Friendly’s story began in early 2020 with the aim of offering a privacy-friendly alternative to the marketing tools from Google, Meta & Co. From this, the company has grown to four employees and over 120 customers (2024). This is our story:
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2020: The why, the founding and the first employee
Tech giants like Google, Meta, and TikTok offer fascinating opportunities for marketing. At the same time, they repeatedly abuse their market power and care little about privacy.
This ambivalence motivated Stefan Vetter to found Friendly in early 2020. Stefan had worked in agencies for many years and had been building up his own digital marketing agency since 2015. In the process, he experienced not only the seductive benefits of big tech, but also the downsides firsthand.
Friendly therefore deliberately offers an alternative to the offerings of the tech giants. All of Friendly’s products are based on open standards such as email or the web, are available as open source, and place a high value on privacy.
The concept caught on: 94 days after its launch, Friendly reached CHF 1 000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). And in June 2020, our CTO József “Joey” Keller joined the team as our first permanent employee. Joey continues to work tirelessly on our technical infrastructure, and his creativity in programming and product development never ceases to amaze us.
There were also crises in 2020, such as when our founder almost deleted all customer data due to human error in the early days. Since then, we have invested heavily in our infrastructure, including reliable, multiple backups.
In May 2020, Friendly became an Open Startup – the first and still the only one in Switzerland. We share everything if there is no reason not to publish it: this includes revenues, costs, website visits and even our employment contracts.
2021: Friendly LLC, 10x revenue and employee no. 2
Friendly started out as a project of our founder’s existing agency for the sake of simplicity, but in January 2021 it became its own LLC.
In June 2021, monthly recurring revenue exceeded the CHF 10 000 threshold – an increase by a factor of 10 in less than a year. Stefan documented his 10 most important insights on this.
In August 2021, Dr Kathrin Schmid joined us as employee no. 2 – initially she supported customer support, in the meantime she has become CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and CISO (Chief Information Security Officer). With her background in education, she was able to confidently take on new areas of responsibility and has since become a valuable employee for us.
In the same month, we published Kathrin’s employment contract. And set the Internet on fire with it.
2022: Our team grows, and we overcome a financial crisis
In January 2022, Peter Boehlke joined us as a freelance analytics consultant. As a contributor to the open-source software Matomo, the basis of Friendly Analytics, he continues to be an enormous asset to us and our Analytics customers.
In March 2022, Lukas Sigel joined our team, which soon turned out to be a lucky find. In addition to Luke’s skills in web design and development, he has great talent for engaging with our customers, so we soon promoted him to CCO (Chief Customer Officer). His email templates, explanations and customised solutions have been greatly appreciated ever since, and thus Luke is making a significant contribution to Friendly’s success.
In August 2022, we reached 80 active customers.
However, our revenue growth slowed over the course of the year. We saw higher costs due to the growth in our team, and our income was initially unable to keep pace with this. As a bootstrapped startup with no investors, we cut our own wages for several months starting in November 2022 to overcome the crisis, which we managed to do by early 2023.
2023: Friendly becomes profitable
2023 is the year in which we reached the “black figures”* with Friendly. For the first time, we were “profitable”* in 6 out of 12 months of the year.
In April 2023, our monthly recurring revenue hit CHF 15 000. In addition, our consulting revenue developed into an important source of income over the course of the year. In June 2023, consulting revenue rose to over CHF 10 000.
Our data protection promise gained new relevance in September 2023 with the introduction of the new Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, boosting demand for our products.
In November 2023, we reached 120 active customers.
And just before the end of 2023, we successfully passed the certification for the ISO 27 001 and 9 001 standards.
Find out more about 2023 in our Annual Review.
2024: We’ll keep going!
After 2024 got off to another small loss in January, every month since February 2024 has been “profitable”* at Friendly. Our growth continues to be slow, but the business figures are becoming more and more solid. Our team also remains stable in 2024.
From April 2024, we have finally been able to pay Stefan a (currently symbolic) salary.
We created another viral LinkedIn post – again with our employment contracts.
As of summer 2024, we are pleased with what we have achieved and motivated to continue building Friendly. We will keep going.
* “Black figures” and “profitable” are put in quotation marks because Stefan still doesn’t pay himself a full salary for his work and, as the sole founder without investors, still has to make up for the loss so far.
