❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - March 2024
Welcome to the 179 new subscribers who’ve 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 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 you can 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.
🙋♀️ 🙋♂️ Oh, and if you’d like me to reply to very specific questions regarding Snowball, send me a message here and I’ll answer next month publicly (you can ask the question in French if you prefer):
Let’s go.
The Main News
The media migration out of Substack is going extremely well. Congrats to the entire team which is doing an amazing job. It’s not that easy to step back, but when I do, I’m truly impressed!
We interviewed quite a lot of people to hire our future Lead Growth, and we’re getting close to the end of the process. We should have a name soon. For those who applied, I’m sorry that everything took quite a long time.
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong without doing any outbound sales.
We discovered that Snowball is the #1 Substack publication in France, and #26 in the world in the finance category (and the only one in French). You can check it out here.
KPIs
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
🟢 56,551, +951 vs the 1st of March 2024 (+1,7%)
🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €268,000 (flat).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €66,250 year to date (+€32,850 since the 1st of March):
🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 49% (flat).
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
🟠 Churn rate: around 4.65% (+0.35%).
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,433,000.
€750,000 on 5 term accounts on Cashbee Pro yielding from 3.6% to 3.8%.
€683,000 on Qonto.
Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇
3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems)
As a reminder, 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.
Lyse, Virginie, and Alexandre (hello cfo) are in charge of Finance, and HR.
And, I (Yoann) is in charge of everything else.
In March we did a lot of building regarding our future media platform which should be launched around June.
Progress
In this section, team members and myself will show you the main things that have happened recently.
🚀 Snowball Max soft launch - update
We reached 258 (+38 vs last month) within 4 months without any external communication outside a small part of the community.
We did our first customer satisfaction survey with users who have been using the service for 3 months or more.
It’s not a perfect product-market fit yet, but we’re not that far:
60% would be a little bit disappointed if the service disappeared.
22% would be extremely disappointed in such a case.
We’ll continue to collect data regarding this service to improve it in the upcoming months.
🔗 If you want to learn more about it or share it with your friends, the landing page is right here.General/admin/marketing/media
We’re close to hiring our first Lead Growth. We had a lot of great applications!
We’re working with lawyers in France, and in the US to issue BSPCE tied to stock options issued by the US holding company (Snowball XYZ). I’ll probably share more details about that in a dedicated edition because it could be interesting for many French companies that have a holding company in the US.
The magazine project is going well. We should launch it in June. We already sold 3 ads (€500 per page since it’s just a test).
We’re gonna hire someone as a Chief of Staff (or Chief of Stuff?) full-time, but first as a freelancer. The role of this person would be to work on special projects that don’t usually fall under one specific person. She’ll help us launch new initiatives more quickly. This person will also help me with many strategic/long-term stuff.
Product
Pierre-Marie (PM) completely redesigned our way of doing product at Snowball:
The product delivery OS is set in place, and we got the first features delivered with it.
Testing some techniques & tools on the product discovery OS.
PM also worked a lot on the “Media Creation Engine”, the codename of our future newsletter/articles editor, and worked on his first features. He did a lot of user interviews to better understand creators’ and readers’ expectations, and competitors’ teardown.
The "Media Creation Engine" is moving on at a good pace, and feedback from Creators is positive
He designed, sent, and analyzed our first CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey for Snowball Max.
Design
Collab with the marvelous Nicolas Honoré, to redesign Snowball newsletters. But to enjoy this fresh new design you’re gonna have to be patient as it will be released only once we'll be free from Substack, with our home-made media platform. Here’s a sneak peek:
I can’t wait! Designing the Media Creation Engine
Currently partnering with PM to run user tests of our future editor with Snowball creators.
Tech
Good progress on the newsletter editor for creators. We developed an in-house editor to allow our team of creators to create their content directly in Snowball with a fully branded experience and with everything they need to focus on content creation. Here are some screenshots (maybe at one point we’ll be able to sell our newsletter editor / CMS haha). As a creator working daily on Substack, I can tell you that this will be a gamechanger for us:
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in March.
Product
Finish "Media Creation Engine"
Define the "Media for Member" target experience and the plan to get there (including Substack migration)
Tech
Continue to work on the new media platform/migration.
Implement a new AI feature developed by Florent (a feature that’ll help coaches to better follow long conversations with users to increase their productivity).
Design
Keep working on the Media Creation Engine, iterating after users tests and delivering the very last components.
We'll then design the Snowball Media experience on the members’ side. To do so we'll run the first design thinking workshops in April, and co-design the homepage and key funnels of the future Snowball Media.
General/admin/marketing/media
Hire and onboard our future Lead Growth / Chief of Staff.
Continue the public soft launch of Snowball Max.
Launch a new sponsorship offer with a new premium tier to increase revenues, add more value to readers, and add more value to sponsors.
Define a medium-term plan to:
improve Snowball Max’s offer.
Improve Snowball+’s offer.
Simplify our offers.
Add tutorials/online classes to our offers.
Add new media to our offers (video, audio, etc.)
We’ll host our first Snowball Meetup in Paris on the 9th of April. We should be around 100 (community, employees, creators, and coaches).
Keep working on the Crédit Impôt Recherche / BSPCE plan.
Problems
Tech: We had some struggles with the (open-source) editor library we decided to use to fully customize the experience and had to spend quite some time on it. But now, it’s running pretty well.
Product: Poor results on the continuous discovery initiative, we need to adapt the setup.
Need you for?
✨ 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?
Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful day.
Yoann ❤️
It's always super interesting to read you.