❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - April 2024

Welcome to the 130 new subscribers who’ve joined us since the last edition a month ago. If you’re receiving this email for the first time, its main goal is to update you about how Snowball’s business is going. This is mainly for the 400 + investors who helped me raise 1.6 million dollars in February 2022, but I’ve decided to open it to the public for the curious out there.

Why in English? Well, hopefully, one day Snowball will be an international company, so it’s important to document our journey in a language that can be understood by most people around the world. If you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at the end of this email or you can click here. And if you want to subscribe to BTC (Behind the Curtain), you can do it there 👇

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To investors and friends,

Hi everybody!

I hope that you’re all doing great and that you’re enjoying your looooong week-end.

On our side, we’re doing great!

🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️If you’d like me to reply to particular questions regarding Snowball, just hit reply, and send me an email. I’ll try to answer some questions next month publicly (you can ask the question in French if you prefer).

The Main News

• The media migration out of Substack is still going extremely well despite some tiny hiccups (which are totally normal). Congrats to the entire team which is doing an amazing job.

• Super excited to announce to you that Bianca joined us as our first Chief of Staff (or Stuff 😅). Welcome Bianca! 🙌

• And we’re also super happy to have found our first Lead Growth to finally kickstart our growth! Welcome Maxime. 🚀

• We should get around €60k very soon (CII/Crédit d’Impôt Innovation).

• The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong without doing any outbound sales. We sold a new format: an edition dedicated to a company to deep dive into its industry and operations. Price tag: €5000 for this first test.

• We hosted our first meetup in Paris and it was a huge success. About 100 members gathered IRL for the first time. We’ll probably organize another one next fall.

KPIs

Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:

Financial KPIs

• 🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €23,887 (flat)

  • 🟠 Media: €20,930 (↘️)

  • 🟢 Max (coaching): €2957 (↗️)

• 🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €295,484

  • 🟠 ARR Snowball+ (media subscriptions): €260,000 (-€8k). We faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions this month.

  • 🟢 ARR Snowball Max (financial coaching): €35,484.

• 🟢 Ad business: We booked €82,150 year to date (+€15,900 since the 3rd of April):

  • Here’s the media kit if you’re interested in advertising your product in Snowball or know someone who could be interested.

• 🟠 Churn rate media: around 5.7% (+1.05%).

• 🟢 Churn rate max: around 0.2%.

• 🟢 Cash on hands: €1,350,000 (excluding CII + all the sponsorships that haven’t been paid yet).

  • €750,000 on 5 term accounts on Cashbee Pro yielding from 3.6% to 3.8%.

  • €600,000 on Qonto.

Media KPIs

• 🟢 57,610, +1059 vs the 3rd of April 2024 (+1,9%)

• 🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 46% (-2%).

• 🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).

Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇

Answering your questions - Why are we moving out of Substack?

🙋‍♀️ If you’d like me to reply to particular questions regarding Snowball, just hit reply, and send me an email. I’ll try to answer some questions next month publicly (you can ask the question in French if you prefer).

Unlike business influencers faking to reply to interviewers or their audience on Instagram, TikTok, etc. I promise these questions come from the community, you.

Last month, two of you asked me almost the same questions:

• Why are we migrating out of Substack?

• Why are we building our own media platform?

• What has been the process? What are the bottlenecks/problems related to this migration?

These are extremely important questions, and I’ve thought about them a lot since almost the beginning of Snowball, 4 years ago. I’ll try to be as succinct and precise as possible.

Our mission is to make finance accessible to the everyday person. Not just the wealthiest. Therefore, education plays a key role in this mission, hence why we’re focusing so much energy on our media.

But education is not the only goal of this media. Its other goal will be to help us distribute our future products.

Controlling your media can be extremely powerful in helping you distribute your products. Look at Bloomberg, or even Hubspot who’s trying to do the same as Bloomberg after having bought the media The Hustle (Robinhood is doing the same as well with its newsletter Snacks and Chartr).

Media will be a cornerstone of the Snowball (still small) empire.

When something is so crucial to your business, you want to vertically integrate it into your business. But why precisely?

• You can create a better and more customized experience for readers. For instance, current members are flooded by too much content and Substack is not helping us create a better experience regarding infobesity. What about having a tailored Snowball experience based on your level of expertise? Impossible with Substack or any other platform.

• Creating our own platform will also help our content creators. AI-assisted content creation, better processes, better writing experience, better collaboration, etc. Substack and other tools are great when you’re alone, not when you start to become a real media with dozens of creators.

• We’re building different products and want them to be well-integrated with one another. What if tomorrow we want to push some content from our media to our investing app? Impossible with Substack, but possible with the platform we’re currently building.

• What about adding new kinds of media like audio, video, etc.?

• What about having a native mobile app?

• What about totally controlling your business model? What if we want to bundle our media with another product? Hard to do at the moment, but it’ll be super easy in the future.

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons that pushed us to create our media platform instead of relying on other tools even though some of them are quite open like Ghost, WordPress, etc… We assessed all of them, and we concluded that even though it’s more expensive in the short term to build our platform, it’s a strategic move we can’t delay.

What has been the process? What are the bottlenecks/problems related to this migration?

• We did a lot of discovery/ideation before developing anything (workshops, user interviews, surveys, etc.).

• We outlined what the dream product could look like based on this discovery.

• We decided what the MVP (minimum viable product) should look like to put a product into our members’ hands as soon as possible without spending years developing the best-polished product.

• The bottlenecks are mainly technical at the moment because designing and sending emails is like playing with very old/limiting technologies.

3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems)

As a reminder, Léa is in charge of the design.

Pierre-Marie is in charge of our product.

Emeline is in charge of the tech (backend).

Clément is in charge of the tech.

Maxime is in charge of growth/marketing.

Lyse, Virginie, and Alexandre (hello cfo) are in charge of Finance, and HR.

And, Bianca and I (Yoann) are in charge of everything else.

In April, like in March, we did a lot of building regarding our future media platform which should be launched this summer.

Progress

In this section, team members and myself will show you the main things that have happened recently.

🚀 Snowball Max soft launch - update

We reached 279 users (+21 vs last month) within 5 months without any external communication outside a very small part of the community.

So far, a lot of initial subscribers are renewing their subscriptions. It’s a very good sign regarding the fact that we’re close to a PMF (product market fit) with some customers.

🔗 If you want to learn more about it or share it with your friends, the landing page is right here.

General/admin/marketing/media

• Bianca joined the team as our first Chief of Staff. Bianca is a perfect fit for many reasons:

  • She’s worked in fast-paced environments where she had to manage complicated projects.

  • In her professional life she has accumulated many skills:

    • UX/UI

    • Project management.

    • Management.

    • Account management.

    • Marketing.

    • …

  • Most importantly, she’s a great person passionate about our mission.

• Maxime joined the team as our first Lead Growth a few weeks ago! His main mission will be to drive acquisition and boost conversion of our different products with the main goal of increasing our revenues. Maxime is a perfect fit for many reasons:

  • Passionate about personal finance.

  • A lot of experience in the fintech industry.

  • In a previous life, Maxime was an entrepreneur so he knows quite well how to navigate in a young startup like Snowball.

  • And the most important of all. He’s a great guy. :)

    From next month on, we’ll have a dedicated marketing section here.

• We got a positive answer from SogeDev telling us that we should receive around €60k of tax credits (CII). Thanks a lot for your help Lyse!

• The magazine project is still going well. We won’t probably launch it in June, but we’re still confident it’s possible before August.

• As I said in the introduction, we organized our first meetup in Paris, and it was a huge success. We’ll plan more events in France in the upcoming months.

Product

• "Media Creation Engine" is almost done, we’re doing the last round of testing with our creators. As a reminder, the Media Creation Engine is the editor that’ll be used by creators to publish and send newsletters. If you’ve already used Notion, the interface is quite familiar:

  

• "Media for Member" MVP scope defined, we’re close to getting the end-to-end experience. “Media for Member” is the codename of our future website where you’ll be able to access our content online.

• Pierre-Marie has been able to interview many users (continuous discovery).

Design

• Léa has continued to work on the Media Creation Engine (editor)

• Léa worked a lot on the “Media for Member” (our future website).

• Léa did a lot of tests with Lasqo, a company allowing you to create designs based on your Mascott thanks to an AI model trained on your illustrations. Here are some outputs from this AI (quite stunning). We could imagine integrating this tech directly into our platform soon. This AI could for instance output a few illustrations based on the content of a newsletter. Sky’s the limit…

Tech

• Started working on the publishing process, going from the creators’ actions to the newsletters’ editions distribution to our members. The content is also adapted to the intended audience.

• The newsletter editor for creators is done. We developed an in-house editor to allow our team of creators to create their content directly in Snowball with a fully branded experience and with everything they need to focus on content creation:

• Started to work on how we will push HTML from the editor to our mailing tool (probably Sendgrid). We ran into some issues here (more about that in the “problems” section)

Plans

Here are the main things we’ll tackle in March.

Product

• Build our emailing system.

• Build first bricks of “Media for Member” MVP.

• Select and build our data & analytics stack.

• Iterate on the continuous discovery setup to target Free members & Leads.

Tech

• Continue to work on the HTML renderers to push the right code to our emailing solution.

• Work on the “Media for Member” MVP.

• Have a reliable process, test the email sending, and build endpoints to gather metrics for our creators. And prepare the Substack migration (first migrate the editions, then the users).

Design

• Keep working on the Media for Members, our future website.

• Lea will be off a big chunk of May and early June (🏯🇯🇵🍜).

General/admin/marketing/media

• Build our first marketing dashboard.

• Build and launch our acquisition plan.

• Set up our CRM/marketing automation tools.

• Continue the public soft launch of Snowball Max.

• Enhance our Discord/community.

Problems

• Tech: we ran into quite a huge issue when we tried to push HTML from our editor to Sendgrid. Indeed, we did not think early enough that email clients are extremely limited when it comes to the kind of HTML/CSS they can render. Therefore, we had to find a solution to “translate” our HTML/CSS into something that can be rendered by email clients. Clement did an amazing job of solving this issue. Congrats.

• Product:

  • Our user research repo tool (Dovetail) is demonstrating some limits, we may need to explore other tools

  • The process of selecting the ideal stack for user communications, data & analytics is cumbersome, we need to realign our needs

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Need you for?

• ✨ If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball or if you know someone who’d like to, click here.

• 👋 Just wanna say hi. Hit reply (you can even write in French if you want). :)

• 🤔 You don’t understand something or would like more details? Hit reply.

Thanks for reading! 🫶

Talk to you soon!

Have a wonderful day. ☀️

Yoann ❤️