We are expanding our team for the first time in two years – and salary costs are rising. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for March 2025.
Contents
March at Friendly in Numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 23 630 CHF (+1%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 10 487 CHF (+12%)
- 💰 Total revenue: 34 117 CHF (+4%)
- 💸 Costs: 30 822 CHF (+4%)
- 🧾 Profit: 3 295 CHF (+18%)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 9.7% (+8%)
- 👩 Active customers: 162 (-1%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 2.5% (+93%)
- 👋 New trials: 11 (-31%)
- 🔎 Website visits: 2 812 (+12%)
These were the key developments in March:
Revenues: MRR growing, strong result in Consulting
In March, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions increased by +1% to CHF 23 630. This means that our MRR growth is below the average of +2% for the previous 12 months, but we are making good progress.
Our consulting revenue reached a high level again at CHF 10 487. Month after month, we are impressed by how Joey, Luke and Peter manage to efficiently support and train our customers in key areas despite limited resources.
Peter uses his Analytics expertise to provide our customers with the key figures and reports they need for efficient data evaluation.
And Joey and Luke create professional design templates for emails and landing pages in Friendly Automate, help build smart campaigns, and consistently conjure up unique solutions tailored to our clients’ needs.
Kathrin also supports individual customers with data protection trainings and introductions to Friendly Automate.
Thanks to the strong commitment of the entire team, we achieved total revenue of CHF 34 117 in March, an increase of +4% compared to the previous month.
Costs: Higher salary costs for Lukas & Lukas
We already announced it in the title: From March, we will be reinforcing our support team and welcoming Lukas Frei. More on this below. Lukas will start with a 20% workload and a starting net salary of CHF 1 500.
At the same time, Lukas Sigel will be supporting our CEO Stefan Vetter in management from March. More on this below. For his promotion to COO, Luke will receive a small pay raise of CHF 250.
Despite this, our salary costs are only increasing slightly this month, as our freelance Analytics consultant Peter Boehlke took on fewer hours in March.
The costs for product, training & events, admin and donations remained the same.
On the other hand, our advertising costs fell slightly. The main reason for this is a lower rate of search queries. (However, this also results in fewer website views, and we need to keep an eye on this).
Despite the salary increases, our costs rose by just over CHF 1 000 to CHF 30 822 in March.
Here are all our costs including salaries for March 2025 in detail:
Congratulations, Lukas!
Our CCO Lukas Sigel is supporting Stefan in the management of Friendly as Chief Operating Officer (COO) from March 1, 2025.
Luke is taking over important operational management tasks from our founder and CEO Stefan so that Stefan can focus more on the strategic direction of Friendly.
Find out more in our blog post.
And welcome, Lukas 2
Finally new staff: In the last two years, we have invested a lot in our structures and processes, laying a solid foundation for a functioning business, but have not hired any new team members.
We are now financially and organizationally in a position to gradually expand our team.
The first to join us from March 1 is Lukas Frei as Customer Happiness Manager.
You can get a small insight into Lukas on his Friendly profile page – we will be introducing him in more detail in a separate blog post shortly.
Conclusion
We have become accustomed to the success by now: we have been consistently in the “black figures”* for 14 months. In March, we again generated a profit of CHF 3 295 with a profit margin of 9.7%.
But yes, the “black figures” are still in quotation marks because even after five years of dedication to Friendly, Stefan still can’t pay himself a full salary.
We want to change that this year. We have set ourselves the goal of gradually increasing Stefan’s salary to CHF 4 000 over the course of 2025.
If everything goes according to plan, the days of our disclaimer are numbered:
* “Black figures” are 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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