2024 went so well for us that we’re raising the salaries of the whole team in January. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for January 2025.
Contents
January at Friendly in numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 22 701 CHF (+2%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 9 438 CHF (-26%)
- 💰 Total revenue: 32 139 CHF (-8%)
- 💸 Costs: 29 186 CHF (-8%)
- 🧾 Profit: 2 953 CHF (-5%)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 9.2% (+3%)
- 👩 Active customers: 157 (+3%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 0.0% (-100%)
- 👋 New trials: 13 (+44%)
- 🔎 Website visits: 3 248 (+43%)
These were the key developments in January:
Revenues: Solid increase in software sales, January slump in consulting
In January, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions increased by +2% to CHF 22 701. Our most important KPI is therefore on a reliable course.
At the same time, we recorded significantly lower consulting revenue than in December. Our consulting revenue fell by -26% to CHF 9 438.
Fluctuations in consulting are normal, and January means a break after the Christmas business for many of our clients.
Nevertheless, we were able to increase the number of our active clients by +3% to 157 and even recorded a perfect churn rate of 0%.
Compared to December, our total revenue fell by -8% to a still very good CHF 32 139.
Costs: Pay raises and increase in working hours
We already announced it in our Year in Review: Due to the good business performance in 2024, in January we increased the salaries of the entire team, including Peter’s hourly rate.
We are also finally able to gradually increase Stefan’s symbolic salary – currently from CHF 500 to CHF 1 000.
In total, we are paying out salary increases of just over CHF 2 500, which we distribute according to workload and position.
At the same time, Lukas has temporarily increased his workload from 50% to 60% so that he can currently be there for us and our customers even better.
The costs for administration remained the same, while we spent more on advertising due to increased demand for search ads. Our hosting costs in Germany fell and we were able to eliminate the position for our trademark registration, as we have finally written off the costs completely after a total of 24 months.
Despite the pay raises, our costs fell by -8% to CHF 29 186 compared to December.
(Our costs were very high in December due to generous Christmas gifts to the team and a high volume of consulting work).
Here are all our costs including salaries for January 2025 in detail:
Equal Pay Day – with us on January 1
Switzerland is marking this year’s Equal Pay Day on 15 February 2025, which symbolizes the proportion of the year that a woman in Switzerland statistically works for free compared to the median salary of men.
The gender pay gap has fallen continuously in recent years, but is still at 12% in Switzerland according to the latest surveys.
Not with us – adjusted for working hours, our CMO & CISO Kathrin Schmid earns the same as our CCO Lukas Sigel (and both earn more than our CTO Joey Keller for geographical reasons – we would like to change that too).
So our Equal Pay Day is on January 1 every year.
Our pay transparency plays a key role in ensuring that this is and remains the case. And that is not only fair, but also makes us more attractive as an employer.
“It is time for companies to take action on pay transparency. Because fair pay is the second most important reason why employees choose a company. Employers should prioritize this fact in order to continue to operate successfully.”
Mikolaj Jaszczuk, Principal Consultant Rewards at Mercer Switzerland, on m-q.ch
Conclusion
Despite the pay raises totaling over CHF 2 500, we achieved a profit of CHF 2 953 in January with a profit margin of 9.2%.
This means that our last loss-making month was a whole year ago: the last time we were in the red was in January 2024.
As our costs have risen by less than 7% since then, but our revenue has grown by over 21% (our MRR by almost 25%), the picture looks very different now. We have achieved a consistently “profitable”* year.
We are paying ever more fair salaries, growing healthily and taking responsibility together. This is worth more to us than exploding revenues.
* “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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