❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - July/August 2023

Sep 08, 2023

Welcome to the 67 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.

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 click here. And if you want to subscribe to BTC (Behind the Curtain), you can do it there 👇

To investors and friends,

Hi everybody. How was your summer?

On our side, it was quite busy!

By the way, sorry for not sending you an update in August, but I did not want to disturb you while you were drinking margaritas by the sea…

The Main News

We’re getting closer and closer to launching our new offer Snowball Max. At first, it’ll be a private beta only, then we’ll open it to a larger audience in January 2024. Congrats to Valentine, Léa, Emeline, and Clément for their work.
We had a nice bump in revenues during the summer. That’s good news since these months are usually more quiet.
We surveyed Snowball’s community regarding the current offer (media), and we got 2500 answers! I’ll share some quick insights with you today, but I’ll probably write another edition dedicated to this.
We launched the very first paid campaign (just a one-week test on X).
We’re producing a lot of content, and it’s becoming a mess. I can’t manage everything on my own anymore. We need someone to supervise, optimize, and improve our content production, distribution, and quality. That’s why we’re gonna start looking for a Content Lead (freelancer or full-time employee). Here’s the job desc if you’re interested or if you know someone. We’d like to work with a creative mind, passionate about content, and its distribution but also about the personal finance universe. Full remote. Interested? 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️
P.S: Sorry if you contacted me and I haven’t replied yet, but I will soon.

Check the Lead Content job desc

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

🟢 50,224 subscribers. +1455 vs the 19th of July (+3%)
🟢 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €274,057 (+€7675).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €5,155 of new sponsors this month:
- Projected revenues: Backlog for the rest of the year + what’s been already paid = €89,183 (+€5,155). Here’s the media kit if you’re interested in advertising your product in Snowball or know someone who could be interested.
🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 50,2%. Decreased by about 1%. It usually decreases a little bit during summer.
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63 % (+1 %).
🟢 Churn rate: around 4.93% (-1.57 %).
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,312,533 (-€32k since mid July).

Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇

3Ps

As a reminder, Valentine is in charge of the product parts.

Léa is in charge of the design sections.

Emeline is in charge of the tech (back) parts.

Clément is in charge of the tech (front) sections.

And, I (Yoann) write the marketing/admin/media parts.

Main Progress

In this section, I’ll show you the main things that have happened in the past month/period.

General/admin/marketing/media
- We did a first experiment on X with paid ads. For €500 we acquired:
  - 400 new subscribers on X so €1.25 per follower
  - 360 new free subscribers on Snowball so €1.38 per new subscriber
  These results are great for a first try. In the newsletter industry, acquiring free subscribers for less than 2 € per subscriber is considered a great result. We can clearly see the impact of the campaign here:
- We canceled the project of a podcast with majelan since it was a very time-consuming project.
- We started a “partnership” with BFM. I’ll appear regularly on the show “Tout pour investir”. It’s a multi-channel show broadcasted on TV, radio, YouTube, and even as a podcast.
- Snowball was featured on page 7 of Le Parisien (newspaper) + on their website.
- We launched the referral program (new feature on Substack). It brought 86 new subscribers. Not great, but not bad either.
- We sent quite a big survey to assess the state of Snowball on the media side and got close to 2,500 answers! I did not expect to receive so many responses. This will help us improve not only the content but also the reading experience of our community. I’ll probably write a dedicated edition about it but here are some interesting insights:
People act thanks to Snowball:
People are a bit lost
Even though it’s not perfect, Snowballers like Snowball+
As expected, people feel like they’re receiving too many emails. But to be honest, I thought the percentage of “I feel like I’m receiving too many emails” would be much bigger:
The Snowball Daily on WhatsApp is the highest-rated newsletter of the bundle. I believe we should push it even more to increase our conversion rate.
We also received hundreds of messages full of love like that 🤯 😍 (thank you)
Product
- Defined tracking plan.
- Iterated on main features’ UX & UI and scoped out what's not necessary.
- Supported team to keep on track.
- Started to analyze data from our last survey to prepare the discovery phase on the media side.
Design
- After designing the low-fidelity Finance Coach back office, the high-fidelity design is done!
- We also design the high-fidelity versions of the future Snowball Max client space! For info, these designs provide a preview of upcoming features and experiences, but the first released version will be very minimalist at first.
- Contribution to Snowball Max quality assurance tests, can't wait to see the community using it!
- Fractal is now a fully open-source and usable design system! We are so proud, and we tell you the epic story of its birth in this medium article.
Tech
- Front
  - Finished main Fractal components.
  - Started implementing Snowball Max with Fractal. Currently working on the onboarding to give the best experience for the users.
- Back
  - Emeline is off this week, so no update today. Sorry :)

Plans

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

Marketing
- Paid acquisition: Launch a second test on X.
- Paid acquisition: Try to increase the budget of the first test campaign on X.
- Paid acquisition: Launch a test on Meta.
- Relaunch the LinkedIn machine. 😅 I haven’t published anything
- Continue to prepare the soft launch (private beta) of Snowball Max.
Media
- Try to see if we can improve some stuff in the short term thanks to the insights we receive.
Product
- For September, helping with QA, defining Q4 priorities, and reviewing the roadmap as well as preparing operational materials for coaches.
- Snowball Max's first release will be very a minimalist version of Snowball's financial advice service; we aim to offer quickly additional features with a continuous delivery approach based on a strong skeleton.

Tech
- Front
  - Finish the onboarding.
  - Start working on the conversation interface for the money coach.
- Back
  - Emeline is off this week, so no update today. Sorry :)
Design
- Design iteration and specifications for each future release version of the Snowball app (client space + coaches back office).
- Contribution to product quality tests until the Snowball Max launch.
- UX mapping of the future entire Snowball experience, including the media, to better understand and improve navigation and access to Snowball services.

Problems

What are the current problems?

Tech
- We are running short on time and still have a lot to do before the launch of Snowball Max in a few weeks, this will be tight. 🙂

Need you for?

✍️ You’re interested in our future Lead Content opening or do you know someone who could be interested? Here’s the job desc you can read and share.
✨ 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?

Behind the Curtain