❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - September 2022

Welcome to the 386 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. How are you doing?

On my side, everything is going great! Being on my own for more than 2 years was great, but starting to work again with a team feels amazing!

What happened in September?

The Main News

• Pauline and I (but mainly Pauline to be honest) built from scratch the MVP (minimum viable product) of the first (I think) financial advice service on WhatsApp. More about that in the progress section.

• The ad business of the free version of Snowball is still going extremely well.

• ARR is still flat. Thankfully, the ad business counterbalances this slow growth.

• The development of the new media platform we’re working on with Mozza is doing extremely well.

• Met an amazing person who could be a great product leader.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

• ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €254,138 (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: €12K.

• Number of subscribers: 33,890 subscribers (+ 2,7 % since the 12th of September 2022).

• Opening rate: 55 %.

• Churn rate: 4 %.

• Cash on hands: €1,644M vs. €1,633M last month (+ €10K MoM).

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.

• The Daily Snow is now written by two amazing students who used to be Snowball subscribers: Titouan & Manon. This helps me to save almost 2 hours per day.

• As I said earlier, Pauline did an amazing job building the MVP of what will probably be the first service of financial advice through WhatsApp in the world. Some details:

  • How?

    • We assembled a team of 5 amazing professional financial advisors (FA) who will answer users’ questions directly on WhatsApp.

    • Everything will be compliant with the AMF (Autorité des Marchés Financiers).

    • The FA team will reply to questions on WhatsApp within 2 hours.

  • Why?

    • To make financial advisors more accessible to the younger generations.

    • To turn this new service into a new source of revenue for Snowball OR use this service to increase conversion to the paid version of Snowball by bundling it with the media subscription.

  • When?

    • We will launch a beta test with a few dozen users within the next month in order to validate (or invalidate) our hypothesis.

• Mozza is now working on the wireframes of the upcoming platform that should replace entirely Substack in the upcoming months. More details about that:

  • In the beginning, this platform will live side by side with Substack. Its main goals will be to:

    • Make the Snowball offers clearer and sexier.

    • Make it easier for newcomers to find the content they need.

    • Start to share new tools to help investors.

  • We might migrate from Substack to Beehiiv though (more automation features with Beehiiv + more growth features).

  • The idea is to start building our own newsletter platform in the future in order to support custom features (a better bundling experience for instance).

• Thanks to Pauline, I met someone who could be a great product leader both on the human side and on the technical side. I’ll keep you posted.

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.

• Pauline and I have decided to put the hiring of new writers on hold. Instead, we will focus on accelerating the growth of the user base how?

  • Recycle the content already created and share it on new channels.

  • Start to test new acquisition channels: mainly paid ads, cross promotions, and TikTok.

• Keep or kill the new financial advice offer.

• Continue to work with Mozza on the media product.

• Decide how we will build the first version of our new platform (no-code vs. code for instance). Hiring a full stack developer or working with an agency like Collective? Honestly, as I said last month, it could be a mix of all these things. 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️ If you’re a full stack developer looking for a new adventure, and you like the Snowball vision/community, hit reply. I still haven’t replied to some of you since the last edition. I apologize for being slow…

• We kickstarted our work with Les Échos, but we still need to figure out what we could concretely do together.

Problems

What are the current problems?

• The revenue coming from the subscription business is still flat. We need to boost our acquisition.

• Building a team of creators seems harder than we thought.

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 PM or a full-stack developer, and you’re interested in this project? Hit reply. If you know someone, spread the news. :)

• Just wanna say hi. Hit reply. :)

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

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

Yoann ❤️