More revenue and less loss, a look back at our second retreat and a nomination for Switzerland’s most important startup award: welcome to our Open Startup Report for May 2022.
Contents
May at Friendly in the Numbers
💳 MRR: CHF 12,946 | ~$13,490 (+3%)
💵 One-time revenues (consulting): CHF 1,765 | ~$1,839 (+126%)
💸 Costs: CHF 17,399 | ~$17,732 (-9%)
🧾 Profit and Loss: CHF -2’688 | ~ -$2,801 (-59%)
👩 Active customers: 77 (-)
💔 Monthly customer churn: 1.6% (-85%)
👋 New Trials: 7 (-13%)
🔎 Website Visits: 4,464 (-6%)
📮 Emails sent (Automate): 383,033 (+14%)
📈 Pageviews tracked (Analytics): 815,457 (+13%)
This is what moved us in May:
Revenue up, costs down
Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increased +3% in May to CHF 12,946 (~$13,490). This is our highest MRR to date and the ninth consecutive month of revenue growth.
Our one-time consulting revenue in May was CHF 1,765 (~$1,839), a significant increase of +126%. The trigger was a custom setup of Friendly Automate for a customer.
Our costs dropped by a significant -9% to CHF 17’399 (~$17,732). On the one hand, one employee left us, on the other hand our expenses for advertising decreased. However, we had as additional costs the expenses for our second team retreat in Switzerland in the amount of CHF 1’355 ($1,361).
Due to these positive developments, our loss dropped massively by -59% from CHF -6,545 (~ -$6,568) in April to “only” CHF -2,688 (~ -$2,801) in May.
Once again for May we are sharing all of our costs including salaries. Here they are:
Switch from Baremetrics to Profitwell
From the very beginning, we have relied on Baremetrics to calculate our monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Unfortunately, the founder of Baremetrics sold his company to an investor in November 2020. Since then, the quality of the software became worse and worse. The core function of the software – calculating revenue – became buggy, and it took weeks to fix individual aspects of it.
When the new owner then wanted to increase the prices for us as existing customers by a factor of three (!), we cancelled with a heavy heart and switched to ProfitWell.
The change was hard for us because we had a good relationship with the former team at Baremetrics. For example, Baremetrics wrote about Friendly and our growth from 0 to $1,000 MRR in their blog.
Also, Baremetrics was a driving force of the Open Startup movement and created a directory of Open Startups, on which we are also represented to this day.
Last, but not least, our public revenue dashboard runs on Baremetrics. I don’t know of any other revenue analytics software that can show all the numbers publicly.
Until our subscription expires in December 2022, we will continue to run our public dashboard under Baremetrics, as we unfortunately cannot set our dashboard in ProfitWell to public. After that, we will either switch to screenshots from ProfitWell or query individual metrics via the API and display them on our site.
The screenshot of our MRR earlier in this report is already from ProfitWell.
By the way, since each tool uses slightly different calculations, values in this report from ProfitWell and values in our public dashboard at Baremetrics may differ slightly.
Friendly on the “Queen of the Mountains”: Our team retreat no. 2 in Switzerland
In May, we met for the second time in Friendly’s history for a team retreat. After Budapest last year, this time we went to Switzerland, where 75% of our team lives.
In Kathrin’s blog post you can find out where the “Queen of the Mountains” is located, what a “Herrgöttli” is and what all the fun has cost:
Friendly is nominated for the TOP 100 Swiss Startups
The TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award is the most important Swiss award for startups. This year Friendly is also nominated for the award. The ranking is determined by a jury of experts.
Parallel to this, a public voting for 10 sectors takes place. Friendly will take part in the public voting in the ICT sector. We need your support for the public voting. This is how you can vote for us:
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