❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - October 2022
❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - October 2022
Welcome to the 471 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 👇
To investors and friends,
Hi everyone. I hope you’re all doing great.
On my side, I’m super happy to be able to test a new offer I’ve been wanting to test for more than a year: financial advice on-demand on WhatsApp. A giant thanks to Pauline for building this from the ground up! More about that in the progress section.
What happened in October?
The Main News
As already said, Pauline and I launched the beta test of Money Coach: financial advice on-demand on WhatsApp. We’re super happy! Our team of 5 certified financial advisors is amazing.
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 February.
ARR (annual recurring revenues) is still flat.
The development of the new media platform we’re working on with Mozza is doing extremely well and should be done by next week (only mockups). I’ll share a sneak peek in this edition.
We’ve found a great creator that’ll build a new newsletter within the Snowball ecosystem.
Still looking/discussing with tech and product people.
KPIs
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €254,238 (flat). This does not include the sponsoring revenues. See below. 👇
Ad business: Snowball is fully booked until the end of January 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+.
Subscribers: 35,387 (+ 4,4 % since the 6th of October 2022).
Opening rate: 55 %.
Churn rate: 4 %.
Cash on hands: €1,633,416 (- €10K MoM but missing about €30k 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 (stablecoin us dollars) sleeping on my Fairmint account since raising funds in March. Therefore, I’ve 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!
We finally launched the Money Coach offer. Here are more details/data about this:
More than 2,800 people visited the website in a week (I only talked about it in one newsletter, one LinkedIn post, and one or two Daily Snow on WhatsApp) → good sign of interest.
1,069 persons joined the waitlist. A conversion rate of 38 % from the website to the waiting list. Not bad for a Notion website 😅.
We had a “not mandatory” field in our form so users could say why they wanted to subscribe to the Money Coach offer, and a mind-blowing 90 % filled it out! With quite long explanations. Our community is priceless ❤️.
We sent an e-mail to 300 people from the waiting list so they can subscribe and pay for the service.
87 people subscribed and paid. It means we had a conversion rate of 29 % from the waiting list to becoming a paid user.
We did a pricing test by sending different prices to different cohorts. 43 % paid between €20 and €25 per month, and 57 % in between €5, and €15. €10 was the most subscribed offer.
36 % of paid subscribers are women! Better than the split of the newsletter mailing list which is closer to 85 % men, and 15 % women.
I’ll probably write a dedicated BTC (Behind the Curtain) edition about launching this experiment for the most curious out there.
Learning so far: this seems to be a great addition to the current offer.
People learn with Snowball, the newsletter, but sometimes they need a bigger nudge or someone trusted and with expertise to confirm, and or challenge their decisions. At this point, we believe that Money Coach could be bundled with the newsletter Snowball at a higher price point (free version, Premium version with just the paid newsletter, and gold version with the paid newsletter + the money coach).
Mozza is finalizing the last mockups of the upcoming website. Here’s a tiny preview (🚨warning: it’s not final. For instance, illustrations will be different):
The idea is, first of all, to better package the offer, and to make it more understandable by prospective users.
Second of all, the objective is to package the content in order to help people navigate this giant sea of knowledge (one of the biggest pain points we found during the user research phase).
We want to keep the spirit of Snowball by including some hand-drawn illustrations like I’ve been doing since almost day one.
This will be mixed with colors, and designs you usually don’t see in the finance/fintech ecosystem, which is, to be honest, boring…
We’re still talking with talented product, and tech people, but some discussions take longer than expected.
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.
Regarding the newsletters’ bundle, we’ve found a great creator we’d like to launch a test with. The new newsletter that’ll be part of the Snowball bundle will focus on real estate investing.
Plans
Here, I’ll tell you what are the big projects we’ll be tackling in the upcoming weeks.
Continue to build the first Snowball micro-course on WhatsApp to assess the potential of such content.
Draft the “creator contract” with our lawyer.
Meeting with a podcast creator to potentially launch a Snowball podcast.
We’ll kickstart the initiative that'll consist in producing content outside the newsletter to boost our acquisition.
Launch the development of the new website. Certainly a no/low code solution: Webflow x Outesta x Mailer Lite. Something like that.
finish the Money Coach test (end of November) and gather insights before deciding how to include it in the current offer.
Continue to meet product and tech people we could hire very soon.
Problems
What are the current problems?
The revenue coming from the subscription business is still flat. We need to boost our acquisition.
One of our sponsoring campaigns worth €15k is in jeopardy because of bad communication with the sponsor, the intermediary, and Snowball.
Learning: work directly with brands instead. Most of the time, intermediaries are just a waste of time.
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 PM or 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. :)
✍️ 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 ❤️