❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - August & September 2024

🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ You work at Meta or know someone who does? We need your help! After publishing an ad with an image of myself on a TV set, we got our business account blocked (there has been no news from Meta since then), and my account has been blocked for months with no way to understand why. Hit reply if you can help. Thanks!

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Welcome to the 334 new subscribers who joined us since the last edition in August. If you’re receiving this email for the first time, its primary goal is to update you about Snowball’s business. 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 ones.

Why in English? Hopefully, Snowball will be an international company one day, so it’s important to document our journey in a language most people worldwide can understand. If you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at the end of this email or 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,

Back-to-school season is over. I hope you’re feeling motivated about your future endeavors. We are at Snowball :)

This edition covers August and September. Sorry for sending it so late. From now on, we’ll try to stick to the monthly update.

Also, expect more articles besides the regular investors’ updates.

🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ Before starting, we’d like to learn more about the Behind the Curtain community. If you have 5 minutes, could you answer this survey? You’ll get 15% off Snowball+ at the end (€68/year instead of €80) as a gift. Thanks a lot

The Main News

We’re on the last big sprint to set up the foundation of our new media platform.

• Overall, the migration out of Substack is still going well. We’re building, and building, and building. Big up to the team. It’s a big project, and we can’t wait to launch it.

• Sponsorship revenues have surpassed last year’s revenues (+20%). The pipeline is still robust without any outbound sales.

• Marketing machine is up and rolling → Thousands of new free subscribers and new content are coming.

• Subscription revenues are still flat / slightly decreasing.

KPIs

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

Financial KPIs

• 🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €21,794 (→)

  • 🟠 Media: €19,897 (↘️)

  • 🟢 Max (coaching): €1897 (↗️)

• 🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €261,528 (→)

  • 🟠 ARR Snowball+ (media subscriptions): €238,760 (-€1k). Once again, we faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions in Aug & Sep.

  • 🟢 ARR Snowball Max (financial coaching): €22,768 (+€1k). We discovered that 55% of our customers see long-term value in the service.

• 🟢 Ad business: We booked €161,412 year to date (+€56,092 in Aug & Sep):

  • 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% (+1%).

• 🟢 Churn rate max: around 4%.

• 🟢 Cash on hands: €1,101,095 (including CII + all the sponsorships that haven’t been paid yet).

  • We still have €150,000 on two term deposit accounts at Cashbee Pro yielding from 3.6% to 3.8%. And we’re going to redo the operation with €150,000.

  • We received €11,500 interest from 3 term accounts we closed because they matured (not the 1 billion Google is receiving on its cash balance yet, but still 😅).

Media KPIs

• 🟢 61,286 // +2628 vs early August 2024 (+4,5%).

🥳 We're pretty happy with this result since we proactively deleted 7719 inactive members in July. Without deleting them, we should have reached around 70,000 members. Why do we delete some members? To keep our mailing list clean and to improve our deliverability. To learn more about this, check out this LinkedIn post (in French).

• 🟢 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 49.17 % (+1.6%) → why? Because we cleaned our email database.

• 🟠 Opening rate (Snowball+): 60% (slight decrease).

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

🙋‍♀️ Answering your questions

🙋‍♀️ 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.

3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems)

• 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 Aug and Sep, we did a lot of building regarding our future media platform.

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Progress

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

General/admin/marketing/misc.

• We organized our Q3 offsite in mid-September, and it was fantastic having the whole team together. We focused our time on service design and how we want to evolve as a business next year. It helped us all deeply think about our strategy, ideas, and projects and align on the plan to break even. Exciting things ahead!

💡 I’ll probably share our master plan / long-term vision in the upcoming weeks. Some of you think (I received a few emails) we’re not following the initial plan discussed in the investor memo, but we are.

• Since June, we’ve had successful cross-audience partnership campaigns, sharing the newsletters we love with Snowball users and vice versa on our partner’s media. It has yielded positive results, bringing in roughly 10,000 new free signups for free. We’ll continue to plug these campaigns where we can. :)

• We’ve been carefully selecting 20 - 30 fintech players to create special offers for the Snowball community. Most of the products we’ve chosen are used by at least one of the team members. Every deal we negotiate keeps the customer’s interest at heart, although Snowball will receive affiliate commissions (everything will be transparent for our community).

• We’ve finally finalized our BSPCE employee terms. It was a hurdle, including many emails between US and French lawyers. The idea is to issue stock options in the US (Snowball XYZ, Inc.) and convert them into French BSPCE (simplified version). Overall, it better serves our employees' interests. A huge thank you to Hello CFO for working this all out!!

• ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Our Trustpilot page is slowly amassing great reviews with a score of 4.9 stars. Thank you everyone so far! Feel free to add your review if you want!

Snowball Max

• The current service still has an inbound of about +13 new users per month (0 marketing on our side). It’s slowly growing. Our coaches are happy, and we’re looking at ways to smooth out operations and costs.

• We decided to launch a new version in the upcoming month to make it more scalable/profitable.

Media

• Step by step, we’re getting near the target experience and scope that will allow us to get rid of Substack:

  • Our emailing system is ready

  • We simplified and improved the understanding of our future landing page

  • We’re halfway done with the newsletters & editions analytics part

  • We’re simplifying how our users can manage their Snowball plan and account

• Léa has finished an enormous piece to improve our home page experience. We organized +20 user tests and revamped the design and how we packaged our products and offers. We can’t wait to share it with you! And thanks again to everyone from Discord who voted :)

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Plans

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

General/admin/misc.

• We’re exploring service and tool bundles (at a discounted price) to serve our community. Something like this bundle by Lenny and Perplexity :

  

  For us, it could be something like “subscribe to Snowball+ and get a free year of tool xyz”.

  Leave a comment if there’s a specific company you’d love to see Snowball partner with!

• We will scale up our publications on Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as in this “Behind the Curtain” newsletter. Finding time to create content is not always easy when we’re already managing our respective scopes.

Snowball Max

• Our user research interviews have helped us dive deeper into our core audience persona. We are now more confident in the direction we want to take for the evolution of Snowball Max to reach profitability while enhancing members’ experience. We will be testing some ideas soon; more on that in the coming months. :)

• We will investigate non-tech initiatives that can increase the service’s attractiveness, scalability, and member retention (indeed, the engineering/design/product team will remain focused on the media until launch).

Media

• We've run small paid acquisition campaigns on Twitter and Reddit with a test budget to generate free newsletter signups. Our cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) is relatively high on both platforms - 4 euros and 19 euros per free signup, respectively. In October, we will try out Meta if we can get them to unblock our account (either they don’t agree with me supporting L’Olympique de Marseille, or they think I’m fake. I’m saying that because they blocked one of my BFM business apparition.) 😂🫠

• We’ve kicked off our battle plan for migrating. Each team member will participate in planning and organizing the migration. You can read more about our reasoning here if you’re wondering why this is important to us.

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Problems

Max

• We still don’t have much time to work on Snowball Max as we are super focused on the media migration.

Media

• We have a lot of legacy products & subscriptions in Stripe to manage, and we’re not quite sure how to migrate them to our new billing system (still with Stripe). We want something simple and easier to understand. Thanks, Substack 🥵

• We’re a bit lost on the Snowmelt operation. We have a 50/50 split between our readers who want us to reduce content and readers who want to keep things as they are. As a reminder, this was our plan :

  

  We will find time for some user interviews to understand better what to do and how to address this.
  

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Need you for?

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

• 👋 wanna say hi. Hit reply (you can write in French if you prefer)

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

🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ We’d like to learn more about the Behind the Curtain community. If you have 5 minutes, could you answer this survey? You’ll get 15% off Snowball+ at the end (€68/year instead of €80) as a gift. Thanks a lot!

Thanks for reading! 🫶

Talk to you soon!

Have a wonderful weekend. ☀️

Yoann ❤️