Once again, our costs have skyrocketed – but this time we can cover them. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for December 2024.
Contents
December at Friendly in Numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 22 171 CHF (+1%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 12 702 CHF (-12%)
- 💰 Total revenue: 34 873 CHF (-4%)
- 💸 Costs: 31 756 CHF (+12%)
- 🧾 Profit: 3 117 CHF (-61%)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 8.9% (-60%)
- 👩 Active customers: 153 (+1%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 0.7% (-51%)
- 👋 New trials: 9 (+29%)
- 🔎 Website visits: 2 275 (-26%)
These were the key developments in December:
Revenues: The reliable growth trend continues
In December, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions increased by 1% to CHF 22 171. Our slow but reliable growth trend is thus continuing once again.
We are particularly pleased that we were also able to achieve a very good result in our consulting business in December: At CHF 12 702, we achieved the second-highest consulting revenue of the year.
On the other hand, the number of our active clients rose by only 1 to 153, with a very low churn rate of just 0.7%.
At CHF 34 873, our total revenue is therefore down on the record-breaking previous month, but almost 10% higher than in October.
Costs: Sharp rise in costs due to analytics consulting and gifts
For the second time this year, our costs have skyrocketed again.
In January, a miscalculation on our part resulted in unexpected financial expenses, so that our costs suddenly rose by over CHF 4 000 or 17%.
Now our costs in December have risen again by over CHF 3 400 or more than 12%, to CHF 31 756 compared to CHF 28 309 in November.
But the situation is different.
The higher expenses are mainly due to two factors: firstly, we had a very high demand for Analytics consulting, which resulted in a significantly higher fee for our permanent freelancer Peter.
Secondly, we wanted the team to share in what has been a very successful year for us, so we gave them generous Christmas presents. We also sent Christmas cards to numerous customers.
Both were planned and coordinated with our budget.
Meanwhile, expenditure for product, admin and donations remained constant, while costs for events and advertising declined.
Here are all our costs including salaries for December 2024 in detail:
Congratulations to Joey
Our CTO Joey Keller has recently taken on the important role of Product Team Lead at Mautic, the open source project behind Friendly Automate.
We congratulate Joey and are happy that we can give something back to the project through his work for Mautic.
Read more about it in our blog post.
Stefan’s year in review
In a very personal review of the year, our founder Stefan Vetter reflects on the past year.
He shares his views on the development of Friendly, his second company Wortspiel, and provides insights into personal changes.
In particular, the reduction of his possessions to 76 items provoked a surprisingly large reaction on LinkedIn, with over 300 000 views, 1 300 reactions and 700 comments.
Conclusion
Despite the sharp rise in costs, we ended the month of December with a profit of CHF 3 117 and a good profit margin of 8.9%.
In January, the high costs had led to a loss-making month. We are proud that we are now in a position to absorb one-off additional costs very well and still manage to remain “profitable”*.
This brings us to the end of a really good year at Friendly. We will be reporting on this shortly in our Open Startup Annual Review 2024.
* “Profitable” is put in quotation marks because Stefan has not yet paid himself a full salary for his work and, as the sole founder without investors, still has to make up for the loss so far.
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