Following several strong months, we’ve been able to give back to the team – with multiple raises, including Stefan’s salary now exceeding 4 000 CHF. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for October 2025.
Contents
October at Friendly in numbers
- 🤖 Software revenue: 33 467 CHF (-0.5%)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 13 675 CHF (+2%)
- 💰 Total revenue: 47 142 CHF (+0.1%)
- 💸 Costs: 39 620 CHF (+1%)
- 🧾 Profit: 7 522 CHF (-6%)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 16.0% (-6%)
- 👩 Active customers: 187 (-1%)
- 💔 Churn Rate (lost customers): 2.1% (n/a)
- 🔎 Website visits: 2 532 (+3%)
These were the key developments in October:
Revenues: MRR flat, consulting strong
Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions remained flat in October at CHF 33 467.
Since shifting our focus more toward enterprise customers, the pace of customer growth has slowed – but each new enterprise customer brings in significantly more revenue. As a result, overall our MRR has grown faster in 2025 than in previous years.
At the same time, we increased our consulting revenue by another +2% to CHF 13 675.
This result was driven by custom setups and onboarding projects, training sessions, in-house development, and newsletter creation. Our October clients included a bank, a hospital, a nonprofit organization, several insurance companies and online retailers, and a public sector entity.
As mentioned before, our consulting business has reached a high plateau. The trend lines in this chart reflect that:
Total revenue in October rose slightly by +0.1% to CHF 47 142.
Costs: Salary increases for Luke, Joey, Kathrin and Stefan
Personnel costs increased by over CHF 2 000 in October due to salary increases for Luke, Joey, and Kathrin – in recognition of their contributions to Friendly’s recent growth.
We also increased Stefan’s salary to CHF 4 025 – meaning we’ve already reached our 2025 goal of paying him CHF 4 000 per month, two months earlier than planned.
Additionally, our developer Matic expanded his capacity from 10% to 30% as of October, allowing us to further strengthen our technical team.
Product, events, and admin costs remained mostly unchanged.
Our marketing expenses declined in October, as we completed depreciation of our Friendly rebranding project (reveal coming soon!). That said, we’ll continue to recognize related expenses over the coming months, as we’ve decided to award a bonus to our designer Nicolas Previdoli in appreciation of his outstanding work on the rebranding.
In September, we had made a one-time larger donation to Mautic. Excluding that, our monthly contributions to nonprofit causes and memberships have returned to their usual level.
All in all, our October expenses amounted to CHF 39 620 – up only 1% from the previous month, despite the salary increases.
Here are all our costs including salaries for October 2025 in detail:
Conclusion
In October, we recorded a solid profit* of CHF 7 522 with a profit margin of 16%.
That marks 21 consecutive months of positive results. We’re now in a position to build reserves and invest in new team members – more info coming soon on our career page.
* Friendly has fully recovered its early-stage losses as of June 2025. Our monthly profit now only comes with the caveat that Stefan, our founder, still isn’t paying himself a full salary for his work – we’re working on it.
