❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - June & July 2024
🙋♀️🙋♂️ Before starting, we’d like to learn more about the Behind the Curtain community. If you have 5 minutes, could you answer this survey? As a gift, you’ll get 15% off Snowball+ at the end (€68/year instead of €80). Thank you so much in advance.Welcome to the 424 new subscribers who 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 Snowball’s business. 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 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,
I hope you’re having a good summer sipping mojitos and watching the Olympic games.
This edition covers June and July.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ 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’re still in building mode, and the marketing machine has started.
The media migration out of Substack is still going well. Big up to the team. It’s a big project, and we can’t wait to launch it.
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong without making any outbound sales.
We launched the marketing machine with great first results → thousands of new free subscribers.
Subscription revenues are still flat / slightly decreasing.
KPIs
Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:
Financial KPIs
🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €22,838 (→)
🟠 Media: €20,965 (→)
🟠 Max (coaching): €1873 (↘️)
🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €274,056 (↘️)
🟠 ARR Snowball+ (media subscriptions): €251,576 (-€2k). Once again, we faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions in June & July.
🟠 ARR Snowball Max (financial coaching): €22,480.
🟢 Ad business: We booked €105,050 year to date (+€14,600 in June & July):
🟢 Churn rate media: around 4% (-3%).
🟠 Churn rate max: around 4%.
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,199,000 (including CII + all the sponsorships that haven’t been paid yet).
€750,000 on 5 term accounts on Cashbee Pro yielding from 3.6% to 3.8%. We should get the money out of 3 accounts and get around €11,500 of interest (not the 1 billion Google is receiving on its cash balance yet, but still 😅).
Media KPIs
🟢 59,658 // +633 vs early June 2024 (+1%).
💡 This does not reflect the reality because we deleted 7719 inactive members. Without deleting them, we should have reached around 67,300 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+): 47.61 % (+1.6%) → why? Because we cleaned our email database.
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
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.
In June and July, we did a lot of building regarding our future media platform.
Progress
In this section, team members and I will show you the main things that have happened recently.
General/admin/marketing/misc.
On the Growth side, we have launched our first CRM mailing campaigns, which have resulted in our first conversions. These campaigns included reactivating Snowball Max leads who haven't completed their subscriptions and re-engaging free Snowball users who were previously paid users. Additionally, we have initiated a welcome and nurture automation campaign to provide more information about Snowball's features and products, aiming to deliver greater value to our audience.
Since June, we have been running a successful cross-audience partnership campaign, sharing the newsletters we love with Snowball users and vice versa on partner media. So far, we have generated more than 7000 new free sign-ups (+12% of the user base). The campaign is planned to continue until mid-August. Congrats Maxime. 🙌
On LinkedIn, we have implemented a new calendar for regular posts and launched our LinkedIn newsletters (you can subscribe here), which will be published three times a month. Our goal is to enhance visibility and increase acquisition through this channel.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Regarding social proof, we have launched our Snowball Trustpilot page and initiated a review request campaign. So far, we have generated 69 reviews with a score of 4.8 stars (why not 5? Because Trustpilot gives you a small handicap when you start: “Bayesian average. We use a Bayesian average in the calculation to make sure that a business with fewer reviews starts off with a balanced TrustScore. This means that we automatically include the value of 7 reviews worth 3.5 stars each in all TrustScore calculations. As a business collects more reviews, this becomes a smaller factor in the calculation.” Feel free to add your review if you want!
We thought we had finalized the stock option plan with our US / French lawyers last month, but we had to do more work. It should be done within a few days, though. The idea is to issue stock options in the US (Snowball XYZ, Inc.) and convert them into French BSPCE (simplified version).
We built 90% of our equity and salary plan (I’ll send a dedicated newsletter regarding this).
Built our internal peer review system (same; we’ll share an article with you soon).
Built our diversity & inclusion strategy.
Snowball Max
We discovered an issue when Stripe’s payments were updated, resulting in some users’ subscriptions not being updated in our database. This didn’t cause any issues for our users, but we had some discrepancies in our CRM and dashboard data. This has been fixed (👏 Emeline), and we have added some monitors to make aware of this kind of issue earlier
We also made a big deployment, resulting in many dependency updates for Snowball Max.
We conducted a deep analysis of Max’s current state of play, from which we formalized assumptions regarding which target audience Snowball Max may serve the best and what value proposition to bring them.
We launched a CRM campaign targeting all our members at the beginning of July, inviting them to discover Snowball Max. After three weeks, we decided to put the campaign on hold as summer might not be the right time for such an operation.
Media
Good progress has been made on the guests’ (logged out) experience:
Home page is done (you’ll love it, I’m sure)
Kudos to our amazing Discord community, who contributed to the homepage design by voting for the design version they preferred and sharing feedback and insights with Léa Mendes (especially regarding accessibility and inclusion):
All editions list are done
Almost all landing and legal pages are done
We started to design the experience for members, focusing on allowing them to manage their newsletter subscriptions better.
Also, good progress has been made in editions’ distribution: Sendgrid usage has been implemented and is being tested.
Reworked the navigation for connected users.
💌 Clément spent quite some time tinkering with HTML emails lately. If you’re unfamiliar with sending HTML emails, you should read this great article by Clément (even if you’re not a developer, it’s super interesting). Here’s the beginning:
Sending HTML emails is not as easy as one can think. Email clients are stuck in the 90’s when it comes to handling HTML and CSS technologies.
A quick example
At Snowball, we are currently building the list of newsletter editions in the media web app:
We want to display each edition as a card
We want to display 3 cards per line and that it automatically wraps to the next line
I want all cards on a line to be the same height
Something like that:
Pretty easy, isn’t it?
You wipe out your basic Tailwind CSS config, you write the following code:
<div class="flex gap-2 p-2 justify-center flex-wrap max-w-[1200px] mx-auto items-stretch">
<div class="flex flex-col gap-1 max-w-[300px] border-1 p-2">
<img
src="https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/300"
class="max-w-full h-auto max-h-[200px] fit-cover"
alt=""
/>
<h1>This is the title</h1>
<p class="flex-1 flex items-end">This is the subtitle</p>
<div class="flex justify-between">
<span>Yoann Lopez</span>
<span>June, 15th 2024</span>
</div>
</div>
<!-- Rince and repeat for all the editions... -->
</div>And you send that with the Tailwind-generated stylesheet to your Gmail inbox:
Well… it doesn’t seem to work properly (this is an understatement).
To approach the expected result while being compatible with most email clients, you must write the following markup…
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in August.
General/admin/misc.
We plan to launch an acquisition campaign on Twitter and Reddit in the coming weeks to assess our ability to acquire qualitative new users at a reasonable cost via this paid channel.
To continue growing our user base, we will launch a freelance/entrepreneur persona partnership campaign with brands in this segment.
Snowball Max
The new navigation introduced in Snowball Media (with the sidebar and the footer) will also be coming to Snowball Max in the coming weeks
Running user research interviews with people fitting with Max leads core audience personas to validate our assumptions and better frame Max's value proposition.
We will investigate non-tech initiatives that can increase the service’s attractiveness, scalability, and member retention (indeed, the engineering/design/product team will remain focused on the media until launch).
Media
We will launch the Snowmelt operation. The idea is to decrease the content sent to our Snowball+ users without decreasing the added value. Here’s the action plan:
💡 If you'd like to learn more about this, you can check this Notion page.We plan to launch a B2B offer. More about that later.
We plan to revamp Snowball+’s offer (a little bit) in September to increase our conversion rate.
We will start working on:
Snowball subscription/upsell experience.
The connected user experience (subscription management page, editions list, etc.)
The editions and newsletters statistics.
Problems
Max
We still don’t have much time to work on Snowball Max as we are super focused on the media migration.
Media
Revenues are still flat, but we believe current and future initiatives will restart the growth engine.
We tried to improve the overall signup/sign-in experience in Snowball Media (compared to Snowball Max) but haven’t been able to go around some blockers with our authentication provider. So, when the migration is over, we will work on this subject to simplify the workflow for media users.
Need you for?
✨ If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball or if you know someone who’d like to, click here.
👋 wanna say hi. Hit reply (you can even write in French if you want). :)
🤔 You don’t understand something or would like more details? Hit reply.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ 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!Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful weekend. ☀️
Yoann ❤️