Our recurring revenue grew to CHF 13’662, our loss increased significantly and we renounced external investors: welcome to our Open Startup Report for August 2022.
Contents
August at Friendly in numbers
- 💳 MRR: CHF 13,662 | ~$13,944 (+3%)
- 💵 One-time revenues (consulting): CHF 660 | ~$674 (+633%)
- 💸 Costs: CHF 18,714 | ~$19,519 (+30%)
- 🧾 Profit and Loss: CHF -4,392 | ~ -$4,483 (+347%)
- 👩 Active customers: 80 (-)
- 💔 Monthly customer churn: 5% (+285%)
- 👋 New Trials: 3 (-57%)
- 🔎 Website Visits: 6,452 (+138%)
- 📮 Emails sent (Automate): 313,734 (+10%)
- 📈 Pageviews tracked (Analytics): 1,591,064 (+33%)
This is what moved us in August:
Recurring revenue up slightly and costs up significantly
Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increased slightly by +3% to CHF 13,662 (~$13,944) in August, our highest MRR to date and the twelfth consecutive month of revenue growth.
Our one-time revenue from consulting rose to CHF 660 (~$674), a massive increase of +633% after the slump in July.
Unfortunately, our costs increased massively by +30% to CHF 18’714 (~$19,519). This should also be a record at Friendly.
There are two reasons for this increase. First, Kathrin has upped her workload from 20% to 40%. This rise had been planned for half a year and we had already announced it last month. Secondly, we had been underreporting our partners’ commissions for the last few months. This was due to an error in my evaluation tool. The amount of commissions in our cost breakdown below is now correct, but it is significantly higher than in the last reports due to the calculation error.
Due to these effects, our loss unfortunately increased by a brutal +347% to CHF -4,392 (~ -$4,483).
Our next goal is still to break even as soon as possible. This road will be stonier than we had hoped. Nevertheless, we are confident.
In the current month of September, we have several active consulting projects (such as for custom email templates) that will significantly increase one-time revenue.
Once again for August we are sharing all of our costs including salaries. Here they are:
Why we don’t want investors (and maybe you don’t either)
Despite all the financial challenges, we don’t want outside investors at Friendly. I’ve written down why in a new blog post:
A look back
The history of Friendly began in early 2020 with the goal of offering a privacy-friendly alternative to the marketing tools of Google, Meta & Co. This has grown into a company with four employees and over 80 customers.
In August, I wrote up Friendly’s story for our About Us page. Here it is:
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