❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - Oct & Nov 2024
Welcome to the 399 new subscribers who joined us since the last edition in October. 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,
2024 is nearly over. Time flies so fast… and we’ve been busy. We are so busy, in fact, that we keep breaking our promises about sending monthly updates. We’re sorry. Let’s add this to our list of 2025 resolutions.
This edition covers October and November (2 months in one newsletter).
To make it up to you, I will soon send a special edition about our vision and plans at Snowball. In addition to these updates, we will publish more newsletters about our backstages.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ Before starting, 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
The Main News
We’re launching our Alpha test to finally migrate from Substack.
Our new media platform is finished. We’ve spent most of the last 2 weeks planning each migration step. The objective is to be fully operational within about two months to launch it publicly.
+67% this year for our sponsorship revenue. We’ve already closed €43,000 for next year. That’s already 25% of our available newsletter slots!
We are currently conducting many acquisition initiatives, including subscription bundles with some of your favorite tools/services, paid social ad tests, contests, and exclusive advantages from our recommended apps…
We’re working on a wholly revamped Snowball Max offer.
KPIs
Let’s see what’s happened since the last edition:
Financial KPIs
🟠 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): €20,899 (→)
🟢 Media: €18,771 (↗️)
🟢 Max: €2128 (↗️)
🟠 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): €250,788 (→)
🟢 ARR Snowball+ (media subscriptions): €225,252 (+€4k thanks to our bundles).
🟢 ARR Snowball Max (financial coaching): €25,536 (+€2k with no outbound sales).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €205,636 year to date (+€44,224 since Sep):
🟢 Net MRR Churn rate: 1,9%
🟢 Net Subscriber Churn rate: 3,7%.
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,001,594 (including CII + all the sponsorships that haven’t been paid yet).
We have €450,000 on deposit accounts at Cashbee Pro yielding 3.6% to 3.8%.
We expect to receive around €25,000 in interest.
Media KPIs
🟢 65,023 // +2751 since Sep (+4,4%).
🥳 We're pretty happy with this result since we proactively deleted 7719 inactive members in July. Without deleting them, we should have reached around 72,742 members. Why do we delete some members? To keep our mailing list clean and to improve our deliverability. To learn more about this, check out this LinkedIn post (in French).🟢 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 49-50 %
🟠 Opening rate (Snowball+): 59% (slight decrease).
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 October and November, we focused primarily on building and planning our migration to the new media platform and increasing acquisition.
Progress
In this section, team members and I will show you the main things that have happened recently.
General/admin/marketing/misc.
We launched a paid subscription bundle with Secret. For the price of our annual plan (Snowball+ 80€), users would get free access to +540 deals and discounts available on Secret’s platform (which generally costs $149/year). The first week was super successful (+150 signups → more than €10k of ARR).
Since it was a success, we extended it to all new paid members with an annual plan.
We started activating lead magnets with our existing tools. We started with this real estate investment calculator on LinkedIn. It generated +2000 followers and around 600 signups.
Our sponsoring inbound recently saw a jump in the volume of leads. We’re fully booked until the end of the year, and we’ve already closed 25% of our available slots for 2025. So we increased our prices. Not only do we expect our audience base to grow, but we also have excellent performance feedback from sponsors. It made sense to update our prices.
We launched a new resource page: "Best apps to invest and manage your money." You’ll find 33 platforms the Snowball team recommends to help our members navigate amongst all the existing players. Most of the products we’ve chosen are used by at least one of the team members. Besides the special rewards we negotiated for our Snowball users, we have integrated an affiliate program to earn a commission when our members invest with or use these platforms.
We continue to organize cross-audience partnerships at the rate of one per month, like the one with Anaxago in October, which generated around 600 free signups.
On the paid acquisition side, we have finally unlocked our Meta account thanks to the help of one of our BTC subscribers (thanks a lot!!)! We’re still working on tests to improve our customer acquisition costs.
AI at Snowball: Pierre Marie (Lead product) created a bot of himself with ChatGPT to become his assistant. I’ve been using Spiral to accelerate content creation. Clement and Emeline switched to Cursor, a tool that boosts productivity by generating code, facilitating collaboration, and automating code reviews.
We launched our first podcast. Indeed, we turned the Daily Snow (daily news) into a daily podcast. So far, the audience seems to like it even though it’s super raw (sorry, it’s my first podcast; I’m still learning). In two weeks, it’s already in the top 200 of all the podcasts on Apple Podcasts and number 30 in the “news” category (on the 5th of December):
Snowball Max
We’re upgrading our payment system to be consistent with our media products.
We have updated the navigation to match the one in place in the Media app
We have slightly improved the quality of life of the coach in the back office
We decided to launch a new version of Snowball Max in the upcoming month to make it more scalable and profitable. We will test a self-serve version, relying less on coaches’ time and input to provide our services. According to our survey results, the opportunity seems promising. The price will be close to 149€/year, and around 75% of the more than 2000 persons surveyed are willing to pay for such a service.
We’ve identified most of the no-code tools we could use to launch a self-serve version, thanks to our network and a few benchmarks. We will find out by testing, though. :)
Why no-code tools? To test our assumptions rapidly, to let the tech & design team finish the media migration, and to generate revenues as soon as possible. This new MVP will allow us to move faster later.
Media
We’ve released the last features to have a 100% functional experience on our new media platform.
We’ve worked on a single sign-in, reworking our member creation flow to make it clean, consistent & scalable on all our platforms
Our plan for the migration is taking shape. We’ve scoped all the aspects of the initiative to cover, and now we’re getting on with it.
We’re finalizing the last pieces of our billing system and migration. It’s been a tough one!
We reviewed our acquisition funnels, including new designs and several user tests. Here’s a sneak peek.
Plans
Here are the main things we’ll tackle in the upcoming weeks.
General/admin/misc.
We’d love to continue exploring bundles with your favorite apps and services. Something like this bundle by Lenny and Perplexity :
For us, it could be something like “subscribe to Snowball+ and get a free year of tool xyz”.
Leave a comment if there’s a specific company you’d love to see Snowball partner with! Next up is F…… 👀
You may have noticed we’ve been dedicating newsletter editions to interesting companies and industries such as this one or this one. This is part of our sponsoring offers. Since the performance of these editions has skyrocketed, we will test something new: we will push these deep dives on social media to increase the brand awareness of our sponsors and increase our acquisition. If it works, we could co-finance these social media pushes with our sponsors.
We’re assessing priorities on what to work on after the migration. We have many ideas, but we want to focus on the ones most impacting user experience and revenue. Some of the main ones are :
Snowball+ Lite version
Integrating audio as part of our newsletters
Building a cool referral program for both paid and free users
Improving our content distribution to decrease the infobesity
The future of Snowball Max a.k.a. evolving from Media to FinTech
Just 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 revenues, that'll be great.Snowball Max
We’ve kicked off content production for the self-serve version. A few team members will be producing around 200 mini-tutorials.
Once the content is produced, we’ll build the other features with no-code tools.
Media
Prepare the beta launch before the public launch (500 users). For reference, our alpha tests are capped at 20 users for now.
Refine the last pieces of the migration script to migrate accounts onto the new media platform
We’ve kicked off our battle plan for migrating. Each team member will participate in planning and organizing the migration.
💡 If you’re wondering why we’ve decided to move out of Substack, you can read more about our reasoning here.Problems
We haven’t identified any problems besides finding the time to manage all activities. We’re hustling our way to the end of the year. 💪
Need you for?
✨ If you want to sponsor Snowball or if you 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!Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful weekend. ☀️
Yoann ❤️
👋
Merci pour cette transparence, très inspirant