In Friendly’s fifth year, we tripled our profit and in small steps almost reached profitability. Welcome to our Open Startup Annual Review 2024.
Contents
New customers: Arbeitgeber Banken to ZeroWaste Switzerland
In 2024, the number of our active customers rose from 120 to 153. We are grateful for the trust that our customers place in us.
We are particularly pleased that we are continuously gaining trust in security-sensitive sectors such as the insurance, finance and healthcare industries.
Of course, we are also still there for innovative non-profits and SMEs.
Our new customers include Hannover Re, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the Swiss Human Rights Institution SHRI, Arbeitgeber Banken, innova insurances, the blindekuh foundation, ZeroWaste Switzerland, Shoppi Tivoli, Zollikerberg Hospital, the compensation funds of the cantons of Neuchâtel, Bern, Fribourg, Jura and Vaud and the Swiss Society of Cardiology SGK.
“We are proud of what we have achieved with Friendly Automate.”
Astrid Giebel, Head of Product Management DACH at Pierre Fabre Pharma
In our latest case studies, Astrid Giebel from Pierre Fabre Pharma and Florian Lüthi from Branchen Versicherung discuss how they were able to simplify processes, implement new marketing ideas and improve their data protection with Friendly Automate.
Finances: Three times the profit of 2023!
The year 2024 got off to a very irritating start for us financially: in January, our costs rose massively by CHF 4 016 (+17%). The main reason for this was a miscalculation in a consulting project. We therefore started the year with a loss account.
In the months that followed, we paid all the more attention to keeping a careful eye on our finances.
We managed to continuously increase both our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions and our consulting revenue over the course of the year and ended all the remaining months in 2024 with a profit.
In 2024, our total recurring revenue (TRR) from software subscriptions amounted to CHF 234 589 (+24%) and consulting revenue to CHF 122 191 (+35%). Our total revenue thus reached CHF 356 780, an increase of +28% compared to the previous year.
Meanwhile, the cost curve flattened considerably. Our costs rose by only +21% to CHF 321 850.
This resulted in a very nice profit of CHF 34 930 at the end of the year, almost three times as much as in 2023.
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
TRR | 26 823 CHF | 117 391 CHF | 156 327 CHF | 188 691 CHF | 234 589 CHF |
Consulting | 0 | 0 | 18 385 CHF | 90 313 CHF | 122 191 CHF |
Total Revenue | 26 823 CHF | 117 391 CHF | 174 712 CHF | 279 004 CHF | 356 780 CHF |
Costs | -52 672 CHF | -133 038 CHF | -205 736 CHF | -266 038 CHF | -321 850 CHF |
Profit/Loss | -25 849 CHF | -15 647 CHF | -31 024 CHF | +12 966 CHF | 🎉 +34 930 CHF |
The profits from 2023 and 2024 cannot yet fully compensate for the loss of the previous years. But we have already reduced the loss Stefan has been covering himself, as the sole founder without investors, to CHF -24 625; a significant improvement from CHF -59 554 in 2023.
This puts Stefan in a position to finally pay off his personal debts in full. A personal milestone for him.
At the same time, we started paying Stefan a (still symbolic) salary in April 2024, which we will be able to increase from CHF 500 to CHF 1 000 in January 2025.
Our long-term goal is to be able to pay everyone in the team a fair salary and achieve a healthy profit margin.
Our goal for 2025 is to raise Stefan’s salary to at least CHF 4 000 and at the same time increase our profit margin from the current 9.2% to at least 12%.
Consulting: Further on course for success
Last year, we reported on how we established consulting as a key business area in 2023 and were thus able to significantly improve our revenue.
This trend has continued in 2024 thanks to the great commitment of Luke and Joey. As our experience grows, we are able to support and implement more and more complex customer projects, especially with ambitious custom solutions.
This personal support creates added value for our customers, which promotes the user experience and satisfaction with our products in the long term.
Through careful planning, we were also able to stabilize the “rollercoaster ride” of fluctuating consulting revenue, which we had reported on several occasions.
In 2024, we earned an average of CHF 10 183 per month from consulting, compared to CHF 7 526 in 2023. Total consulting revenue amounted to CHF 122 191, which accounts for 34% of our annual revenue.
In 2024, we continued to share all business figures transparently. What is normal for us repeatedly provokes controversial reactions on social media.
In January 2024, Stefan had mentioned a few reasons why we are an open startup on indiehackers.com.
And these reasons continue to pay off for us.
- Visibility: Our monthly Open Startup Reports continue to be very well received on LinkedIn. We achieved a particularly wide reach at the end of July with the publication of our employment contracts. The post went viral and even Blick reported on it.
- Trust: Our openness and honesty create sympathy. In reaction to and as a result of our transparent employment contracts, we have received several spontaneous applications this year.
- Feedback: We also received further helpful feedback in 2024. For example, on how we could make our working conditions even more employee-friendly.
- Sharing experiences: Without entrepreneurial role models in his personal environment, Stefan has benefited from the Open Startup Reports of other transparent companies on his path as an entrepreneur.
That’s why he wants to share his experiences with Friendly as well. In addition to our Open Startup Reports, Stefan speaks regularly in podcasts, most recently in the very personal December episode of Mach-dis-ding.ch.
Team: Kindness and appreciation
When a podcaster pointedly said in September that she “honestly didn’t care” about our public employment contracts, we agreed with her – the media coverage was a big deal for us, the employment contracts are not.
In a blog post, Stefan then named some of the things that are important to us at Friendly: Appreciation, freedom, self-care, encouragement, participation, responsibility, rest and kindness (more details here).
Our culture continued to be what our team at Friendly valued most in 2024.
Because we also lived it in 2024:
Our CEO Stefan Vetter asks every employee once a week how he or she is doing personally. And he takes the time to listen to the answer. He also manages the business superbly, for which we are genuinely grateful to him and express this regularly.
Over the course of the year, our CCO Lukas Sigel has once again significantly advanced our Sales department on his own initiative. His performance is enormous and only possible because he can take on responsibility.
Our CMO and CISO Dr. Kathrin Schmid has only worked 8 hours overtime this year despite her many tasks in marketing and information security (around the ISO monitoring audit in November, there was a lot to do at short notice). And she reduced them all again within 2 weeks.
Our CTO József “Joey” Keller has the freedom to dedicate time during working hours to the open source project Mautic (the software behind Friendly Automate). This is a source of motivation for him, and he was appointed Product Team Lead at Mautic at the end of the year for his commitment.
Our permanent freelancer Peter Boehlke continues to support our team as an analytics expert. Our clients, from SMEs to enterprises, value his great expertise, and Peter appreciates both the stability and flexibility he enjoys thanks to his freelance position.
Our developer Matic Zagmajster, who lives in Slovenia, can only be part of our team because we work completely remotely. Within his small but regular commitment, he has already been able to develop numerous new functions for our Friendly Automate customers and fix several bugs.
And yes, at the end of the year Joey said that his job at Friendly is the best he’s ever had (click here to see our career page 😉).
“I believe that the way we work together internally at Friendly has a direct impact on how we treat our customers. Friendliness and appreciation are our core values – this is reflected in everything we do. There’s no hidden agenda at Friendly, and that’s something our customers appreciate as much as I do as an employee.”
Lukas Sigel, our CCO
These developments await our team in 2025:
- We are increasingly perceived as an employer and review the attractive applications we receive.
- Stefan is working towards reducing his workload as CEO.
- We will be welcoming a new team member in Customer Support from March 2025 – more about this shortly.
Last but not least, thanks to the good business performance, we will be increasing the salaries of the entire team and Peter’s hourly rate from January 2025.
Information security: The important details behind the scenes
At the end of 2023, we successfully passed the ISO 27 001 and 9 001 certifications for information security and quality management.
The ISO standards require ongoing improvement measures in the audited areas, which we identify, prioritize and continuously implement using comprehensive checklists.
In 2024, we implemented many important measures, among them:
- we carried out an independent penetration test
- improved the security of our servers with technical measures
- drafted and implemented an internal policy for information security
- developed and tested a process for managing threats to information security (incident management)
- completed instructions on business-relevant tasks (standard operating procedures, SOPs) in central areas
These tasks largely take place behind the scenes, but they are extremely important to us. We honor the trust of our clients by ensuring the information security and quality of our offering.
As such, we have taken great care to do this and received very positive feedback in the ISO surveillance audit in November 2024.
You can view our current certificates here: ISO 27 001 and ISO 9 001.
Outlook: Calm Company
In September, in response to the HR Briefing podcast, Stefan described how he sees Friendly as a “Calm Company”. This aptly summarizes our perspective for 2025:
“I run a calm company. We are growing slowly and steadily. I don’t believe in aggressive growth targets, constant availability and high workloads. We work efficiently and carefully instead of rushed and stressed. My perspective is to create a long-term, sustainable, calm and friendly working environment in which we all do well together.”
Stefan Vetter
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