Welcome to the 418 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 you can 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.
Is it still OK to say Happy New Year? Well, anyway, happy New Year to all of you!
This new edition of Behind the Curtain will cover the end of 2023 and January 2024.
Let’s go.
We received a €500,000 loan from BPI France thanks to the amazing work of Jérémi Bertolino, and our finance team (Alexandre and Lyse). This kind of financing is interesting for shareholders because there’s no equity dilution.
Subscriptions revenues are still stagnating, but it’s ok. We know we need to push the growth button…
Which leads me to the fact that we’re hiring two new profiles in the team:
📈 A growth marketer full-time (full remote). If you’re interested or know someone who could be interested, our opening positions are right here.
👩🎨 A UI/Illustrator “alternant(e)”. If you’d like more details, the job description and how to apply are right here.
We had to let go of Valentine (Lead Product) in December. The part-time configuration wasn’t working well enough for her and Snowball.
But the great news is that we found another great Lead Product who’ll join the team on the 16th of February. 🙌
The sponsorship pipeline is still very strong.
Snowball Max reached 196 paid subscribers in 1.5 months without any external communication.
Let’s see what happened since the last edition:
🟢 54,000. +1793 vs the 20th of November 2023 (+3,4%)
🟠 ARR subscriptions (Annual Recurring Revenue): €270,300 (-€3000). After reaching an all-time high of ARR in December, we faced a lot of “billing failed” unsubscriptions (it happens when a credit card expires or when there is not enough money on the account linked to the credit card).
🟢 Ad business: We booked €28,200 of new sponsors since the last edition (all of them came basically in January):
Projected revenues: Backlog for the rest of the year + what’s been already paid = €28,200. 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% (flat).
🟢 Opening rate (Snowball+): 63% (flat).
🟠 Churn rate: around 5.6 (-0.16%).
🟢 Cash on hands: €1,550,000.
Now let’s turn to the 3Ps (Progress, Plan, Problems). 👇
As a reminder, Léa is in charge of the design.
Emeline is in charge of the tech (backend).
Clément is in charge of the tech.
And, I (Yoann) is in charge of everything else.
In this section, team members and myself will show you the main things that have happened recently.
As a reminder, here’s what the product looks like (some features displayed below are not live yet).
We reached 196 paid subscribers within 1.5 months without any external communication.
And users seem to love this new offer:
We should launch Snowball Max publicly in February.
General/admin/marketing/media
We received a €500k loan from BPI France. Congrats to Jérémi Bertolino and our finance team (Alexandre and Lyse) for their work.
We put €750,000 on 5 term accounts:
3 x €200,000 on 6-month accounts yielding 3.8%. This should bring €11,500 at the end of the 6 months.
2 x €75,000 on 12-month accounts yielding 3.6%. This should bring €5400 at the end of the 12 months.
We hired Sogedev to apply to CIR (Crédit Impôt Recherche) and JEI (Jeune Entreprise Innovante).
We’re hiring a curious, jack-of-all-trade growth marketer. To apply and see the job desc, click here.
I started to publish again on LinkedIn. Finally!
We started to work on the Snowball Magazine with Corentin + a lot of topics related to HR (onboarding, hiring, culture…)
Product
As I said earlier, Valentine is no longer part of the team, but our future Product Lead will start on the 15th of February.
Design
Designed + conducted dozens of user tests of our new client space with its roadmap feature to ease the follow-up of actions between coaches and Max subscribers. Kudos to all Max clients who joined us on Discord and user tests, helping us to improve this client space experience. We're so grateful to have such an amazing community!
Prepared and conducted 2 days of workshops on service design ideation with the Snowball team to define how we gonna free our Media from Substack dependencies and how to leverage our media experience
Design of Snowball Max soft launch experience with a dedicated landing page and a public subscription flow with waiting list constraints so our wonderful coaches will be able to support the workload of new users.
Tech
Added a lot of new features in the Snowball Max app:
A lot of new features to increase the “quality of life” and productivity of our coaches: support for reactions, support for sending images on the coaches’ side, coaches can now add links to the user profile…
User account/profile and roadmap.
features to ease the daily life of admins.
Implemented a new waiting list feature for public release.
Exploratory work about media content migration:
what mailing service will be used to send newsletters?
how to structure the data to support a central Snowball account with multiple apps?
Here, team members will tell you what are the big projects we’ll be tackling in the upcoming weeks.
Tech
Release the new waiting list feature.
Document the exploratory work about mailing services (for media migration).
Start to work on the media migration.
Design
Snowball Max soft launch & product marketing.
Hiring a junior UI designer (alternant(e)) with a strong passion for illustration, someone who gonna put glitters and friendly emotions through the Snowball experience. The job desc is right here. ❤️✨
As we gonna free Snowball from Substack limitations and terrible UX, we'll focus our first efforts on designing a smooth and reliable newsletters creator tool during the coming weeks. 💪
General/admin/marketing/media
Finish the analysis of our last media survey + see what kind of quick wins we can implement to improve the user experience on the media side (I’ve postponed this for too long. I have to finish it in February).
Launch a mailing campaign to catch back some “billing failed” users.
Public soft launch of Snowball Max.
Hire one or two new coaches (part-time, 1 to 2 hours per day).
We will spend about 2 months without a product manager, but fortunately, Lea did a great job at taking over part of the job, and our next Lead Product will be here soon.
If you are or know a great growth marketer, we’re hiring one. The job desc is right here! I’d like to work with someone who’s extremely curious and ready to experience a lot of stuff.
If you are, or know a junior UI designer who’s looking for an “alternance”, here’s our job desc.
✨ 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?
Thanks for reading! 🫶
Talk to you soon!
Have a wonderful day.
Yoann ❤️
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