❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - January 2023
Welcome to the 619 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 👇
To investors and friends,
Hi everybody. I hope you’re all doing great.
So what happened in January?
The Main News
We have amazing people in the hiring pipeline! I’m dying to tell you about them, but I’ll have to wait a little bit. We’re on the verge to have a very strong team.
The ad business of the free version of Snowball is still going extremely well. New and previous sponsors are knocking at our doors without us doing any outreach.
ARR (annual recurring revenues) is flat after a slight decrease in December.
49 persons have applied to be part of the bundle. So far 12 have been accepted, but we still have to evaluate many others!
Unfortunately, we had to stop the process with one of our candidates. We were too different regarding our working methods.
KPIs
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €247,230 (flat vs December). 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 next year), it’s right here.
MRR: about €14/15K. Flat. These revenues will increase when we’ll launch the bundle of newsletters.
Total projected revenues for the upcoming year (subscriptions + ads): €400,000+. Flat
Subscribers: 45,629 (+ 11,6 % since the 9th of January 2023).
Opening rate: 55 %. Flat.
Churn rate December: around 7.7 %. Lower than in December, but still a bit high.
Cash on hands: €1,533,690 (-€19k 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 almost done thanks to our lawyers.
The development of the media platform V1.5 (Webflow x Ghost) is almost done. We just need to finalize the landing page to highlight the new offer regarding the bundle of newsletters. Kinda tricky.
12 newsletters have been selected to be part of the launch of the bundle. We have some amazing topics:
Watches, LEGO, Money & Psychology, Stocks, Wine, Budgeting, Love & Money, etc.
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!
We’re in the final stages of hiring some great profiles (product and tech).
We’ve continued to discuss with some companies to see if we could sell the Money Coach offer to them. Early discussions show us that it might not be easy. The main issues are related to:
Fear to choose a service that might make their employees lose money.
Fear of non-adoption/low engagement of the perk by employees (paying a perk for nothing).
We’ve found an agency that’ll help you to launch our TikTok/Reels/Shorts presence. Finally!
Thanks to Quentin, a Gsheet genius, we were able to reach more than 600k people on Linkedin thanks to this post about a budget tracker. We will do more of these kinds of communication to acquire new readers.
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.
One of the financial advisors we worked for the Money Coach MVP/test is ready to join Snowball.
We will continue to explore the B2B2C potential of Money Coach.
Launch the V 1.5 of Snowball at the end of the month or more likely next month.
Launch the bundle at the same time (with a new business model).
Launch new growth initiatives: short videos, Gsheets.
The Snowball media is going to become way more complicated. More than 10 newsletters to manage. A new business model. More content to fact-check. Make sure that everything is consistent. Much more ad slots we could sell to advertisers. Therefore we will need to hire people to take care of this. I was able to do it on my own. Not anymore.
Problems
What are the current problems?
January was a bit of a busy, yet not very productive/efficient month. We had some issues regarding product marketing related to the upcoming offer.
On the product/platform side, we lost a bit of time. Not a huge deal, but something to be aware of.
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!
Have a wonderful evening, and enjoy the rest of your week.
Yoann ❤️