Our recurring revenue fell by -5%, our loss increased massively and we launched new offers: Welcome to our Open Startup Report for October 2022.
Contents
October at Friendly in Numbers
- 💳 Software revenue: CHF 13’126 (-5%)
- 💵 Consulting revenue: CHF 1’058 (-76%)
- 💸 Costs: CHF 19’125 (-3%)
- 🧾 Loss: CHF -4’941 (+279%)
- 👩 Active customers: 78 (-4%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 3.8% (+3%)
- 👋 New trials: 6 (+100%)
- 🔎 Website visits: 2’978 (-4%)
- 📮 Emails sent (Automate): 243’468 (-31%)
- 📈 Pageviews tracked (Analytics): 1’417’168 (-4%)
These were the key developments in October:
We need to go over the books
October was not a good month financially.
Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) fell by -5% to CHF 13 126. Our non-recurring revenue from consulting also declined. After an extremely strong September, it fell by -76% to CHF 1058.
Our costs fell slightly by -3% to CHF 19 125, but the loss increased by a hefty +279% to CHF -4 941 due to the lower revenue.
Why did our MRR fall – for the first time in 13 months? At 3.8%, the churn rate (red part of the bar in the chart) was at the same level as in the last 12 months. The churn rate is also normal in comparison with other SaaS companies.
However, unlike in recent months (and in the period before that), the number of new customers is at an extremely low level. I have no clear explanation for this. We haven’t changed anything in our marketing – on the contrary, our new entry-level offers should actually make us more attractive to new customers.
It could therefore have to do with the general market environment, which is extremely challenging with the energy crisis, inflation in the eurozone, interest rate hikes and the threat of a recession.
At least every crisis passes. On average, a recession “only” lasts 11 months. And this is followed by an upturn. And it is always significantly longer than the crisis period:
But that doesn’t help us at the moment. So we have to go over the books. This means that if our revenue does not increase significantly over the next few months, as a self-financed start-up without investors we will have to cut our costs.
Once again for October we are sharing all our costs including salaries. Here they are:
New entry-level offers
We want to make data protection-friendly marketing accessible to companies of all sizes. We hope we have come a big step closer to this goal.
Our previous prices were attractive for medium-sized and larger companies. With our new, significantly cheaper entry-level offers, our products are now also affordable for small companies and even freelancers.
Take a look at the new prices for Friendly Automate and Friendly Analytics. As before, you can test both products free of charge for 14 days.
Interview on publishing.blog
Haeme Ulrich from the Swiss publishing.blog recently spoke to me about marketing, data protection and the history of Friendly (interview in german language):
