❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - Feb 2025

Welcome to the 254 new subscribers who joined us since the last edition in February. 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 us raise 1.6 million dollars in February 2022, but we’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,

We’ve officially made the move. We pulled the plug and migrated from Substack! This marks a massive milestone for Snowball, and we can’t wait to double down on the exciting projects we’ve been building on the side.

Before starting, quick poll:

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

The Main News

• 70,000+ subscribers successfully migrated to our new platform! Huge congrats to the team. It wasn’t easy, and we still have some final tweaks to make, but the major milestones are CHECKED ✅ ✅ ✅ 🙌

• Ad revenue keeps climbing! We’ve closed €121,375 in ad revenue so far this year. Our next available slots are at the end of May. That’s already 70% of last year’s total revenue, and we’re only in March!

• User growth is steady. We’ve increased our budget for paid ads and are averaging +5% monthly growth. Plus, we have some exciting organic initiatives in the works.

• Snowball Max revamp is underway. We’re still fine-tuning the offer. More details soon!

KPIs

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

Financial KPIs

• 🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €20,755 (➡️)

  • 🟠 Media: €19,493 (➡️)

  • 🟠 Max: €1,263 (➡️)

• 🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue from subscriptions): €249,060 (➡️)

• 🟢 Ad business: We booked an additional €27,360 during February, €121,375 year to date. Here’s the media kit if you want to advertise your product in Snowball or know someone who might be interested.

• 🟢 Net MRR Churn rate: 4,8 %.

• 🟢 Net Subscriber Churn rate: 6,1 %.

• 🟢 Cash on hands: €900,211 (including CII + all the sponsorship that hasn’t been paid yet).

  • We have €300,000 in a deposit account, yielding 3.6% to 3.8%.

Media KPIs

• 🟢 71,029 // +1230 since January (+1,7 %), but we deleted inactive users, so 62,851 after that cleaning.

Again, we deleted 7,000 inactive members before migrating to our new site. Without deleting inactive members from time to time, we would have reached 90,000 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+): 48 %

• 🟠 Opening rate (Snowball+): 55 %.

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.

The 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.

We focused primarily on launching our new site and preparing our following big projects.

But before we get to it, let’s talk about the services of a partner we’ll probably use soon (+ we’re testing sponsorship in this newsletter to showcase products we love for you to discover them + to make money simultaneously).

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💰 [PARTNER WE LOVE ❤️] Did you know that €1.3 trillion is currently sitting idle in French bank accounts? And that in 2024, these current accounts generated €49 billion in interest… for the banks? So why not benefit from it yourself?

The French company Swaive allows individuals and businesses to earn interest on their money without risk in just a few clicks. Swaive’s investments come with the same guarantees as a regular bank account but with the added advantage of earning returns.

In a period of falling interest rates, a fixed-term deposit is a smart way to lock in an attractive rate :

Swaive’s fixed deposit accounts (for individuals and businesses) offer :

• 🏦 A fixed-term deposit is a savings product where you lock in cash for a fixed duration (3, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, or 60 months) in exchange for a fixed, guaranteed interest rate from the moment you subscribe.

• 🛡️ Capital: 100% guaranteed at all times ;

• 📈 Returns: Fixed and guaranteed from the start, with rates up to 2.90% per year (gross annual rate), depending on the chosen duration (3 to 60 months). ;

• 📆 Liquidity: You can withdraw your funds within 32 days if needed. ; Minimum deposit: 10 000 € ;

• ❄ Snowball will also be opening a deposit account with Swaive soon!

Swaive is the only French company specializing in risk-free investments. It also offers a boosted savings account for individuals at 4% per year for the first two months, then 2% after that*.

*For any first-time opening of a savings account until March 31, 2025, the interest rate will be boosted for two months from the account opening date up to a maximum balance of €200,000. Beyond this limit and after the two months, the rate will be 2% per year (gross annual rate).

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Alright, here’s what our team has been up to :

Progress

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

General/admin/marketing/misc.

• Due to high demand, we’ve expanded advertising slots to our Daily Podcast and Behind The Curtain newsletter (the one you’re reading right now).

• We wanted to write more content here about our ways of working, our stance on AI at Snowball, and our vision. We’ll get to it soon.

• Meta ads are working well, bringing in new free sign-ups for €2.07 per user (we’d like to get it under €2). Since mid-December, this channel has helped us acquire 3,300 new free members. Also, our first Influence campaigns are rolling out!

• We updated our financials and forecasts to break even by the end of the year. We’re aiming for 1M in revenue. Currently on track, Q2 will be crucial for us. 💪

• We happily discovered one morning that Edward Chechique, an expert in AI & Design, used our design system, Fractal, to demonstrate the power of Figma AI.

Media

• Migration complete! You can view our new website here. Over 62,000 subscribers successfully transferred. You should have started receiving our new newsletter designs in your inbox (if you’re a subscriber, of course). The Tech team has done a tremendous job. Send them some love.

  

• Many things are already better than on Substack (and it’s a V0). For instance:

  • The creative workflow from creation to publication is much easier for us (a simple example: on Substack, two people couldn't edit the same newsletter simultaneously, but now they can).

  • Our newsletters clip (you know when Gmail says, “Click here to see the rest of this email”) way farther on Gmail than on Substack despite a heavier and more code-intensive design. Congrats to Emeline and Clément for improving this.

  • Our editor is way more powerful than the Substack one, making creating and publishing newsletters easier for creators.

  • Our delivery rate seems higher than on Substack (more than 99% at the moment vs above 97% on Substack).

  • The unsubscribe workflow is more straightforward for users.

• Since our platform is now live, the bêta is officially over. Beta testers loved the new design/website. Congrats to Léa!:

  • Rating of 4.2/5 for the design of our new newsletters vs. 4/5 for Substack.

  • Rating of 4.2/5 for the design of our new website vs. 3.3/5 for Substack

• We’ve explained key information in our brand new Help Center; please feel free to take a look if you want to check for any impacts to your account or if you’re just curious about the whole Snowball ecosystem (Newsletters, Discord, WhatsApp, Fairmint, etc.).

• You might have heard we’re launching a new paid media offer soon (code name: Snowball Lite). It’s taking shape: pricing & packaging are defined, the landing page is ready, and Lea is working on the rest of the user journey. We should be able to launch it in the upcoming weeks.

• I also want to say a big, big, big congrats to Bianca, Pierre-Marie (PM), and Maxime, who contributed significantly to the success of this migration. PM because, as the product manager, he was in charge of making sure that everything went smoothly (very hard when the project is so complex), Bianca because she fought hard against Stripe to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible when we migrated our paid users (and believe me, after 5 years of running Snowball, that was pretty messy), and Maxime to help up make sure that everything was set up correctly on the CRM/analytics side. Their work is less visible but as important as anybody on the team.

• We have a prototype of a SnowAI solution fed by all our newsletters and done with a custom GPT. Tested internally and with a few members, the results look promising, although we barely exploited the technology's full potential.

  We’re exploring another solution with an AI specialist (freelance) to improve the experience and the quality of the answers!

Snowball Max

• We’re progressing on the revamp of Snowball Max, although we’re still defining the specs, implementation framework, and go-to-market strategy.

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Plans

Here are the main things we’ll tackle in the upcoming weeks.

General/admin/marketing/misc.

• We decided to test AskRally, an AI tool for audience research that will help us understand how different personas would respond to our product, content, or messaging. We’re looking forward to using it for our new paid media offer.

• We will launch many new “marketing tools”/lead magnets to increase acquisition (e.g., compound interest calculator, risk profile generator, Chrome extensions).

To remind you, our main objective is to reach profitability with our media to focus on the Fintech side of Snowball. In the long term, Snowball, the media should be a growth engine to propel Snowball, the FinTech. And if it can generate a lot of revenue as well, that'll be great.

• We have a backlog of very old coupons from Substack. To be honest, it’s a bit of a mess. Now that we’ve migrated, we’ve finally decided to start “cleaning” them.

Media

• We’ve decided to keep Substack running to benefit from the platform’s referral system. We’ll also connect Meta to our API so we can create smoother Free sign-up flows.

• We’re going to start SEO initiatives. Within 12 months, we aim to reach 100k monthly visitors on our website.

• As you read in our last edition, email reputation and deliverability are critical for us as an online media company. We will streamline maintenance by automatically removing bounces and blocks and reactivating and deleting inactive users.

• We’re in discussions to acquire a newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers. Additionally, we see new opportunities to expand Snowball content to new audiences—more about that next month.

• I'm thinking seriously about a long-form podcast/video format.

💡 If you’re wondering why we’ve moved out of Substack, you can read more about our reasoning here.

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Problems

• Migrating to a new platform has led to formatting quirks across different email clients. In particular, Gmail, Outlook, and Mail love to override some styles, messing with buttons, images, or layout blocks. We’re actively fixing these. Clément and Léa are doing a tremendous job, and they lost quite a lot of hair trying to deal with code from the 2000s. For example, some old Outlook apps use a word engine to display emails. 🤯

• We’re noticing discrepancies in our analytics between Substack and Snowstack (yes, we have our own little nickname for our platform). The numbers don’t always align, so we’re investigating why and improving what we can.

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Need you for?

• ✨ If you want to sponsor Snowball or 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 ❤️