A new format for our transparent reports, and two new team members at once. Welcome to our first Open Startup Quarterly.
What’s going on
Welcome to the new Open Startup Quarterly! With the Open Startup Report for December 2025, we ended our monthly format to make room for something new: fewer reports, with more room for insights. In addition to our numbers, we will now also share developments and learnings, and offer a look behind the scenes.
The first quarter of 2026 was shaped by recruiting. For the first time, we advertised a position at this scale, reviewed applications, and made many, many decisions – whom to invite, whom to turn down.
We held first, second, and third interviews, learned a lot along the way, and ended up hiring not one, but two new team members.
At the same time, we invested a lot of energy into preparing the new role – Luke did fantastic work here. He prepared a structured onboarding month with introductions and trainings, and also designed the expanded Customer Success setup.
This new setup will take pressure off our tech team and create the conditions for us to focus more strongly on automation and scaling.
Already now, the tech team is continuously developing our infrastructure, as security requirements keep changing. Among other things, we are currently working on improving our bot detection measures, so that malicious automated actions such as website visits, form submissions, and email opens can be filtered out more reliably. We are also working on our own captcha for Friendly Automate.
In this report, as always, we share our finances – but we also share what we learned from recruiting and what worked well for us.
The numbers
Until now, we shared our finances monthly. From now on, we will share them in a quarterly overview, which makes the business development easier to see.
These are our numbers for the first quarter of 2026:
- 🤖 Software revenue: 120 085 CHF (+17 %)
- 🧠 Consulting revenue: 20 134 CHF (-39 %)
- 💰 Total revenue: 140 219 CHF (+4 %)
- 👩🦰 Personnel costs: - 92 799 CHF (-1 %)
- ⚙️ Product & admin costs: - 16 564 CHF (-1 %)
- 📣 Marketing & events costs: - 16 094 CHF (+30 %)
- 💛 Donations: - 1 605 CHF (-0.3 %)
- 💸 Total costs: - 127 062 CHF (+2 %)
- 🏆 Profit: 13 157 CHF (+20 %)
- 🍰 Profit margin: 9.4 % (+16 %)
Our recurring revenue from software subscriptions grew by a pleasing +17 % in the first quarter of 2026, reaching 120 085 CHF. A new enterprise subscription from the Swiss Federal Administration made a significant contribution to this growth.
Our consulting revenue was lower this quarter, at 20 134 CHF. This development is intentional in principle: we are increasingly working with agency partners who take on consulting and implementation tasks for us. In the medium term, we want to become profitable on MRR alone, meaning that we finance ourselves exclusively through subscription fees. In the short term, however, we still depend on consulting revenue.
This brings our total revenue for the first quarter of 2026 to 140 219 CHF.
Our largest cost item remains personnel, which fell slightly to 92 799 CHF compared to Q4 2025, even though we were able to increase Stefan’s nominal workload from 40 % to 45 %. Our goal for the year is to raise Stefan’s paid workload to 80 %, so that he can finally pay himself a fair salary.
Expenses for product, admin, and donations remained stable, while our marketing costs increased. The main reason is our ongoing spending on brand protection, which we briefly reported on in December. In addition, we continue to amortize the costs of our rebranding.
Our total costs in the first quarter of this year therefore amounted to 127 062 CHF – an increase of only 2 % compared to Q4 2025.
At the end of the quarter, we achieved a profit* of 13 157 CHF, with a profit margin of 9.4 %.
*Our profit comes with the caveat that Stefan has not yet been paying himself a full salary for his work – as mentioned above, we are working on it.
Here is an overview of all figures from the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026:
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | Q1 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRR | 69 636 CHF | 77 249 CHF | 90 906 CHF | 102 595 CHF | 120 085 CHF |
| Consulting | 29 300 CHF | 44 789 CHF | 35 584 CHF | 32 796 CHF | 20 134 CHF |
| Total revenue | 98 936 CHF | 122 038 CHF | 126 490 CHF | 135 391 CHF | 140 219 CHF |
| Personnel costs | - 63 887 CHF | - 73 633 CHF | - 81 944 CHF | - 93 758 CHF | - 92 799 CHF |
| Product & admin costs | - 16 257 CHF | - 16 196 CHF | - 16 379 CHF | - 16 647 CHF | - 16 564 CHF |
| Marketing & events costs | - 8 438 CHF | - 9 607 CHF | - 9 439 CHF | - 12 396 CHF | - 16 094 CHF |
| Donations | - 1 184 CHF | - 1 166 CHF | - 2 378 CHF | - 1 609 CHF | - 1 605 CHF |
| Total costs | - 89 766 CHF | - 100 602 CHF | - 110 140 CHF | - 124 410 CHF | - 127 062 CHF |
| Profit | + 9 170 CHF | + 21 436 CHF | + 16 350 CHF | + 10 982 CHF | + 13 157 CHF |
| Profit margin | 9.3 % | 17.6 % | 12.9 % | 8.1 % | 9.4 % |
Recruiting
At the beginning of January 2026, we advertised a position widely for the first time in Friendly’s history – on LinkedIn, Jobs.ch, Jobscout24.ch, and on our own Friendly career page.
The response surprised us: we received more than 100 applications, including many from truly interesting people. After three selection rounds, we ultimately decided to split the role between two new team members in a job-sharing setup.
We would like to share our two most important learnings from this process.
The value of kindness
Paul English’s “Hiring Religion” was an important inspiration for us – we highly recommend the (short) read. Based on his approach, our stated goal was to fill every interaction in the application process with appreciation.
We thanked every applicant and, when asked, explained the reasons for a rejection with care (something that requires particular sensitivity when you do not want to fall back on generic phrases).
Whenever possible, we sent initial replies no later than the next business day and organized most interviews within one week. We were as transparent as possible with all applicants and tried to give them a clear perspective as quickly as we could.
We conducted the interviews as conversations between equals and made sure they did not feel like an exam, but like an interesting opportunity to get to know each other.
“In my view, a good job interview is not an interrogation. It was important to me to conduct every conversation the way I would want to be interviewed myself: with respect, honesty and mutual curiosity.”
Lukas Sigel, COO and CCO of Friendly
We are proud of the two new team members we were able to win over this way. But we are just as proud of the positive feedback we received, including after rejections.
Feedback like this is the clearest reflection of our culture of kindness, and we want to continue building on it.
Structure, but also gut feeling
We are big fans of Notion – especially because it lets us create extensive databases, connect them with each other, and create tailored views for different purposes.
Our recruiting database in Notion was a valuable tool for keeping track of the most important applications and their status.
Originally, the plan was to rate candidates systematically and sort them by their overall score. That, however, did not work well for us. We realized that gut feeling and the team’s exchange right after the interviews were our most reliable guide.
This was especially true because kindness and appreciation are so central to our company culture. When selecting new team members, we therefore pay very close attention to character.
“We can train skills – we have little influence over character. I would rather surround myself with people who have an outstanding personality and a strong willingness to learn than with experienced experts who are difficult on a human level.”
Stefan Vetter, founder and CEO of Friendly
We have now successfully completed the recruiting process, and our two new team members have been settling in with us for several weeks. We will introduce them in the next Open Startup Quarterly for Q2 2026, which will be published in July.
What’s next
We are on track — and curious to see what the next few months will bring.
One question that has come up for us again is this: should we still be transparent in the age of AI?
Arvid Kahl, previously a strong advocate of the open startup philosophy and a role model for Stefan when he founded Friendly, has changed his mind since the widespread adoption of AI:
“Building in public once helped me sell my company. Today, that same transparency could destroy yours.”
Arvid Kahl, The Bootstrapped Founder
And yet, we are still choosing transparency. We’ll explain why in the next Open Startup Quarterly.