Our most important KPI has dropped
Open Startup Report June 2024

While things are generally looking good for us, our most important KPI has fallen this month: Welcome to our Open Startup Report for June 2024.

June at Friendly in Numbers

  • 🤖 Software revenue: 18 601 CHF (-4%)
  • 🧠 Consulting revenue: 7 466 CHF (+3%)
  • 💰 Total revenue: 26 067 CHF (-2%)
  • 💸 Costs: 25 356 CHF (-3%)
  • 🧾 Profit: 711 CHF (+125%)
  • 👩 Active customers: 131 (+2%)
  • 💔 Churn rate (lost customers): 1.6% (-35%)
  • 👋 New trials: 12 (-)
  • 🔎 Website visits: 2 957 (-29%)

These were the key developments in June:

Revenues: Software revenue falls for the first time in a year, consulting stays stable

This is disappointing: for the first time in a year, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions fell in June, by -4% to CHF 18 601 compared to CHF 19 295 in the previous month.

Software revenue is our most important KPI. While consulting revenue can fluctuate depending on the current volume of orders, we can rely on revenue from software subscriptions.

How did the decline in revenue come about? Two larger customers left us in June, while we gained four smaller customers. However, these four new customers were not able to compensate for the loss of sales for the time being.

From this perspective, the loss is only short-term. In the long term, we benefit from having more small customers than a few large ones. This reduces the cluster risk and improves our organic growth opportunities in the long term.

Meanwhile, our consulting revenue remained stable at CHF 7 466 (+3%). We are very pleased that we were able to achieve this figure, especially as our Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Lukas Sigel was on holiday in June.

As a result, our total revenue fell slightly by -2% to CHF 26 067.

Costs: Costs for salaries, marketing, admin and product remain steady

The good news is that our expenses have remained at the same level for months. Compared to May, our costs in June fell by -3% to CHF 25 356.

Our salary costs were slightly lower in June because we gave fewer assignments to freelancers. Our advertising and training costs were also slightly lower than in the previous month. On the other hand, we recorded slightly higher hosting costs.

Since June, we have been supporting Mautic, the open source software behind Friendly Automate, with CHF 1 200 per year instead of CHF 120 per month. The reason for the slight reduction in sponsorship contributions is a new membership structure that Mautic has recently implemented. We are now community member of Mautic.

Here are all our costs including salaries for June 2024 in detail:

Conclusion

Friendly: Revenue vs. costs from June 2023 to June 2024

This month’s profit of CHF 711 does not break any records, but is slightly higher than in the previous month of May.

And we have thus achieved five “profitable”* months in a row – for the first time in our history.

Although progress is slow, many small drops fill the barrel. We expect to exceed the previous year’s total profit as early as July or August this year.

We are therefore doing well in terms of our Exist strategy.

* “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.


Update in August 2024: We actually made it and have already exceeded the total profit of 2023.


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