❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - March - April 2025
Welcome to the 123 new subscribers who joined us since the last edition in February. If you’re receiving this email for the first time, its primary goal is to update you about Snowball’s business. This is mainly for the 400+ investors who helped us raise 1.6 million dollars in February 2022, but we’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,
Lots of building, new experiments, and forward motion. This month, we’re diving deeper into our short-term plans, and sharing some behind-the-scenes ideas we’ve been cooking up.
Also, we’ll switch to French in the upcoming weeks since 90% of you either don’t care to switch or prefer to switch.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ Before we dive in, we’d love to learn more about the Behind the Curtain community. If you have 5 minutes, could you answer this survey? As a thank you, you'll get 15% off Snowball+ at the end (€68/year instead of €80). Thanks a lot!
The Main News
We’re entirely focused on two big builds:
Snowball Lite, our new paid media offer, is in development. Packaging, design, and user journeys are ready, and the tech team is already building.
In parallel, we’re scoping the MVP for our new coaching experience. More scalable, more valuable, more aligned with what you’ve asked for.
Meanwhile, I’m trying some stuff with Lovable.dev and other “vibe coding apps” to see what can be done and how we could use them in the future to increase the team's productivity.
Bianca has been deep in Stripe cleaning mode and will take the lead on managing Snowball Max’s sunset, which should free up some technical bandwidth.
We’ve also decided to add sponsors to this newsletter from time to time.
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NB: I'd like to remind you once again, as I did when I proposed to the Snowball community to invest in the company, that the risks are numerous and that you should only really invest what you are ready and willing to lose completely!
KPIs
Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:
Financial KPIs
🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €21,232 (↗️) ;
🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue from subscriptions): €254,784 (↗️) ;
🟢 Ad business: We booked €4,066 during March, €121,375 year to date. Here’s our media kit if you’re interested or know someone who might be interested ;
🟢 Net MRR Churn rate: 1,1 %. Expected to increase next month due to the sunset of Snowball Max ;
🟢 Net Subscriber Churn rate: 8 %. Lots of subscription cleaning lately, which increases churn ;
🟢 Cash on hands: €882,145 (including CII + sponsorship that hasn’t been paid yet).
We have €300,000 in short-term cash investments, yielding 3.6% to 3.8%.
Media KPIs
🟢 67,321 // +1353 since we migrated.
🟢 Average opening rate (Free newsletters + Snowball+): 51 %
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63 %.
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.The 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.
Alright, here’s what our team has been up to :
Progress
In this section, team members and I will show you the main things that have happened recently.
General/Marketing/Misc.
Maxime has left the company. A huge thanks to him for everything. 🙏 Don’t hesitate to contact him on LinkedIn if you’re looking for a growth marketer (freelancer), I highly recommend.
We’re almost ready to launch our dedicated newsletter for financial advisors, a segment with strong ties to Snowball but surprisingly little tailored content. We’ve already found collaborators who’ll help me write it and a potential first sponsor. The idea is to :
Increase and diversify our revenues ;
Start to build ties with a segment that might be able to distribute our financial products in the future.
We’ve paused Meta ads until we can redefine needs & scopes.
Léa built a custom GPT to generate micro copy in Snowball’s tone of voice more quickly (excluding newsletters). A handy tool to help us spin up new pages faster.
Pierre-Marie continues experimenting with AI tools like ListenUp and AskRally to streamline product discovery and prioritization.
I built an internal replacement for a SaaS we were paying €1,000/month for by using Vibecoding tools like Lovable.dev. It was a big win. It's always good to decrease costs and regain control.
We’re currently testing the tool and beta testing it with 100 users.
On the ops side, we’ve been doing heavy cleanup in Stripe. There are over 400 legacy Substack coupon codes, plus multiple “forgotten” subscriptions and duplicate accounts. It feels cleaner already.
Media
Substack is over. Check out our new site here. This was one of the most complex projects we’ve handled to date. After months of work, 1,500 beta testers, 600+ feedback entries, and more than a few grey hairs, it’s already paying off:
Open rate and clicks: higher than before ;
Fast releases and quick wins: the team casually shipped Google sign-in and Read Lists (not released yet) in one afternoon. It feels nice to be able to build our own feature. ❤️ ;
Profitability: we’re saving around 2,000 € each month in Substack fees ;
Higher member satisfaction: with an incredible NPS of 73!
We’re also improving emailing best practices:
Refining user segmentation to optimize delivery ;
Tracking and protecting our IP reputation (which is excellent) ;
An audit is ongoing to determine what we can do better.
We implemented a custom email open tracking. Sendgrid (our email provider) only counts an open event once the entire email loads. For our long-form newsletters, open events weren’t being counted. Now they are.
GDPR upgrades: users can now update their personal data, change emails, and delete their accounts. Cookie banners are also live.
On the analytics side, we’ve created a simple Amplitude funnel to track conversion. Not sure we’ll keep Amplitude long-term, but it’s enough for now.
FYI, Substack is still running but inactive. We use it to benefit from the platform’s referral system, and we import new subscribers every week.
Coaching
We’ve closed new signups for Snowball Max. The model (as it is) doesn’t scale.
Starting May 5, existing Max users will move to a €49/month sunset plan to make operations break even. No more, no less. Members can decide whether to keep their subscription at the new pricing or cancel it and get a refund.
We’re already working on what’s next: a new version of this service, our “Money Buddy,” that offers more value, with a better UX, in a way that’s both scalable and viable. MVP target: September. The idea is to build a product for the 99%, not the 1%—a product for all the people who don’t or invest very little.
In the meantime, an alpha version of the MVP (super meta 😅) is coming. I’ll do it manually with 20 to 100 users to validate the new model. Nearly 200 mini-tutorials are ready (thanks, Bianca, Manon, Kevin, Tx).
We’re still testing our AI prototype with members. Reach out if you want to give it a try. The idea is to help you quickly find key insights from past newsletters. Feedback is promising. We’re also working with a freelance AI specialist to refine the experience.
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in the upcoming weeks.
General/Marketing/misc.
We hosted our team offsite in Bordeaux! Day 1 focused on team collaboration, and day 2 was an ideation sprint for the Money Buddy MVP. It felt good to be in the same room (we’re fully remote otherwise).
We will launch many new “marketing tools”/lead magnets to increase acquisition (e.g., compound interest calculator, risk profile generator, Chrome extensions).
We want to redesign our affiliate system, including its format, integration, and distribution. For now, it still lives on the “Meilleures Apps” page.
Regarding that, we’re launching our SEO initiative tomorrow. We have a gigantic trove of content we’re not using.
Within 12 months, we aim to reach 100k monthly visitors on our website through SEO.
Stripe billing audit: Bianca identified potential revenue leaks due to native credit logic. Now that we’re diversifying our product offer, we're refining the billing process to avoid surprises.
I’m exploring the “assurance vie” space to see how to position ourselves if we want to launch such a product soon.
To remind you, our main objective is to reach profitability with our media to focus on the Fintech side of Snowball. In the long term, Snowball, the media should be a growth engine to propel Snowball, the FinTech. And if it can generate a lot of revenue as well, that'll be great.Media
As you read in our last edition, email reputation and deliverability are critical for our online media company. We will streamline maintenance by automatically removing bounces and blocks and reactivating and deleting inactive users.
We’re in discussions to acquire a newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers. Additionally, we see new opportunities to expand Snowball content to new audiences. More about that in the future.
And yes, a long-form podcast/video format is still on the table. Let us know if you’d love that.
Next priorities:
Reduce failed payments
Launch a proper referral program
Release Snowball Lite
💡 If you’re wondering why we’ve moved out of Substack, you can read more about our reasoning here.Coaching (Money Buddy)
Roll out subscription changes and updates for “closing” Snowball Max ;
Finalize the MVP scope for the money buddy ;
Launch the Alpha.
Problems
We still have some deliverability issues with Outlook, Live, Hotmail, and all the Microsoft email addresses.
Need you for?
✨ If you want to sponsor Snowball or know someone who’d like to, click here.
👋 wanna say hi. Hit reply (you can write in French if you prefer)
🤔 You don’t understand something or would like more details? Hit reply.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ 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!That’s it for this month.
March was a turning point for Snowball. We now own the entire stack, from design to delivery, and it’s already making a difference in performance, experience, and freedom.
More to come soon. As always, if you want to test something (SnowAI, Read Lists, etc.) or say hi →, reply to this email.
Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk soon,
Yoann ❤️