❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - May 2024
❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - May 2024
Welcome to the 222 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!
Sorry for sending this edition a bit late, but this first half of June has been quite busy!
🙋♀️ 🙋♂️As usual, 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).
The Main News
Not much to say, we’re still in building mode.
The media migration out of Substack is still going well. Congrats to the entire team which is doing an amazing job.
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong without doing any outbound sales.
Subscription revenues are still flat / slightly decreasing, but we’ll launch the first acquisition/conversion campaigns soon.
KPIs
Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:
Financial KPIs
🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €22,838 (↘️)
🟠 Media: €20,335 (↘️)
🟠 Max (coaching): €2503 (↘️)
🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €283,466 (↘️)
🟠 ARR Snowball+ (media subscriptions): €253,430 (-€7k). Once again, we faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions in May.
🟠 ARR Snowball Max (financial coaching): €30,036.
🟢 Ad business: We booked €90,450 year to date (+€8300 in May):
🟠 Churn rate media: around 7% (+2%).
🟢 Churn rate max: around 0.2%.
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,326,000 (excluding 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%.
The rest on Qonto.
Media KPIs
🟢 59,025 // +1415 vs the 9th of May 2024 (+2,5%)
🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 46% (-2%).
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
Now 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 May, like in April, 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.
🚀 Snowball Max soft launch - update
We reached 225 users (+8% vs last month) within 5 months without any external communication outside a very small part of the community. [last month's data regarding Max were wrong].
🔗 If you want to learn more about it or share it with your friends, the landing page is right here.General/admin/misc.
We’re making progress on the editorial content for the magazine but it’s a lot heavier than we expected. We’re also not sure about launching a magazine in the middle of summer.
We finalized the stock option plan with our US / French lawyers. The idea is to issue stock options in the US (Snowball XYZ, Inc.) and convert them into French BSPCE.
I recorded a new La Martingale podcast with Matthieu Stefani.
Media
The “Editor” (previously called “Media Creation Engine”) is done, we’re now fine-tuning here and there based on our creators’ feedback.
On the tech side, we finished rewriting the HTML code generated by the editor to be able to properly display in email client. The support of “modern” HTML and CSS technology is quite poor and particularly disparate. We had to resort to using “old” technology to have proper support, and we also had to accept that some of the markers of our brand design wouldn’t be visible to email clients (e.g. shadows on blocks). We are preparing a dedicated article on this subject, so stay tuned…
We have made progress on the publication workflow for the creators (draft, ready to correct, ready to publish, etc.).
We have a clear plan (scope, target cost, slicing, prioritization) for our 2 next priorities: the distribution of the editions to members via email, and building the media app where leads and members will be able to read our content.
We validated our stack for user communications: SendGrid for newsletters & transactional emails, Customer.io for growth campaigns & automation.
We are currently in the process of implementing our CRM solution. Customer.io will enable us to set up automation campaigns to focus on growing the paid user base (Max & SB+), improve the conversion from free to paid, launch referral campaigns, and many other things. We will be cautious in using this potential to avoid overwhelming our community with marketing messages. However, we believe that this new CRM strategy will be an important tool in growing our revenues.
We have updated our referral reward program to make it more attractive. Now, the first referral earns a reward of 1 free month of Snowball+. If you refer 6 people, you'll receive the Snowball ebook/audiobook, and if you refer 10 people, you'll get 1 month of Snowball Max for free.
"Media for Member" MVP scope defined, we’re close to getting the end-to-end experience. “Media for Member” is the codename of our future website where you’ll be able to access our content online.
Pierre-Marie has been able to interview many users (continuous discovery).
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in June/July.
General/admin/misc.
Finalized our first marketing dashboard.
Continue to enhance our Discord/community.
Build our equity/salary plan.
Build our internal peer review system.
Build our diversity & inclusion strategy.
Snowball Max
Snowball Max is stable and is performing optimally.
We’ve planned to assess the soft launch and align on evolutions for Snowball Max. Mainly answering the question of how we can add more value to the user and how we can scale the product (official launch, coach ops optimization, and AI?).
On the tech side, we are currently focused on Snowball Media, so no new feature is planned for Snowball Max at the moment.
Media
Build a user emailing system to distribute editions to members.
Build our MVP of the media site.
Pick our user data stack.
Define the next priorities once the migration from Substack is done.
Build our CRM segments and marketing automation campaigns on Customer.io.
Organize cross-reference campaigns with newsletters we appreciate to grow our user base.
Optimize the visibility of our newsletters’ content on social media to maximize reach and boost acquisition.
Problems
Media
We are struggling to pick our user data stack (customer data platform connected to product analytics & user communications). There are a lot of different players, often overlapping, with obscure pricing. If you have experience in this domain, feel free to reach out. 🙂
We have to juggle with data coming from Substack and our data to feed the CRM. There is quite a work of import/synchronization and harmonization of the data.
A lot of churn because of “billing failed issues” + a bug from Substack not allowing users to easily update their method of payment (another good reason to move out of this platform to better control the user experience).
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? Hit reply.
Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful week-end. ☀️
Yoann ❤️