❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - February 2023

Welcome to the 255 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 just 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,

Hi everybody. I hope you’re all doing great.

Many things happened in February! Ready? Go!

The Main News

• Unfortunately, Pauline has decided to exit the Snowball ship. I mean, I wrote “unfortunately”, but it’s actually for the best. Both for Pauline, and for Snowball. Of course, I’m a little sad, but I’ll remain one of Pauline’s biggest fan, and our friendship hasn’t gone anywhere! But even if Pauline did not stay for a long time, the value she added is priceless… She’s freelancing at the moment, so don’t hesitate to contact her, I highly recommend! (Go To market strat & Product Marketing).

• Indeed, thanks to her, I was able to assemble an amazing team I could never have dreamt of a few months ago!

  • Between April and June, 4 to 5 people should join Snowball. They’re all amazing people with an exceptionally diverse background + they used to work at great companies like Back Market, Livi, Payfit or Majelan! I can’t wait to introduce them to you! There will be:

    • 1 product manager

    • 1 designer (product/generalist)

    • 2 developers

    • And potentially a Chief of Staff.

  • On top of that, there will be more women than men in this team (including myself). Why is it important? We all know how hard it is to create a diverse workplace if you don’t start thinking about it from the beginning (we all know these photos of team building with 90% of men on them). I’m really glad to start on the right foot. Especially for a (future) fintech. Once again, this is greatly thanks to Pauline’s efforts (Pauline, if you’re reading this 🫶)! I believe it’s also important for our future users. We want to reach as many people as possible. To do so, I believe that it’s super important to have a team that reflects your users.

• I also hired a great CFO in residence and his copilot (👋 Alexandre & Lyse from hello cfo).

• The bundle of newsletters should be launched around the 20th of March.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

• ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €245,000 (flatish). This does not include the sponsoring revenues. See below. 👇

• Ad business: Snowball is fully booked until the end of March 2023. If you want to share the offer (or if you’re interested in sponsoring Snowball later), it’s right here.

  • MRR: about €14/15K. Flat. These revenues should increase when we’ll launch the bundle of newsletters + push the acquisition button.

• Total projected revenues for the upcoming year (subscriptions + ads): €400,000+. Flat

• Subscribers: 47,910 (+ 5 % since the 8th of February 2023).

• Opening rate: around 55 %. Flat.

• Churn rate February: around 5 %. Lower than in January (7.73%).

• Cash on hands: €1,525,000 (-€8,9k MoM).

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.

• The employee equity plan (BSPCE) is finalized.

• After talking with the future team members, we decided not to migrate out of Substack for now. We will just launch the Webflow website. That should be done by mid March.

• We will launch the bundle on Substack. No heavy migration and no risk to pick the wrong tool.

  • P.S : launching a media with more than 10 creators + a revenue sharing model is not easy 😅.

• 12 newsletters have been selected to be part of the launch of the bundle. We have some amazing topics:

  • Watches, LEGO, money & psychology, stocks, crypto, wine, budgeting, love & money, side business, etc. The creators team is truly fantastic. They’re all passionate about their topic. This will surely make a difference in the french financial media ecosystem.

  • Interested? You can find more details here. More than 40 creators applied! We truly believe that we can reinvent how a media company is run with this kind of model that is fairer for creators. If you’re interested or know someone, apply or share!

  • If you’ve applied and haven’t received an answer yet, it means I haven’t had the time to review your application yet.

• We launched the production and diffusion of short videos on TikTok, and Instagram.

• I’ve finally started the production of the micro-class that we will distribute through WhatsApp.

  • First one: learn the basics of crypto with less than euros. The idea is to push people in the swimming pool in order to teach them how to swim.

  • If it’s successfull, we will create more, and build a library of micro-classes.

Plans

Here, I’ll tell you what are the big projects we’ll be tackling in the upcoming weeks.

• Package the future Money Coach offer. How much? For whom? Etc.

  • We will start to seriously work on this when the future employees arrive.

• Launch the V 1.5 of Snowball around the 20th of March.

• Soft launch of the bundle at the same time (with a new pricing).

• Prepare an onboarding program to welcome new employees.

• I’m exploring a new way to explore Snowball content thanks to generative AI. We could launch a SnowGPT bot based on everything I wrote. More about that later.

Problems

What are the current problems?

• Quite a lot of work 😅.

• Our Daily Snow phone number has been banned so I had to find a solution:

  • A new mailing list on Substack.

  • It will also be shared on the private Discord for premium members.

  • I’m looking for a new way to distribute the Daily Snow on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/ etc, but these solutions are usually quite expensive.

Need you for?

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

• ✍️ You’re a creator and you already have a community or you’ve got talent, but no community? Check this out if you wanna join Snowball. We have great perks including stock options!

• 👋 Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)

Thanks for reading and do not hesitate to react in the comment section or by replying to this e-mail!

Have a wonderful evening, and enjoy the rest of your week.

Yoann ❤️