❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - November 2022

Welcome to the 805 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 just 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 👇

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To investors and friends,

Hi everyone. I hope you’re all doing great.

A lot of things happened in November allowing us to get a lot of insights into the future of Snowball.

Also, a few days ago, we asked our community if they’d be ready to invest in Snowball again. At the moment, the community is willing to invest more than 1.6 million euros! If you’re interested, click here.

Also, we’re looking to hire a full-time tech lead. The job offer is right here.

What happened in November?

The Main News

• We finalized the Money Coach test and crunched the data to gather a lot of insights in order to build the best financial advice offer. Thanks, Pauline for leading this project!

• By the way, I love working with Pauline!

• The ad business of the free version of Snowball is still going extremely well. More and more companies would love to book ads on our “network”, but we’re full until next March.

• ARR (annual recurring revenues) is still flat. Not bad, but not great.

• We found a great developer (freelancer) to build the V 0.5 of Snowball Media.

• The list of creators that’ll be part of the future bundle grew from 1 to 4. It means that we’ll have at least 5 newsletters when we launch the Snowball Bundle. We’ve got 20+ other newsletter proposals in our pipe.

• We’re gonna start to work with Pierre who was the Head of Product of Konbini for 3 years. First as a freelancer in December, then as a full-time hire if it’s a match.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

• ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €255,923 (flat). This does not include the sponsoring revenues. See below. 👇

• Ad business: Snowball is fully booked until the end of February 2023. We’re actually having more demand than we can offer. If you want to share the offer (or if you’re interested in sponsoring Snowball next year), it’s right here.

  • MRR: about €14/15K.

• Total projected revenues for the upcoming year (subscriptions + ads): €400,000+. Flat

• Subscribers: 38,178 (+ 8 % since the 1st of November 2022).

• Opening rate: 55 %. Flat

• Churn rate November: 5.3 % (+1.3%).

• Cash on hands: €1,552,652 (-€80k MoM mainly due to the euro/dollar exchange rate (the euro is falling against the dollar), and still missing about €25k of ads payments).

Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇

Progress

In this section, I’ll show you the main things that have happened in the past month/period.

• I had more than 400,000 USDC (stablecoins us dollars) sleeping on my Fairmint account since raising funds in March. Therefore, in November I decided to open a corporate account on Nexo for treasury management purposes. This cash is yielding around $1,520 per month. Not bad. That’s the equivalent of 253 paid subscribers! But because of the FTX catastrophe and the dominoes effect that followed, I’ve moved these $400,000 to a Ledger hardware wallet. Not your keys, not your coins.

• We ended the Money Coach offer test. Here are more details/data about this (I’ll write a dedicated newsletter in December):

  • 60%+ of users loved the service or really liked it.

  • 10% of users liked it a little or not at all.

  • The others did not use it, so they did not reply.

  • What they really liked was not only the great advice of our Money Coaches but also the fact that everything was on WhatsApp (which confirms our hypothesis that having as less friction as possible is really important)

    

  • About 50% of users took real actions to enhance their financial health.

  • Regarding the right price, we seem to hover around something like €10 per month.

  • The NPS (Net Promoter Score) was 23. As a reminder, an NPS can range from -100 to +100. 23 is not amazing, but it’s not poor either. Especially for an offer that was built in a few weeks. Now that we know what went great or wrong, we can aim for a 60+ NPS when we’ll launch the official Money Coach Offer. 💪.

• Since we’re hiring a tech lead (offer here if you’re curious or know somebody…), we’ve decided to launch a V0.5 of Snowball by using low/no code only. Indeed, we know that we’ll need to develop our own platform, so we want our future tech hire to choose its own tech stack. To develop this V0.5 we found a great agency led by a YC alumni that’ll use Webfow x Ghost. Our first intuition was right… Always trust the first intuition… Lesson learned.

• We kicked off the development of the Webflow x Ghost combo today.

• You probably already know that Snowball (the media) wants to become a bundle of newsletters run by creators. In this sense, we’ve designed the first version of the package we’d like to offer to our creators. You can check it out here. More than 20 creators applied! That’s truly amazing. We truly believe that we can reinvent how a media company is run with this kind of model that is fairer for creators. If you’re interested or know someone, apply or share!

• After many discussions with Pierre, we think that his experience as the Head of Product of Konbini could be a great addition to the Snowball team + more importantly, he’s a great human being! We just started to work together, and if it’s a match, he’ll board the ship.

• We’re currently interviewing many great tech profiles, but no red-hot lead yet. The job offer is right here (again) if you’re interested or know someone.

• We’ve finalized the creator contract with our lawyers.

• We signed the first contract with a creator to launch a real-estate investment newsletter. Can’t wait.

• Our lawyers told us that we're good to go to trademark the Snowball brand in France.

• We’ve got some amazing partnership potentials in the pipe (like really great ones!).

• We’ve started to work with Marion Pollet who’s an amazing illustrator.

• A few days ago, we asked our community if they’d be ready to invest in Snowball again. At the moment, the community is willing to invest more than 1.6 million euros! Interested? The form is right here.

Plans

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

• Package the future Money Coach offer. How much? For whom? Etc.

• Start to see if companies could buy the Money Coach offer for their employees as a new kind of perk.

• We launched another giant survey. About 2,000 people answered it. We now need to crunch the data.

• Continue to meet product and tech people we could hire very soon.

• Launch the V 0.5 of Snowball in mid-January.

• Continue to build the first Snowball micro-course on WhatsApp to assess the potential of such content (I’ve been delaying it for so long… sorry about that).

Problems

What are the current problems?

• The revenue coming from the subscription business is still flat. We need to boost our acquisition. I know. I’ve told you that for a while now…

• Hiring tech people is not easy. If you know someone or you think you’re the right person, let us know!

Need you for?

• 💶 If you want to sponsor the free version of Snowball next year or if you know someone who’d like to, click here.

• 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ You are a senior full-stack developer with an entrepreneurial mindset, and you’re interested in this project? Hit reply. If you know someone, spread the news. :) The job offer is right here.

• ✍️ You’re a creator and you already have a community or you’ve got talent? Check this out if you wanna join Snowball. We have great perks including stock options!

• 👋 Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)

Thanks for reading and do not hesitate to react in the comment section!

Have a wonderful evening, and enjoy the rest of your week.

Yoann ❤️