❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - June 2023

Welcome to the 215 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 by most people around the world. If you don’t want to receive it anymore, you can unsubscribe at this email's end 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. How’s your summer?

On our side, we’re doing great, and the development of our first homemade product is going extremely well.

As a reminder, this product is named Snowball Max, and it’ll include not only the media offer (Snowball+) but also a financial advice service. More about that here.

The Main News

• 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? 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

• 🟢 48769 subscribers. +848 vs last month (+1,8 %)

• 🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €266,382 (flat).

• 🟢 Ad business: We booked €10,600 of new sponsors this month:

  • Projected revenues: Backlog for the rest of the year + what’s been already paid = €84,028 (+ €10,600). 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+): 51,5 %. Decreased by about 2.5 %. It usually decreases a little bit during summer.

• 🔴 Opening rate (Snowball+): 62 % (-5 %). Same reasoning. We’ll see in September if it increases again.

• 🟢 Churn rate: around 4.93% (-1.57 %).

• 🟠 Cash on hands: €1,344,000 (-€89.3k MoM).

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

Main Progress

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

• General/admin/marketing

  • Started to talk with majelan about a potential weekly podcast that could start as soon as next September for the majelan’s community, but also for Snowball+ and Max subscribers.

  • Defined what the Content Lead job could look like.

  • Designed a survey that’ll be sent to all our users next month to improve our content production and distribution.

  • Started to talk with Investir Day for a deeper partnership. We might organize a meetup with the community there.

  • Discussion with Les Echos, Finary, Magma, and Waltio to offer exclusive deals to future Snowball Max users.

  • We had our first meetup in Paris with the team of creators + employees. Two of them even came from abroad (Nicolas who’s writing Snowball Makers and Pauline who’s writing Snowball Thérapie)! 😍 Thank you, everybody, for coming, it was amazing to meet you all. Next time, we’ll do something with the community!

    

• Product

  • Implemented Sprint planning and team-sharing achievements.

  • Benchmark and selection of main providers for Snowball Max service (tracking, KYC provider, e-signature).

  • Usability Testing interview with our main financial coach and iterating on coach experience.

  • Support on building end users' experience.

• Design

  • From team ideation workshop to low fidelity prototype: design of our future Snowball Back Office: an app, connected to WhatsApp API, that will allow our coaches to advise our Snowball Max subscribers to manage their personal finances like a pro!

  • Improvements of the future Snowball Max subscription flow experience, copywriting, and interactions

  • Still building Fractal, Snowball design system with Clément. A library of all design and user interface assets and components that will allow us to build and maintain delightful interfaces for our future product.

  

• Tech

  • Front

    • Exploratory tests of authentications solutions and started implementation of authentication with Clerk on the frontend side

    • Implementation of the "basics" components in Fractal, Snowball's design system. You can check them out and play with them right here if you wish. And here’s the project on GitHub.

  • Back

    • Setup of our database and tests of the new schema

    • Ongoing implementation of the signup and onboarding endpoints, for the users and the money coaches, with the integration of Clerk (on the backend side) with up-to-date data replication in our database.

• Media

  • Designed a survey that’ll be sent to all our users next month to improve our content production and distribution.

Plans

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

• Marketing

  • Launch our first acquisition campaign.

  • Launch the referral program.

  • Send the media survey to all our users.

• Product

  • Next month's focus will be on starting tech delivery, and for this reason, Valentine is going to focus on solving all the unclear points of the users' experiences as well as creating operational guidelines when needed.

• Tech

  • Front

    • Finish implementation of remaining Fractal components.

    • Start the development of the onboarding experience of the Snowball Max application (using Fractal components developed until now).

    • Plug the onboarding screens into the endpoint developed by Emeline.

  • Back

    • focus will be on finishing the onboarding, by adding the implementation of Yousign and Stripe. When the onboarding will be done, I’ll start working on the messaging process, using the Meta WhatsApp API.

• Design

  • High-fidelity prototypes of Snowball Max experience for subscribers and coaches.

Problems

What are the current problems?

No problem. 👌

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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 don’t understand something or would like more details?

Thanks for reading! 🫶

Talk to you next month!

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

Yoann ❤️