❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - May 2022

To investors and friends,

I hope you’re doing better than the stock, and crypto markets. 🙃

Welcome to the 400 new subscribers who’ve joined us since the last edition. If you’re receiving this email for the first time, the main goal of it 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, but I’ve decided to open it to the public for the curious out there.

The month of May was quieter than April since I was “somehow” off for 2 weeks.

Let’s dive in.

The Main News

• Found a way with my accountant to easily, safely, and cost-efficiently transfer money from the US to France.

• Quite related to this: since I raised around 1 million dollars in February, and since the dollar appreciated a bit more than 5 % compared to the euro, if I convert the money very soon, I could make a $50,000 profit thanks to this new exchange rate. 🙌

• In May, while I was on vacation, 2 newsletters have been completely written by community members (8 persons in total), and the experience went extremely well. It reassures me regarding the fact that Snowball can be successful without me.

• I’m discussing with the Les Échos accelerator to join their brand new program meant to help new media to launch. There’s no string attached. They don’t take any equity, and there’s no obligation on Snowball’s side. I should have an answer regarding this in the upcoming days.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition (28th of April) :

• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): we reached the €250k milestone! €252,520 (+ 1.4% from €249,407 the last month).

• Number of subscribers: 29,897 subscribers (+ 8.1% from 27,645).

• The opening rate is still high with an average of 55 %.

• Paid subscribers: 3,625. Last month’s number was wrong since it included students (who don’t pay). 3,625 is the real number.

• Churn: < 2%.

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

• Cash on hands: €115,338 in France (+9 %), $1.6 million in the US (same).

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.

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

• Still talking with Spotify for a potential Spotify Original podcast. Nothing’s sure, just talks. I should have an answer in the upcoming weeks.

• Secured a €40K revenue-based financing with Karmen to try out their service.

• I packaged Snowball’s sponsorship offer on a Notion page here. If you want to sponsor Snowball, have a look or share it with a potential sponsor, you know where to click:

Plans

Here I’ll tell you what are the upcoming month's plans.

• I’m doing a first sponsoring test with Paymium (€6K) and probably Yomoni (€6K as well) in June. Try to secure a multiple-month contract with Yomoni for the end of the year.

• I secured a €40k financing with Karmen and we will do a small PR campaign to announce the first revenue-based financing in the creator economy in Europe.

• 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).

Problems

What are the current problems?

• Trade Republic, which was interested in sponsoring Snowball for a while, decided not to sponsor Snowball because of the current environment (bear market, potential recession, less VC money, etc.). Fortunately, other potential sponsors are interested (Yomoni, Scalable Capital, Paymium, etc.).

• Not really a problem, but on the media side, many new “creators” in the personal landscape are starting to pop everywhere in France by launching newsletters focused on cryptos/stocks investing. Good sign for the market, but it means that we’ll have to be even more creative and good at what we’re doing to remain one step ahead.

• The current “kinda” bear market is affecting the growth of Snowball.

Need you for?

• If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball or if you know someone who’d like to. Click here or share this link.

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

• Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)

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

Yoann ❤️