This has never happened before in Friendly’s three-year history. For the first time, we were in the black figures for two months in a row and also achieved record revenue. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for May 2023.
Contents
May at Friendly in Numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 15 062 CHF (-2%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 7 559 CHF (+23%)
- 💸 Costs: 22 523 CHF (+19%)
- 🧾 Profit: 98 CHF (-96%)
- 👩 Active customers: 94 (-2%) *
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 2.08% (+110%) *
- 👋 New trials: 12 (+50%) *
- 🔎 Website visits: 4 449 (+55%)
* Figures not exactly comparable with previous month. Our previous revenue analytics software, ProfitWell, has been delivering changed figures for the previous months since the beginning of May – without us having changed anything. Support has not been able to help us to date. For the time being, we are therefore dispensing with the analyses and screenshots from ProfitWell and calculating our KPIs manually based on the data from Stripe (payments by credit card) and our accounting software (payments by invoice).
These were the key developments in May:
Revenues: slightly lower software revenue, consulting revenue at record level
Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions fell slightly by -2% to CHF 15 062 in May. In view of the fact that we celebrated the highest software revenue in our history in April, this is still at a high level.
Our consulting revenue rose again significantly by +23% to CHF 7 559. This is the highest consulting revenue in our history and beats the previous record set in the previous month.
The largest projects were the introduction of Friendly Automate for an NGO and the integration of Friendly Analytics into the booking systems of a Swiss luxury hotel.
Our total revenue amounted to CHF 22 621 – another record.
Costs: increased significantly due to higher salaries, more expenses for freelancers and more advertising
Unfortunately, our costs were also at an all-time high in May. They rose by +19% to CHF 22,523.
Firstly, as announced in the last report, we reversed part of last fall’s pay cut in May. Due to the high losses, I had to ask the team to do so at the time. In view of the high profit in April and in appreciation of their good work, we decided to increase Kathrin and Lukas’ salaries slightly.
On the other hand, we had more expenses for freelancers because we couldn’t cover all the work with our permanent employees. However, as this work contributed to our consulting revenue, these expenses were financially profitable for us.
Spending on advertising also increased significantly. In view of the imminent shutdown of the current version of Google Analytics, we intensified our spending on search engine advertising for these keywords.
Unfortunately, this did not lead to a measurable increase in trials or customers in the short term. Nevertheless, as the advertising was very targeted, it is unlikely to have been in vain and at least contributed to our brand awareness in the target group. However, as the profit in May was tight, we have already significantly reduced our advertising expenditure in the current month.
Here are all our costs including salaries for May 2023 in detail (in USD):
Conclusion
Despite higher costs, we made a profit in May and were thus “profitable”* for two months in a row for the first time in our more than three-year history.
At CHF 98, the profit was very narrow. Nevertheless, it is a huge success for us and shows that the trend reversal that began in April can continue.
Of course, we are also particularly pleased that we were not only able to maintain the high revenue level of recent months, but even increase it. We remain cautiously optimistic that we can remain in the black figures from now on.
* “Profitable” is deliberately put in quotation marks because I have not yet paid myself a salary for my work and, as a sole founder without investors, I have yet to make up for the loss so far.
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