❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - April 2022

To investors and friends,

I hope you’re doing great.

This is the first edition of Behind the Curtain since the first Snowball fundraising launch on the 21st of February 2022.

I’d like to apologize for writing it so late. 🙇‍♂️

Managing both the content side + fundraising with hundreds of people has been quite challenging. 😅

But here I am, safe and sound, ready to write the next chapter of Snowball.

I’ll write you some updates about Snowball’s business once a month so you can quickly see what’s going on… Behind the Curtain. ;)

🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️Oh and by the way, I’m testing something today. A public AMA on LinkedIn. If you have questions about Snowball, its present, future, etc. just ask them in the comment section of this post.

The Main News

Snowball has raised a bit more than 1.6 million dollars (€1.5 million) with 476 community members.

I’d like to thank all of you! It’s crazy to think that everything started from this LinkedIn post a bit more than 2 years ago:

I’m not 100% sure, but I believe this is the first time a newsletter run by 1 person raises so much money thanks to her community.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition, right before the fundraising on the 21st of February (2 months ago more or less):

• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €249,407 (+ 9.4% from €228,394)

• Number of subscribers: 27,645 subscribers (+ 17.3% from 23,566).

• Number of paid subscribers: 4,053 (+ 7.8% from 3,769).

• Churn: < 2%.

• Monthly burn: < €1000 (about the same).

• Cash on hands: €105,500 in France, $1.6 million in the US. (+∞ since the 21st of February. 😅).

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

Progress

In this section, I’ll show you the main things that have happened in the past month/period.

• Discussing with 2 high-profile potential hires with concrete decisions coming in the upcoming weeks (product/ops/jack of all trades).

• About to add €120,000 to the ARR thanks to the sponsoring of the free version of Snowball (3 serious sponsors are in the pipe to start in May/June).

• Raised $1.6M dollars. I closed the pre-seed, pre-product round of Snowball at a $21.9M valuation. I’ve hit the pause button because the valuation started to rise way beyond a rational number. I’ll open again the fundraising once Snowball hits a different stage (first MVP for instance or a big ARR milestone).

• Talking with Spotify for a potential Spotify Original podcast. Nothing’s sure, just talks.

• Recently launched the Snowball Discord. The community is just plain amazing! I’ve learned so much stuff in a few weeks. It’s really crazy to see how powerful a community can be!

Plans

Here I’ll tell you what are the short-term plans.

• Closing the first sponsoring contract (€10k/month).

• Finalizing the first 2 key hires (product/ops/jack of all trades).

• Once these 2 key hires are finalized, I’ll focus on hiring the key tech talent (part of the core team or freelancers). Why wait? Since I’m already into a well-advanced process with a product person as a key hire, I need to wait in order to move on to the tech side since she’s the person that’ll work closely with the tech hire. I’m not in a rush. Just need to do the right things. Why a freelancer could be an option? I had an interesting discussion yesterday with someone, and we talked about the fact that hiring a tech talent before the product-market fit could be challenging since you don’t really know what you’re gonna build exactly. That’s why hiring freelancers could be a good option in the beginning. Still an open question though.

• After that, the main focus of this small core team will be to prioritize the V0 of Snowball 2.0 (media x app).

• I’ll be resting for 2 weeks from the 29th of April to the 15th of May.

Problems

What are the current problems?

• I’m starting to feel the pain of being alone to write not only the entire stream of content but also to manage the “company building” part. Delegating some stuff quickly will be important.

• Not a short-term problem, but the VC money printing machine seems to slow down. It might be a bit harder 12 months from now to raise money. Wait and see.

Need you for?

• If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball (€10k per month for the entire package), hit reply.

• You like the project and would like to be more involved (employee, freelancer, advisor)? Hit reply.

• Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)

Thanks for reading and do not hesitate to react in the comment section!

Yoann ❤️