Welcome to the 185 new subscribers who’ve joined us since the last edition. 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. If you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at this email's end or click here. And if you want to subscribe to BTC (Behind the Curtain), you can do it there 👇
To investors and friends,
Hi everybody. We’re the 12th of May, and I’m super late with this report again, but 2 days early compared to last month! That’s an improvement.
The Main News
As you already know, Valentine joined Snowball last month and became employee #1 (Product Lead). 🙌
This month, I’m super happy to announce that Léa and Clément have also joined the team! Léa was the VP of Design at PayFit, and Clément was Senior Frontend Engineer at Backmarket. If you wanna learn more about them, you can check my latest LinkedIn post.
That’s what the amazing SnowTeam looks like at the moment:
Snowball+ is still growing, and Snowball’s revenues with it. After a few months of stagnation/tiny decrease, we reached another all-time high regarding our revenues:
KPIs
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
I’ve deleted 3.5k inactive accounts. There are now 47,220 members in the community. Every 6 months I’ll clean the database by deleting the least active users. Here are the filters I used to delete these accounts:
Free subscribers.
Subscribed more than 6 months ago.
Opened 0 e-mails in the last 30 days.
Never clicked on a link.
Activity level (a substack metric) below one star (on a scale of 5)
🟢 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €265,205 (+4,5 %).
🟢 Ad business: We booked quite a lot of new sponsors this month
Backlog for the rest of the year (until 12/31/23): €63,250. Here’s the media kit if you’re interested or know someone who could be.
Bookings paid to date: I’ll add this metric next month.
🟢 Total projected revenues for the upcoming year (subscriptions + ads): €415,000+ (+2.5 %).
🟠 Opening rate (free newsletters): around 50 %. Decreased by about 5 %. As I said last month, since we’re sending way more newsletters, the open rate naturally decreases. I added a 🟠, but it’s not that bad. Just something we should monitor. As a reminder, newsletters with a similar user base usually have an open rate close to or below 40 %. Ours is very healthy.
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 60 %+.
🟢 Churn rate April: around 5 %. A bit lower than in March (6 %).
🟠 Cash on hands: €1,465,450 (-€48.5k MoM). Mainly because we had to pay €35k of late VAT for the year 2022.
Burn rate: I’ll add this metric next month.
Runway: I’ll add this metric next month.
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.
Onboarded Valentine, Léa, and Clément. Well… Léa and Clément are still in the onboarding process but are almost done.
Valentine did a great job at untangling what we’ve done so far regarding the “Money Coach” offer, and she has started to model the business plan of this new offer.
At the moment, I’m preparing the audit of the AMF (performed by the organization I’m part of) for the CIF (conseiller en investissements financiers) part of our business. Quite a lot of documentation to provide even though we still haven’t started this activity.
Plans
Here, I’ll tell you what are the big projects we’ll be tackling in the upcoming weeks.
Léa will organize our first ideation spring next week in order to better define and frame the future “Money Coach” offer.
Create the roadmap for the “Money Coach” product & the new media platform (the entire team will work on it, but Valentine & Léa will be the main drivers).
Onboard Emeline, our future engineer.
Define our tech stack + start to build the foundations (Emeline & Clément)
Work on acquisition (free + paid), and see how I can ramp up this part of the business.
Enhance the newsletter publication process + try to create a better experience for readers before we can build a new experience from scratch.
Finalize our business plan with Alexandre and Lyse (part-time CFO) in order to better forecast our burn and breakeven point.
Start to build our platform. 🙌
Problems
What are the current problems?
Same as last month: Snowball+ has created an information overload problem. We will need to find smart ways to make sure that subscribers are not feeling drowned in a sea of newsletters.
Need you for?
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👋 Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)
🤔 You don’t understand something or would like more details?
Thanks for reading. 🫶
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the rest of your week.
Yoann ❤️
well done to the team behind the newsletters. I really enjoy reading the more in deepth versions per investment type as this give to me more value and considerations. however I like your statement of Problem and information overload. the key question to reflect is how to map these knowledge ? seems each segment shall create a map of univers per subtopic and some clever tags to help searching. you will find a way ! good continuation
Hello, just a quick comment. I completely agree, there are too many newsletter and posts coming out, I start to not following them anymore all of them, so there is a need to make it more efficient and less of them.