Friendly
Build stronger customer relationships with ethical marketing
Friendly offers ethical marketing tools that help SMEs strengthen their customer relationships. This leads to more trust and increases leads and sales at lower advertising expenses. All our tools are based on open source
Friendly Automate is based on Mautic, the most popular open source software for marketing automation. We are proud to be one of the four main sponsors of Mautic since last week: mautic.org/sponsors
August report for Friendly, the obviously first and only #OpenStartup in Switzerland:
💵 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): $2,699 (+26%)
🤝 New customers: 7 (+17%)
🤩 Upgrades: 4 (+100%)
💔 Churn (cancellations): 2 (0%)
👩 Active customers: 27 (+23%)
👋 New trials: 13 (+160%)
🔎 Website visits: 3’588 (-4%)
📮 Emails sent (Friendly Automate): 92’783 (-37%)
📈 Pageviews tracked (Friendly Analytics): 1’125’695 (+3%)
💸 Costs: $6’937 (-)
🧾 Profit and loss: -$4,238
This is what moved us in August:
- +26% monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- We share our salaries and all other costs in detail
- New Hosting for Friendly Automate in the European Union (Germany)
- September outlook: Innovations in Friendly Automate & Friendly Analytics
Complete report with all details:
Friendly offers “ethical marketing tools” for small and medium-sized companies.
We recently sat down to define what this term means to us. This definition became our 📃 manifesto. Here it is:
👇
In July, our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increased by 27% to over CHF $2,147.
For the first time, we also share our costs in our open startup report: they amounted to $6,435 – not including my own working time.
This means that Friendly is currently still operating at a loss of $4,289. Our next goal is to reach the profitability threshold as soon as possible.
There was a lot more going on in July - such as a viral blog post, and almost 150k emails sent - more about this you can read in this article:
I grew 🙂 Friendly from zero to 💰$1,000 MRR in 94 days building ethical marketing tools.
In the blog of Baremetrics I was invited to explain how exactly I did that.
Here is a summary:
1. Learn about alternatives to the traditional venture-backed start-up models.
Communities like this one or @sergiomattei' getmakerlog.com can be really helpful here.
2. Start with the audience, not the idea.
This tip from @arvidkahl has proven to be gold for me:
I found it in his free online guide about bootstrapping a business.
You should also check out is book! zerotosoldbook.com
3. Decide whether you want to do something for businesses or consumers.
Pieter @levelsio's advocacy for B2B helped me a lot.
4. Product Hunt is great for launching. But you should test your product before with a smaller audience.
I could have got more out of the launch of my first product if I had done that.
In this blog post here on Indie Hackers, @DannyPostma describes how to do it better.
5. In the beginning the % of customers who cancel will be higher because your product is not yet mature. Do not let this discourage you.
This table shows our customer development until reaching $1,000 MRR. Only about half of the customers stayed.
6. Think about making your numbers public and becoming an Open Startup.
This not only creates more trust with colleagues and customers, but is also great for marketing.
Baremetrics offers a curated list at openstartups.com.
We are proudly one of them! friendly.is/open
Want to know more?
Find out the whole story in this blog post:
More revenue, problems with the stability and an addition to the team – that moved us at Friendly in June:
💵 MRR / monthly recurring revenue: $1,638 (+25%). We acquired seven new customers in June and two customers switched to a larger subscription.
👩 Website visits: 2,106 (-34%). In May we reduced paid advertising (Google Ads Search) to focus more on content marketing. As this is a long-term measure, traffic has initially fallen.
🔨 Stability issues, massive investment in server infrastructure.
🤝 It’s the first time in my life I’ve hired someone – welcome to the team, Joey!
Read more: https://friendly.is/june-2020
WordPress has added our plugin for Friendly Analytics to the official plugin directory.
This means that our plugin meets the high quality and security standards of WordPress.
Also, the plugin can be installed directly in WordPress via the plugin search.
Click here to go directly to the plugin:
Today the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of Friendly has exceeded the remarkable limit of $1’000 – only 94 days after its foundation!
I would like to thank all our customers for their trust. We will continue to work hard to earn it and to make our products better.
Here you can access our public live revenues dashboard: https://friendly.baremetrics.com/
And here you can find all other public information about Friendly, like our website analytics and our product backlogs: friendly.is/open
Almost 100% of the recipients read their SMS. Friendly Automate now supports the sending – without additional costs.
Only the external costs for sending the SMS are incurred. We support Twilio as sending gateway. The billing is done directly via Twilio.
Soon we will also support sending via WhatsApp – also at no additional cost.
Friendly is now an Open Startup. This means that we operate transparently and share our metrics, including revenue and website traffic.
Our MRR is currently CHF 375, our website generated 4'374 page views in the last 30 days.
Here you can find all public information about Friendly: friendly.is/open
