❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - May 2023

Jun 15, 2023

Welcome to the 254 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. 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 👇

To investors and friends,

Hi everybody. I hope that you’re doing great and that you’re ready for the beginning of the summer. 😎

This month, I’d like to say: Welcome Emeline!

The Main News

Indeed, I’m super happy to tell you that Emeline joined the team as a Senior Backend Engineer! Before joining Snowball, Emeline was working at Majelan as a Tech Lead. I’m super excited to have such a talented person on the team! As you can see, men are now in the minority! Very happy to have been able to assemble such a diverse team. Now, we’ll have to make sure to keep, and extend this diversity as long as possible. This is how the core team looks like at the moment:

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

🟢 47921 subscribers +573 vs last month (+1,2 %)
🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €266,121 (+0.3 %). Revenues are stagnating a little bit.
🟢 Ad business: We booked new sponsors this month
- Projected revenues: Backlog for the rest of the year + what’s been already paid = €73,428 (+ €10,178). 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+): 54 %. Increased by about 4 %.
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 67 % (+ 7 %).
🟠 Churn rate April: around 6.5 % (+1.5 %).
🟠 Cash on hands: €1,433,300 (-€32.5k MoM).
- Burn rate: I’ll add this metric next month.
- Runway: I’ll add this metric next month.

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
- Snowball has been audited for its activity of CIF (Conseiller en Investissement Financier) and everything went perfectly well.
- The first payments to creators have been sent. Finding an easy way to redistribute parts of the revenues of Snowball to them was not that easy. Congrats to Alexandre and Lyse.
- Pablo, who is also a Snowball investor, did an amazing growth/acquisition audit of Snowball. He also created a great plan regarding what we could do to boost our acquisition. Don’t hesitate to contact him if you ever need a growth consultant.
Product
- Valentine did an amazing job at working on the onboarding of the future Snowball Max offer. The fact that we’re regulated means that we have to ask mandatory questions during the onboarding before being allowed to give financial advice. Here’s a sneak peek at this very simple onboarding haha:
- Valentine finalized the business plan of Snowball Max. to make sure we can create a profitable product.
- She designed a new way to work together and implemented the process on Notion.
- Designed our short-term roadmap.
Design
- Léa designed our service blueprint in order to have a macro yet detailed view of how Snowball Max (Financial Advice) UX will work.
- Léa did a lot of UI tests to make sure we’ll create a coherent experience. Here’s a sneak peek (or check it out on Léa’s Dribble) 😍😍😍😍:
- Started to create our design system (colors, fonts, etc.) named Fractal. ❄️
Tech
- Clément designed a great POC (Proof of Concept): account creation, sending/receiving messages to/from WhatsApp.
- Clément laid out a lot of tech foundations.
- Compared/documented many tools to communicate with our future users on WhatsApp. We’ll probably use the official Meta API.
- Compared/documented different tools regarding user authentication.
- Emeline has started to work on the WhatsApp client.
Media
- I did an audit in order to see how we can create a better reader experience in the short term (shorten some newsletters, change the frequency, add new mediums like audio, etc.).
- Alexandre and Lyse designed a financial process to redistribute a part of Snowball revenues to creators.

Plans

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

Working on the S2 marketing/acquisition plan.
Finish the design system.
Design the screens that will be implemented.
Continue to lay down out the tech foundations (back and front) + make some decisions regarding the tools we’ll use.
Build the product.
Redefine our OKRs.
User tests.

Problems

What are the current problems?

No problem. 👌

Need you for?

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Behind the Curtain