. So that you can focus on product and customers.
250 - 500 hours for a <10 person early-stage startup. Seriously. Don't believe us? Spend a month tracking this yourself.
Once you calculated the time you've lost "running your business" and not "building your business," you’ll give us a call 😉 .
Companies typically spend ~10% of their TOTAL expenses on HR, legal, finance, and regulatory functions. Our cost is typically 1-2% (or less), while also bringing you expertise on arcane topics when you need it... all backed by a powerful platform that will scale with you as you grow. No need for cohorts of admin employees pushing buttons and pushing paper. That's the old way.
You might still need to hire some capacity for back-office work, but our pricing is designed to always save you ~60-80% (vs. just doing it yourself or hiring people). Your hires will likely be the senior team members who are really coming on board to help strategically, not to handle the day-to-day tactical execution.
And when you’re ready to staff up the junior / mid-level roles too, they’ll be 2-5x as efficient, because our platform makes them superhuman.
Certainly, if you want senior bandwidth and leverage... but — biases aside — we’re best suited to help you handle tactical company operations.
In fact, many of our customers have a COO and a CoS and AbstractOps. Why? Those are senior, expensive team members, who focus on driving the company forward (with strategy, planning, business development, hiring, etc.). On the other hand, AbstractOps takes care of the nitty-gritty tactical work to keep your company from falling behind on “corporate” administration.
The best-run companies grow fast, and when they grow, documents, relationships, data get scattered across a variety of teams, service providers, and tools. It’s a mess. AbstractOps brings order and transparency to that picture.
Finally, even the best operations people can’t know everything. It’s impossible for anyone exec to be an expert on everything across HR, legal, finance, and compliance, across all 50 states (and beyond!). Enter AbstractOps: we give your team superpowers since we are a veritable hive mind of knowledge. Constantly updating, verifying, validating, and auditing research and best practices on running a business. We do that across dozens (soon hundreds!) of companies so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
We don’t provide legal or tax advice. Any time it enters that territory, we’ll be happy to refer you to one of our partners — we have a lot of top-tier specialists that we work closely with, so it’ll be very seamless.
We also don’t get involved in more strategic aspects of HR / Finance / Legal (these strategic elements are often called “business operations”): e.g., we can definitely recommend vendors, but we don’t assist with FP&A, recruiting, performance and culture, etc.
Finally, we don’t touch your core competencies, which we believe should be a) product, b) customers. So we won’t advise you on your stack, design, your go-to-market, marketing, etc. That said… we can recommend service providers that could help you solve some of those problems.
Check out our customer testimonials! Like Brandon, the VP of Operations at On Deck says, “AbstractOps is like a walking cheat code for your startup.”