❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - February 2024
Welcome to the 192 new subscribers who’ve joined us since the last edition a month ago. 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.
Why in English? Well, hopefully, one day Snowball will be an international company, so it’s important to document our journey in a language that can be understood by most people around the world. If you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at the end of this email or you can click here. And if you want to subscribe to BTC (Behind the Curtain), you can do it there 👇
To investors and friends,
Hello everybody!
I hope you’re doing great despite the gloomy winter weather.
🥳 I almost forgot about it, but Snowball is turning 4! The first edition was sent on the third of March 2020. Back then, no Snowie and GIFs were still trendy (now they’re lame…).
What a ride since then.
The craziest part about it is that I don’t feel like I’m on a rollercoaster ride despite what people from the outside might think. Everything has been so smooth, organic, and almost easy (at least from my point of view).
Anyway, happy birthday Snowball, and thank you to all of you. This fourth birthday has been made possible only because of you! And since last year, to the incredible Snowball team as well!
🙋♀️ 🙋♂️ Oh, and if you’d like me to reply to very specific questions regarding Snowball (the business, the vision, etc.), you can reply to this email, and I’ll answer publicly next month.
Let’s go.
The Main News
🥳🥳🥳 Pierre-Marie has joined the team as our new Lead Product and we are super happy to have him onboard. More about PM below.
Our hiring pipe regarding the Lead Growth position is full full full (more than 50 applications). 😅 We have many great candidates, so I’ll spend the upcoming weeks interviewing some of them.
📈 Even if the pipe is full, if you’re interested or know someone who could be interested, the Growth Lead job desc is right here.
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong without doing any outbound sales.
Snowball Max reached more than €20k of ARR. Not huge, but we need to start somewhere. Also, when I was on my own 4 years ago, this amount seemed gigantic. We should not lose sight of small wins.
KPIs
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
🟢 55,600. +1600 vs the 31st of January 2024 (+3%)
🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €268,000 (-€2000). After reaching an all-time high of ARR in December, we faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions (it happens when a credit card expires or when there is not enough money on the account linked to the credit card).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €33,400 year to date (+€5,200 since the 31st of January):
🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 49% (flat).
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
🟢 Churn rate: around 4.3% (-1.3%).
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,484,000.
€750,000 on 5 term accounts on Cashbee Pro yielding from 3.6% to 3.8%.
€734,000 on Qonto.
Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇
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.
Lyse, Virginie, and Alexandre (hello cfo) are in charge of Finance, and HR.
And, I (Yoann) is in charge of everything else.
In February we did a lot of exploration and discovery regarding our future media platform that should be launched around June (right on time for my birthday). 🤞
Progress
In this section, team members and myself will show you the main things that have happened recently.
🚀 Snowball Max soft launch - update
We reached 220 paid subscribers within 2 months without any external communication outside the community.
The new landing page is live:
🙋♀️🙋♂️ Anybody can now subscribe.
We hired two new coaches to be able to slowly increase our acquisition pace. Super happy to have them onboard especially because they share our values:
Nicolas who also writes a great personal finance newsletter.
General/admin/marketing/media
We’re hiring a Growth Lead to boost our acquisition and our revenues. To apply and see the job desc, click here.
We’ve tried a new collaboration with Voxe, an amazing French newsletter. They displayed Snowball in one of their newsletters and we displayed Voxe in one of our newsletters. Great Success as Borat would say! We might explore more deeply this kind of partnership. This brought us about 600 news subscribers and I believe it brought something similar to Voxe.
We revamped our employee onboarding with Corentin.
I launched a mailing campaign to catch back “billing failed” users. It’s far from being over so I’ll share results with you later.
Product
A little bit about Pierre-Marie, our new Lead Product.
Before joining us, PM was Lead Product at Qonto, and product manager at Mention.
But he was also a Snowball Investor and community member! I’m super happy to see how useful this community can be.
PM joined us a few weeks ago, but we can already feel that it’s a great match. We can’t wait to build the future of Snowball with him.
Not much to share since PM spent a lot of time doing his onboarding this month, but he already set up a product OS for the team to better collaborate. More about that next month.
Welcome Pierre-Marie! Very happy to have you onboard.
Design
Léa launched the Snowball Max landing page with the help of Bepo.
Léa briefed Nicolas, an amazing freelance designer who’ll help us redesign our newsletters.
After organizing 2 workshops in January to formalize what we’ll build on the media side, Léa had quite a lot of work on the media side:
Many user interviews with creators since they’ll be users of our platform (reminder: creators are the users writing newsletters).
A lot of exploration to learn about text editors’ best practices.
Designed mockups (+ specs + user journeys) of our future creators’ back office + text editor + sidebar to start to unify our different products. Here’s a sneak peek:
Congrats Léa!
Tech
☃️ Clément is in Lapland chasing auroras with his family at the moment but he worked quite a lot during February:
Implemented a new waiting list feature for the public release of Snowball Max. Indeed, we can’t onboard hundreds of users at the same time because we have a fixed amount of coaches. Before pushing the acquisition button we had to implement a waiting list system for Snowball Max.
Clement continued his exploratory work on the media side:
He already created a functional PoC to test some libraries. Wow!
He created the foundation of the media API with authentication.
There was also a lot of work on the backend side with Florent to better deploy different products (API migration, creation of new apps, etc.).
Clément helped me regarding a potential tax credit we could get (JEI, CIR, CII). We’re working on this with Sogedev.
We did a pentest with the help of Absec Cybersecurity. Since we’re starting to host some sensitive financial data, we want to make sure that our infrastructure is robust and secure. If you want to learn more about pentest, you can click here.
Congrats to Clément and Florent!
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in March.
Product
PM will continue to:
Learn more about Snowball.
Set up our new routines.
Revamp our product delivery workflow
Take the lead on the Creators’ experience of the Media Migration project.
Align with the team on the next product priorities.
Tech
Continue to work on the new media platform/migration.
Implement a new AI feature developed by Florent (a feature that’ll help coaches to better follow long conversations with users to increase their productivity).
Design
Focus our first efforts on designing a smooth and reliable newsletter creator tool + media platform during the coming weeks. 💪
Redesign our newsletter templates with the help of Nicolas.
User tests with creators.
New mockups and design specs.
General/admin/marketing/media
Continue the public soft launch of Snowball Max.
Continue to work on a potential future “Snowball Magazine” with Corentin.
Start to organize the first Snowball Meetup to celebrate our 4th birthday?
Reach out to all the other “big newsletters” with which we could do some cross-recommendations.
Problems
No problem at all.
Need you for?
If you are or know a great growth marketer, we’re hiring one. The job desc is right here! I’d like to work with someone who’s extremely curious and ready to experience a lot of stuff.
✨ If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball or if you know someone who’d like to, click here.
👋 Just wanna say hi. Hit reply (you can even write in French if you want). :)
🤔 You don’t understand something or would like more details?
Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful day.
Yoann ❤️
Keep the good work!