Q4 2020
Hi everyone, this is Emilie queen of culture at Wild Audience. 👸🏻
Welcome back to our Transparency Report series. I am very excited to take you along for another report where I will talk about Q4 2020 and also reflect a little bit on the entire year. I have been checking in with every team member to gather all the numbers and insights and you might see some of them in loom videos at some point in the report.
All our past reports can be accessed on our Transparency page: here
Here is a little summary of what happened during the year:
We transitioned into a Saas company and stopped doing consulting.
Our MRR for Wild Mail grew by almost 3 times (from 8k to 20k).
We let go of a team member and hired two developers Leandro and Francisco so we are now a team of 5.
We spent 7 months developing Wildmetrics and spent €40k in product development.
We created a new 3-year vision.
We launched our Partnership Program and started working with amazing people.
We added 48 new paying customers.
If you’d like to know more about 2020 and enjoy a good podcast, then go straight to our Founder Talk where Bastian tells you everything in his latest episode.
Q4 was also an interesting quarter as we hit a plateau in terms of growth and also lost a little bit of revenue (I’ll tell you all about it later on). At the same time, we made huge progress with product development so there is a lot to be happy about. 🥳
We’ve had a very busy end of the year but before I jump into it I thought I’d share with you a few pictures of what we have been up to. We all live in different countries so we have all experienced this pandemic differently but we’ve all managed to keep doing what we love for our own mental and physical well-being.
More pictures are to come at the end of this report but for now, let’s dive in. So much has happened since the last time we spoke and I am excited to tell you all about it.
We really enjoy taking you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR via this Transparency Report and we hope you still love reading it.
Just in case you’re new to Wild Audience, here’s what we do in one sentence: At Wild Audience we help companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.
We do that through our suite of products:
Wildmetrics [API-based marketing analytics for funnels & ads]
Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]
Alright, let’s do this!
Transparency Report:
Revenue
Customer Success
Product
Marketing
HR
Founder Talk
Coming in Q1 2021
Revenue
We ended 2020 with €19,899 MRR which is less than Q3 so I’ll be honest it wasn’t great. 😅 The good thing is that we know what happened and we can improve this. Let’s do a breakdown and compare the numbers with the last quarter (Q3) to understand this a little better.
Quarterly Breakdown:
If you look at the image below you can see that our growth rate was -2,4% in Q4 against +33 % in Q3. 🧐
Why did we lose revenue in Q4? There are two reasons.
1. Downgrades (contraction)
One of our biggest customers downgraded their account which means that we lost more than €2.4k MRR (the good news is they are upgrading again soon) and on top of that, 7 customers with a +100 MRR downgraded their accounts too.
2. Cancellations (churn)
3 big accounts with an MRR between €350 and €650 cancelled their account and while our churn in Q4 was below average (our average churn in 2020 was €2,071.75) it was still too high looking at it from a percentage perspective. If we compare with Q3 now, we can see that in Q3 our net MRR churn was on average at – 6.32% while in Q4 it was +5.74% which explains a lot!
On the other side, we can see that new business and expansion were not too bad considering that in 2020, our new business MRR average was +€3,156.25 and our expansion MRR average was €2,622.75.
In Q4 we added 7 new customers with €100+ MRR and added a total of €3k+ MRR which is more than in Q3 2020.
Enough with revenue, let’s see what happened with success now.
Customer Success
Back to you guys because you are the most important people in our business and I just love chatting with you. 🤩
In Q4 of 2020, we had a total of 1,001 conversations with 488 customers which were higher than in Q3.
We finished the year 2020 with a 100% happiness score which made us very happy too.
As you know, our number one metric that we thrive to maintain as low as possible (and improve) is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to and solve the initial ticket with a quality response.
In Q3, our First Response Time was 2h02 so unfortunately, that number went up but it was expected. This increase can be explained by two things:
I (Emilie) was on holiday for a few days in October.
We had our company holidays for Christmas in December.
We will be working on this in the next quarter and experiment with a new process to see if we can find a way to decrease that number again. Fingers crossed, it works.
2020 Success Summary
Total emails received: 6,179
Total conversations: 4,072
Happiness Score: 96% with 97% great (99 ratings), 2% okay (2 ratings) and 1% bad (1 rating).
First Time Response: 3h24
We worked on our Help Center and created more than 50 new articles in English and Spanish.
We created a better Success Program and onboarding process.
It’s been a great year for success and we are all very happy about it. We have been working really hard to improve our processes and make sure we provide you with the help that you need. I have to say that I really enjoy talking to all of you by email, loom videos or calls and I am looking forward to 2021 to get to know you more and build deeper relationships with you.
I also wanted to mention that while I am in charge of Success, Benji has been an incredible help to answer all our Spanish tickets and make sure everyone is happy too. Not to mention that the whole team contributes one way or another so it really is a team effort here.
I will just wrap it up by saying that we appreciate every one of you so please continue to contact us either to ask questions or to share feedback with us, we love it. 😍
Product
Wildmetrics
Let’s start with Q4 2020 as it was a full-on quarter and probably our busiest since we started with WMX. 🤓
Here is what we worked on:
We shipped a new data model, we did it all over again from scratch.
We added a new deep data integration for AC & Stripe with many more data points.
We added revenue per email.
We completed big business research (market, pricing, positioning).
We created a Wildmetrics Manual & Docs where all our resources are.
We did 10 WMX problems & user research calls
We onboarded our new developer Pancho to our entire code base, problem space & vision for WMX.
We completed 67 tasks in Q4 with 3 team members.
We spent over 400 hours working on WMX with an average of 135 hours per month.
70% of all time invested in this project was by Leo, 16% by Bastian and 14% by Pancho considering that he only started working full-time in December.
We are so proud of what we accomplished during this quarter and the entire year really. As you may know, we started completely from scratch with no experience in building products at the beginning of 2020 and it’s been quite the journey.
Some fun facts:
The first task done by Bastian around WMX was called “Create Problem hypotheses” and happened on May 11th 2020. Leo’s first task around WMX was called “Set a login [Exp #1]” and happened on May 21st 2020. 🙃
2020 Product Summary
We started in May with one developer (Leandro) and one product manager (Bastian). They worked together on this for 8 months and then onboarded a second developer (Pancho) to join the WMX team. It took us three months to find the right person and we are so happy to have found the right person.
We invested a total of €40k in Wildmetrics alone in 2020 and didn’t generate revenue but as I write this we have onboarded our very first paying customer (more about this in our next report). 🎉
Here is an overview of the features that we shipped in 2020:
Revenue per tag.
Revenue per email.
Deep-data integration with Stripe.
Deep-data integration with ActiveCampaign.
Basic User Interface with user log in.
Alright, that’s it for the product now. Let’s continue with Marketing, Benji’s territory.
Marketing
Traffic Data:
We added 361 new contacts to our list during the last three months of 2020. Again, there isn’t much difference happening here anymore as we aren’t investing in PCC and focusing a lot on our partner program which brings us, direct customers.
You can also see that we still get organic inbound (53%) and direct (32%) traffic mainly so at least the new leads we get are very high-quality leads.
By the way, as an open start-up, our traffic data is now 100% public.
You can check it out by clicking on this link.
Relationship Funnel Data:
Traffic: 8825 visits
Leads: 361 (4.1%)
Trials: 108 (30%)
Customers: 44 (41%)
A few comments about these numbers:
Traffic has increased a little bit after the summer holidays and we are getting closer to our average of 9,000 visits per quarter which isn’t too bad.
Our conversion rate for lead to trial is 31% (benchmark is 30%) and our conversion rate for trial to the customer of 41% (benchmark is 15%) so it’s really good and can be explained by the fact that we get customers directly via our partners.
We still don’t do any lead generation at the moment and focus on retargeting for PPC which also explains a lot!
Overall, our Relationship Funnel is working well and we just need to keep working on improving the top of our funnel (cold traffic to lead).
Growth
Aside from a couple of small projects, all our efforts and attention went into our partnership program during Q4.
Here is an overview of what we worked on:
We optimised our youtube/PPC positioning for our branding campaigns.
We created a new outreach process to contact partners in order to give them a really personalised experience from the beginning and build deeper relationships with them.
We finished translating all our blog posts into Spanish which means that we have 8 new articles in Spanish which are available in the blog section of our es website.
We contacted 100 partner opportunities and got 13 new partners to join our program.
We onboarded our 13 new partners and helped them get started.
Our partnership program in numbers for Q4:
Number of partner opportunities contacted: 100
Total partner replies: 43 (43%)
Total partner calls scheduled: 33 (77%)
Total number of new partners closed: 13 (39%)
Contacted to close conversation rate: 13%
Total number of new customers from partners: 21 Customers (amazing!)
Average Conversion per partner: 0.28 (that will need to be improved!)
Total number of partners: 75
We are pretty happy with the results so far and we love working with all our partners. We have so many collaborations in the pipe and can’t wait to share it all with you in 2021.
Here is our partner page if you’d like to check it out. Feel free to schedule a call with us if you’re interested in joining.
2020 Marketing Summary
Here are a few things we worked on, achieved and learnt:
One thing we learnt is the importance of consistency in our approach, offer, and message with all our strategies and offers (literally everything!). This is something we worked on last year and it will be a constant work in progress. This was a big lesson when becoming a SaaS company.
We stopped spending so much on PCC and focused more on organic traffic. From doing that, we realised that we were clearly getting better lead quality (our RF stats improved a lot) and also providing a much better sales experience.
We started creating content for YouTube again and published a total of 35 educational videos in English and Spanish. We are now getting results from it as we have some big customers coming directly from YouTube. So YouTube works well for us and is a great medium/long-term strategy.
We did some outreach and the only way it works is by having a relationship-based approach and personalising the message.
A partnership is very powerful so we put a lot of time and energy into developing our partner program which we love. We are now at 75 partners and we can’t wait to continue collaborating with them. More about this in 2021.
HR
Alright, it’s time to introduce you to our new full-stack developers. Everyone, meet Leandro (left) and Francisco (right).
Leandro aka Leo lives in Argentina where he is from but he is planning to join us in Europe next year (yay!) As you know Leo has been working with us as a freelancer for nearly a year now to develop Wildmetrics. He has now joined our team full time and we love it!
Things he loves: playing soccer, reading and spending time with his family.
Francisco aka Pancho is from Argentina and lives in Germany with his partner and children. He joined our team at the end of November and we couldn’t be happier.
Things he loves: cycling, walking, yoga and spending time with his family.
Don’t worry everyone, we’ve already planned to initiate them to surfing 🏄♂️
We now operate with a team of 5 people which was quite a change for us but we absolutely love our team. It’s really important for us to work with the right people who share the same values and vision in life. We really enjoy working with each other and have become a real family.
Founder Talk
We like podcasts. So if you want the inside stories of what actually happened in 2020 from Bastian, I recommend this episode.
Here are just a few pictures of the lucky ones who got snow this winter ❄️
Coming in Q1 2021
We will announce our first paying customer for WMX and we are very excited about it!
We are planning our first partner campaigns which is basically re-engaging our current partner list and working with them to create campaigns, webinars, and more. We are also working on influencer marketing and are collaborating with some big influencers to create amazing courses and content. This won’t be launched in Q1 but it will all happen behind the scenes until ready to be announced.
We are back in the content game and we will be recording a few low-production educational videos around API-based marketing analytics.
We are planning on closing our first 10 paying WMX customers!
We aim to finish the alpha version of WMX which means adding the funnel analytics feature with native integration with Facebook ads.
We are also planning to add 5K in net MRR to Wild Mail.
We will focus a lot on Success to get to know you and create deeper relationships with you all.
That’s a wrap! I hope you liked it and I’ll see you in our next report 😌