❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - Jan 2025
Welcome to the 568 new subscribers who joined us since the last edition in December. 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 👇
To investors and friends,
January is already over. But what a start to the year! A scary thing happened in early January, but we’ve solved this issue rapidly. More about that later.
We are all hands on deck, relentlessly building multiple projects simultaneously. It is impressive that such a small team can tackle so many subjects simultaneously.
📆 Three team members (Bianca, Léa, and Pierre-Marie) will be at the AI Product Day on the 31st of March. If you work as a product manager or designer or are just curious about how AI can impact product development, we‘ve negotiated 15% off for the Snowball Community thanks to the promo code SNOW15.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ If you want to sponsor the event, they’re looking for 1 or 2 more companies. It’s an excellent way to be in front of a very targeted audience of product people. Just contact them and tell them you’re coming from Snowball.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ 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’ve started migrating to our new media website (Snowstack). We’re currently in beta.
We’re hoping to migrate our 70,000 subscribers by March.
Ad revenue is still going strong. We’ve closed €94,015 for this year. To compare, that’s already over 50 % of last year’s booking volume. And a few sweet B2B deals have been rolling in.
On the acquisition side, we’re growing steadily. +5,9 % increase this month thanks to our paid ads and cross-audience partnerships with other newsletters.
We’re still working on revamping our Snowball Max offer.
KPIs
Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:
Financial KPIs
🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €21,042 (↗️)
🟢 Media: €19,134 (↗️) thanks to our bundles with Secret and Finary
🟠 Max: €1908 (↘️) but +15 new users each month without any outbound sales
🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €252,504 (➡️)
🟢 Ad business: We booked €94,015 year to date. That’s 35% of our available slots for the year.
🟢 Net MRR Churn rate: 4,3 %.
🟢 Net Subscriber Churn rate: 5,2 %.
🟢 Cash on hands: €910,273 (including CII + all the sponsorship that hasn’t been paid yet).
We have €450,000 in a deposit account at Cashbee Pro, yielding 3.6% to 3.8%.
Media KPIs
🟢 69,799 // +4776 since December (+6,8 %).
🥳 We're pretty happy with this result since we proactively deleted 7,719 inactive members in July and also 1,500 emails that were bouncing in January 2025. Without deleting them, we should have reached around 80,000 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+): 51 %
🟠 Opening rate (Snowball+): 59%.
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.
We focused primarily on migrating to our new media site in December and January and building some cool side projects.
Progress
In this section, team members and I will show you the main things that have happened recently.
General/admin/marketing/misc.
What happens when all your Gmail subscribers see a giant red phishing banner?
Chaos.
We noticed this phishing alert when we returned from our Christmas break and started sending newsletters again on January 6th. At first, we thought it was just an isolated case, but we quickly realized that as soon as there was a snowball.xyz URL in an email, this banner would appear.
We did everything we could to solve this issue the entire week. Thanks to Clement’s detective talents, we discovered we were on a Surbl “black list.” Surbl is a provider of reputation data. We contacted them, and they told us they received one of our emails in one of their “fake email” inboxes. In short, if an email lands in one of those inboxes, it means that you’ve likely bought a stolen email list.
Of course, that wasn’t the case at all. After we discussed it with them and told them we were good people, they gave us some hints about this email address: the day they received it and the fact that it was an email with a typo in the domain name. After some investigation, we found an email address with an iploud.com domain name instead of icloud.com. This email came from one of our Meta paid ads campaigns (we import the emails from meta forms directly into Substack). After we told them that, plus everything we did to improve our reputation, they kindly deleted us from their list on Friday, 5 days after we discovered this issue.
I’m super proud of the team (especially Clément since he did 90% of the work to get us out of this situation) because this kind of problem can last for months sometimes, and it can hurt your business badly (especially when 90% of your revenues come from sending emails…). For instance, our open rate dropped from around 50% to around 30%!
We also learned a lot of things during this week regarding domain reputation, email delivery, etc.
Our Meta advertising campaigns work very well. They generate new free sign-ups for only €1.70 per user. Since mid-December, this channel has helped us acquire over 2,000 new Snowball free members.
We updated our revenue share model for Creators. The goal was to maintain Their stability and continuity while increasing margins for Snowball's long-term vision. The Creators still receive 40 % of revenue from paid subscriptions, but their share of sponsoring revenue has decreased to 10 %. This will help us reach profitability.
On the growth front, our affiliation page, "Best apps to invest and manage your money," generated 3k€ in revenue in November and December. While this may seem like a timid start, we have seen an acceleration since January and hope to generate more significant revenues on this channel in Q1 2025.
In December, we tested a referral campaign that invited our users to invite their friends to discover and sign up for Snowball. This generated 280 new free sign-ups. However, Substack's referral campaign capabilities limited us, so we had to use an external tool (Viral Loops), which added some complexity to the operation. The upcoming new platform will allow us to run these types of referral campaigns more smoothly and efficiently in the future.
We launched our first podcast. Indeed, we turned the Daily Snow (daily news) into a daily podcast. So far, the audience seems to like it, even though it’s super raw. In two weeks, it’s already in the top 200 of all the podcasts on Apple Podcasts and number 30 in the “news” category. Some data:
Around 680 streams per episode ;
26,000 plays since we launched it 2 months ago ;
Audience size: 2,135
And as you can see, it grows steadily:
Snowball Max
We decided to launch a new version of Snowball Max in the upcoming month to make it more scalable and profitable. We will test a self-serve version, relying less on coaches’ time and input to provide our services. According to our survey results, the opportunity seems promising. The price will be close to 149€/year, and around 75% of the more than 2000 persons surveyed are willing to pay for such a service. Manon, Tx, Bianca, and I have been producing all the content. It’s taking longer than expected, but we’re getting there. 💪
Thanks to our network and a few benchmarks, we’ve identified most of the no-code tools we could use to launch a self-serve version. We will find out by testing, though. :)
Why no-code tools? To test our assumptions rapidly, to let the tech & design team finish the media migration, and to generate revenues as soon as possible. This new MVP will allow us to move faster later.
Media
The alpha test phase of our new media with a few dozen members went well. We confirmed that our migration plan and script work in most cases while validating the functionality of our new media site and newsletter editor. There were a few bug fixes here and there, but overall, it was a success!
Following the alpha, we enhanced our media with several features: the ability to cancel a paid subscription directly from the members’ account, unification of the member creation and authentication logic, an Intercom setup, and a smooth unsubscribe experience for marketing communications and newsletters.
Enzo has replaced Mylène for Snowball Igloo, our newsletter about real estate. Welcome, Enzo, and thank you so much to Mylène, who did a fantastic job for almost 2 years. She’s launching a new company called Emblematic (a personal branding agency). I wish her all the best.
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in the upcoming weeks.
General/admin/misc.
We’re considering increasing our budget on Meta ads to expand our user base.
We want to launch a magnet campaign on the actual cost of raising a child from 0 to the end of their studies.
We have been exploring the Influence channel. We have some initial tests with a handful of influencers in the works, and we will evaluate the performance to determine if it's worthwhile to leverage this channel further.
We’re considering further detailing our plan to break even. We want everyone on the team to know where to focus their efforts quarter-by-quarter so we can better track our progress and determine whether we need to pivot or resolve something.
We’d love to continue exploring bundles with your favorite apps and services. We’re currently discussing with Revolut, but nothing is planned.
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’re still assessing priorities on what to work on after the migration. We have many ideas but want to focus on the ones most impacting user experience and revenue. Some of the main ones are :
Snowball+ Lite version (6€ per month)
Integrating audio as part of our newsletters
Building an incredible referral program for both paid and free users
Improving our content distribution to decrease infobesity
The future of Snowball Max, a.k.a. evolving from Media to FinTech
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.Snowball Max
We plan to test an AI solution to answer members' questions based on the knowledge of our newsletters. It’s an exciting project, and Pierre-Marie has been leading the build of a prototype 🙂 Please reply to this email if you have any AI expertise or tips on what to look out for. We’re always happy to chat!
Media
Our next priority will be the last phase of the migration, the official departure from Substack. We have started warming up our emailing system to ensure top-notch deliverability and reputation. This should last around 1 month. We can’t wait to end the migration and let all members enjoy our new website and newsletters!
Discussion to potentially acquire a newsletter (around 50k subscribers).
Think seriously about a long-form podcast/video format.
💡 If you’re wondering why we’ve decided to move out of Substack, you can read more about our reasoning here.Problems
As I said earlier, we encountered an issue with our domain reputation. Thanks to the team’s efforts, we resolved it in one week. Thanks again, everyone! Here are a few more details:
Why? We didn’t have double opt-in enabled, and one of their trap emails ended up on our mailing list.
How did we notice? Gmail started flagging all of our emails as fraudulent.
How did we solve it? We asked Surbl to remove us from their list, improved our domain configuration (e.g., DKIM, DMARC, and SPF), and created subdomains specific to each use case to protect our newsletter reputation in the future. After the migration, we’ll use Sendgrid with a dedicated IP, allowing us to monitor our newsletter domain reputation more closely.
Launching our new platform came with a slightly tricky challenge: ensuring our editions display perfectly across all email providers on both desktop and mobile. In particular, Gmail, Outlook, and Mail love to override some styles, messing with buttons, images, or layout blocks. But no worries—our devs are amazing, and after some tweaking, everything looks just as it should! 💪✨
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 ❤️
Merci pour les updates! J'adorerais un partenariat plus long avec SemRush et/ou des outils no-code