❄️ [Investors update] Snowball - September/October 2023

Nov 20, 2023

Welcome to the 405 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.

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 click here. And if you want to subscribe to BTC (Behind the Curtain), you can do it there 👇

To investors and friends,

Hi everybody! I hope you’re all doing great.

Sorry for sending this update quite late, but I’ve been quite busy. I’ll try sending updates each month from December on.

Indeed it was quite busy because we launched our brand new product: Snowball Max (private beta for now). More about that later.

The Main News

We launched the private beta of Snowball Max, our financial coaching service on WhatsApp, a few days ago, and people are already sending us great feedback! Congrats to the Snowball team. Very proud of them all.

We started to talk with the BPI for a potential loan (€300k to €500k) that would help us boost our development without any dilution.
Subscriptions revenues are stagnating.
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong.
Florent, a backend freelancer has joined the team to support tech & product developments in the coming months. 🙌
I’m officially on air on BFM business twice a month (“Tout pour investir” with Lorraine Goumot).
If you know a great growth marketer hit reply! I’d like to work with someone who’s extremely curious and ready to experience a lot of stuff (freelancer or full-time, to be discussed) in order to boost our acquisition.

KPIs

Let’s see what happened since the last edition:

🟢 52 207 subscribers. +2022 vs the 8th of September (+3,9%)
🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €273,300 (-€757).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €8,800 of new sponsors since the last edition:
- Projected revenues: Backlog for the rest of the year + what’s been already paid = €125,483. Here’s the media kit if you’re interested in advertising your product in Snowball or know someone who could be interested.
🟠 Average opening rate (free newsletters + Snowball+): 49.04% (flat). → I should probably clean the list soon (delete users who haven’t opened, clicked, etc. in the last x days).
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
🟢 Churn rate: around 5.76 (+0.83%).
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,209,000 (-€103,533 since early September).

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

3Ps

As a reminder, Valentine is in charge of the product.

Léa is in charge of the design.

Emeline is in charge of the tech (back).

Clément is in charge of the tech.

And, I (Yoann) write the marketing/admin/media parts.

Main Progress

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

🚀 Snowball Max private launch

First of all, congrats to the Snowball team! We launched this product in a very short amount of time considering that the team was complete only last June. It took approximately 4 months to launch this product. Very proud of their work. 🙌

So, about two weeks ago we opened the door of Snowball Max, our brand-new product focusing on financial coaching. As a reminder, here are the details of this new offer:

Financial coaching directly on WhatsApp (fully compliant with the AMF).
Access to all the Snowball+ newsletters.
Exclusive offers with partners. For now: Finary, Magma, Les Échos, Koyfin, and Waltio.
- €40 for 1 month.
- €60 for 3 months.
- €100 for 6 months.

At the moment we’re working with 3 financial advisors (freelancers): Béatrice, Kevin, and Aurélien. Kévin might join the team early next year.

I’m also doing some coaching myself in order to better understand how we could improve processes and our product for our coaches.

As a reminder, here’s what the product looks like (almost since some features are not live yet).

What was really challenging regarding this product was the onboarding.

Indeed, in order to be fully compliant, we need to

Ask a looooooot of questions.
Verify the identity of our clients (KYC + proof of residence).
Verify their phone number through WhatsApp.
Sign a contract.

all of this adds a lot of friction to the onboarding, but the team did an amazing job in order to make it less painful.

And it seems to work! Here are some feedback from early adopters :

We’ve had some bugs of course, but we’re continuously improving this onboarding.

By the end of the week, we should reach more than 100 users.

If you’re interested to try this new offer, you can subscribe to the waiting list here (only in French):

Waiting list Snowball Max

Ok, back to the regular content…

General/admin/marketing/media

We started to talk with BPI about a potential loan. As soon as I know more about this, I’ll let you know. It should be somewhere between €300k and €500k.
I’m live on BFM Business every other week on the show “Tout pour investir”. It seems to bring a decent amount of new free subscribers each time I’m on TV (between 100 and 200).
All the funds from the 2022 fundraising are now in France on our accounts. We took advantage of a pretty good exchange rate to transfer our US dollars from the US to France.
Paid acquisition: Launched a second test on X which was less successful.

Product

A lot of QA (quality assurance) and testing.
Worked on the Amplitude tracking plan.
Iterated on main features’ UX & UI and scoped out what's not necessary.
Supported team to keep on track.
Started to gather feedback from the coaches to improve the product and their processes.
Continued to work on our next big project: the media migration out of Substack.
Started to work on our process to launch new projects.
Worked on the mapping of the Snowball+ user journey.

Design

Many Back and forths with the team to improve Snowball Max onboarding and coaches’ back office experience with a focus on chat and coaching efficiency.

With these improvements, new variants and components have been added to Fractal, our Design System, including improvements to the open-source Figma file.
Ended the creation of Snowball personas to better empathize with our audience and ease the user-centricity of our future experience on the customers’ side as well as the Snowball teams’ (financial coaches and newsletters creators) side.
Mapping all key user flows of our existing Media experience (from subscribing to newsletters as a customer to writing them as a creator) that will be useful for our future homemade media platform construction.

Tech

Implemented the back office for the coaches.
Intensive testing and bug fixing of the onboarding flow.
Preparing the infrastructure and process for the launch.
Added automatic testing to the flow.
Launched the V4.0 of Fractal, our design system (-10,600 lines of code!).
Migration from PandaCSS to TailwindCSS
Lot of post-launch fixes: changed the signature flow multiple times to make it more convenient for the user, reduced the number of questions ...
Added observability, metrics, and incident management to properly follow Snowball Max on a daily basis.
Kept improving Snowball Max (in particular for our coach).
Added End-to-end testing to secure our deployments.
Finished implementing v1 of Snowball Max backend.

Added Yousign, Stripe, and contract generation.
Added Whatsapp management to contact our users.
Deploy to production a stable version of the API for the launch and follow up after the launch to improve the product quickly.
Added automated tests for the API.

Plans

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

Product

Continue to improve Snowball Max.
Crunch data.
Create a group of beta testers on Discord in order to collect even more feedback.
Prepare, and work on the discovery phase regarding the media migration.
Improve Snowball Max coaches’ processes.
Enhance our internal processes.

Tech

Even more improvements for users and coaches (in particular the personal user account and dashboard).
Improve WhatsApp API support (better handling of failure, delivery, and message types).
Discovery for the next big project: media migration.

Design

Continue Snowball Max improvements.
Continue Back Office improvements for coaches.
Deliver design specifications and prototypes of our future client space, that will ease coaching actions follow-up between our coaches and their coachees.

Marketing

Paid acquisition: relaunch the first X campaign, and increase the budget.
Paid acquisition: Launch a test on Meta.
Relaunch the LinkedIn machine. 😅 I haven’t published anything since June…
I have to prepare a small TedX (TedX Salon) which will be held in Bordeaux on the 5th of December.
I’ll be at Investir Day on the 28th of November at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (part of a round table, and the host of another one).
I think I’ll start to look for a growth marketer (freelancer or employee) in order to turbocharge our acquisition in 2024.

Media

Finish the analysis of our last survey + see what kind of quick wins we can implement to improve the user experience.
Increase our price for a part of the paid audience. At the moment some users are still paying €6 per month or €60 per year, whereas new users are paying €8 per month or €80 per year. We want to align all prices because we added a lot of value (we need to work on the perceived value though) + we increased our expenses.
Start to work on a potential Snowball Magazine. The idea is to:
- Reach another kind of population that prefers to read on paper (aligned with our mission to democratize personal finance + educate the marker).
- Add another source of revenue.
- Increase awareness with a physical “object”.
- Have fun doing this.

Problems

One of our engineers is on maternity leave (Émeline) and we are working with a freelancer (Florent) for the time being. Even if he's super committed, he has less time available than a full-time job.
I have 0 time to work on marketing and acquisition. It’s probably time to delegate this…

Need you for?

If you know a great growth marketer let me know! I’d like to work with someone who’s extremely curious and ready to experience a lot of stuff.
✨ 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?

Behind the Curtain