Finally! Our software revenue breaks through the CHF 20 000 barrier
Open Startup Report September 2024

We have been waiting a long time for this milestone, and now the time has come: our monthly software revenue exceeds CHF 20 000. Welcome to our Open Startup Report for September 2024.

September at Friendly in Numbers

  • 🤖 Software revenue: 20 235 CHF (+6%)
  • 🧠 Consulting revenue: 10 856 CHF (+3%)
  • 💰 Total revenue: 31 091 CHF (+5%)
  • 💸 Costs: 26 973 CHF (+4%)
  • 🧾 Profit: 4 118 CHF (+13%)
  • 👩 Active customers: 146 (+8%)
  • 💔 Churn rate (lost customers): 0.7% (-50%)
  • 👋 New trials: 7 (-36%)
  • 🔎 Website visits: 3 894 (+11%)

These were the key developments in September:

Revenues: Software revenue exceeds CHF 20 000, consulting strong

We have finally made it. For several months, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from software subscriptions had only increased by around CHF 200 at a time – and even slumped by just under CHF 700 in June.

In September, our MRR finally broke through the CHF 20 000 mark with an increase of nearly 6%, reaching CHF 20 235 for the first time. We acquired several new customers in September, including a new enterprise customer, and were able to carry out several upgrades.

We also had a strong consulting month. Our services generated revenue of CHF 10 856 in September, another 3% increase on the previous month, which was a very good month as well.

We are very pleased with these two results and proud of the contribution of our entire team.

Our total revenue thus (again) exceeded the CHF 30 000 mark and reached CHF 31 091. After September 2023 in the previous year and April 2024, this is only the third month in which we have achieved this and the second-best result in our company’s history.

Costs: Cost increases for advertising, freelancer and hosting

Along with our revenue, our costs also increased slightly more in September than in previous months. This is mainly due to the fact that our permanent freelancer Peter Boehlke covered more consulting hours for us and we paid him higher compensation for this in September.

We also invested a little more in advertising and commissioned an additional server for Friendly Analytics.

Meanwhile, our costs for administration, events and donations remained stable.

Overall, our costs rose by just under 4% to CHF 26 973 in September.

Here are all our costs including salaries for September 2024 in detail:

Friendly on the HR Briefing Podcast

Stefan’s LinkedIn post with our employment contracts put us in the public spotlight in August.

Following the article in Blick, we are now also featured in the September episode of Personio’s HR Briefing podcast. Host Susanne Schlossbauer highlights our “impressive achievement”:

“I really have to say that the company has done a great job, because we’re talking about them right now.

This is a tiny little start-up from Switzerland that perhaps nobody knew about before, and they’ve managed to become the topic of the day and get involved in the public debate.”

Find out why she “honestly doesn’t care” about our employment contracts and what we think about this in our blog post.

Conclusion

Friendly: Revenue vs. costs from September 2023 to September 2024

Having been “profitable”* for the last seven months, we are again closing this month with a very nice profit of CHF 4 118, up another 13% on August.

The decision to increase Kathrin and Luke’s workload is already paying off for us.

We would also like to gradually increase Stefan’s symbolic salary soon. However, we are waiting to take this step until we are sure that we can afford it in the foreseeable future.

* “Profitable” is put in quotation marks because Stefan has not yet paid himself a full salary for his work and, as the sole founder without investors, still has to make up for the loss so far.


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