At the beginning of the year, we set ourselves two financial goals for 2025 that seemed ambitious at the time – and we’re now on track to exceed both of them. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for August 2025.
Contents
August at Friendly in numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 29 452 CHF (+6%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 11 677 CHF (+12%)
- 💰 Total revenue: 41 129 CHF (+7%)
- 💸 Costs: 36 063 CHF (+3%)
- 🧾 Profit: 5 066 CHF (+55%)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 12.3% (+44%)
- 👩 Active customers: 186 (-3%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 2.6% (n/a)
- 🔎 Website visits: 2 303 (-7%)
These were the key developments in August:
Revenues: Strong growth in software and consulting
In 2025, we’ve been able to significantly accelerate our software revenue growth – from an average of +1.8% per month in 2024 to an average of +3.7% per month so far in 2025.
In August, we performed even better: our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions rose by a solid +6% to CHF 29 452.
And that’s despite a relatively high churn rate of 2.6% – with five fewer active customers compared to July.
This growth is primarily driven by new enterprise customers, for whom we’ve been expanding our capacity since spring (as reported in our April update). We’re pleased with this development and continuing to pursue this strategy.
Consulting revenue also grew significantly, up +12% to CHF 11 677. August projects included the setup of a larger enterprise instance, various custom solutions, analytics implementations, newsletter design work, and customer training sessions.
Our consulting clients included a business association, a pharmaceutical company, several insurance providers, a vehicle manufacturer, a hospital, a fintech startup, an international non-profit, and an e-commerce retailer.
Working with companies and organizations from such a wide range of industries continues to be an exciting and rewarding challenge each month.
Our total revenue in August grew by a healthy +7% to CHF 41 129.
Costs: Stefan’s salary nearly at CHF 4 000, cost increase remains moderate
Thanks to the positive business performance, we were able to raise Stefan’s salary again in August. His nominal workload is now 30%, and his salary increased from CHF 3 218 in July to CHF 3 862.
At the beginning of 2025, we had set a goal to raise Stefan’s monthly salary to CHF 4 000 by the end of the year. That felt like an ambitious goal at the time: Stefan didn’t take any salary at all during our first four years in business, and his symbolic salary of CHF 500 remained unchanged for nine months (from April 2024 to December 2024).
It wasn’t until January 2025 that we began steadily increasing his salary with a clear focus. We didn’t expect to come this close to our goal already in August. Now it’s looking very likely that we’ll not only reach but exceed it in 2025.
We also payed a higher compensation for our analytics expert Peter Boehlke in August, as he worked more hours for us.
Product and admin costs remained stable, while event and marketing expenses declined slightly.
In total, our August expenses amounted to CHF 36 063 – a moderate increase of 3% compared to the previous month.
Here are all our costs including salaries for August 2025 in detail:
Conclusion
In August, we recorded another solid profit* of CHF 5 066 with a profit margin of 12.3%.
Our average monthly profit margin for 2025 so far is also exactly 12.3%.
That puts us well on track to hit – or even exceed – our second financial goal for 2025: achieving a stable monthly margin of 12%, compared to 9.2% in 2024 and 3.3% in 2023.
We’re excited to see what the coming months bring.
* Since June 2025, Friendly has fully offset its cumulative early-stage losses. Our monthly profit now only comes with the caveat that Stefan, our founder, still isn’t paying himself a full salary for his work – we’re working on it.
