Welcome back to our monthly Transparency Report series. All our past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: April 2020, May 2020, June 2020.

This month we are gonna kick off our report by sharing a little bit of what we do outside work so you get to know us a little bit more.  🙂

We are pretty much all water babies at Wild Audience but we love nature in general so we have been enjoying the outdoors as much as possible lately.

Here is a little sneak peek for you:

I’ll share more about this later on, let’s get back to business for now.

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 love reading it as much as we love creating it.

As mentioned in our last report, July was a big and important month for us and we can not wait to tell you all about it.

The first thing we can share with you is that we are now at €17,056 MRR (last month was €14,701) which is an awesome progression!

By the way, if 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.

Let’s dive in and see what happened in July.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

July was our 4th biggest month in WM history in terms of MRR growth (in %). We grew our MRR a whooping +14,38% 😏

We added a total of €2,215 in new MRR which is great. This month was interesting because the majority of our new MRR came from existing accounts meaning upgrades. Last month it mainly came from new accounts.

€1,187 has been our 2020 average for MRR coming from new accounts. This month it was €857 which is slightly below our average. This is due to the fact that we only had 2 new accounts of +100 MRR. To give you a little bit of context, last month we had 9 new accounts of +100 MRR.

This is also reflected in our average sales price which went down from €95,33 to €42,84.

In terms of MRR coming from existing customers, this month was pretty good as it went up from €308 to €1,745 with one major expansion aka upgrade of +€1000 this month.

ARR

We’ve got more good news! In July, we also passed 200k in ARR which is awesome!  😎

Churn:

We decreased our Net MRR Churn rate even further down this month, from -1.12% to -9.11% which is obviously awesome and is due to the big expansion we had in July.

Just in case you don’t remember: Having a net negative MRR churn rate means that we keep growing through expansion MRR and reactivation MRR even if we don’t add any new business.  😉

Some thoughts for next month:

For August, I do predict a slower month as most of our marketing campaigns will come to an end. We will obviously launch new campaigns but they will only show results later in the year around September and October.

Enough about revenue now, let’s talk about you 🙂

Customer Success

Looks like it’s that time again when I give you some customer success insights.

So in July we had a total of 116 new conversations (151 in June) with 90 customers (113 in June). It’s the summer and you’re all pretty quiet which totally makes sense. Things will pick up in September for sure.

Do you remember last month when we told you about our goal to reply within one hour? Well, we are getting closer!  😌

If you’re new, our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket is kind of a”sacred” metric when it comes to Customer Support. On average, our “First Response Time” is between 3-4 hours and we are trying to get to 1h.

Last month it was at 3h23.
This month it is at 1h50.

Pretty cool, heh? Alright, we know Customer Support is very quiet during the summer so it’s easy but we still feel like celebrating!  🥳

Customer Support System Update

This month we also spent some time cleaning and organising our customer support system inside HelpScout:

1. We created a tag system which will allow us to have more accurate data and know exactly what you guys contact us for. This will help us know what we need to improve and what we need to focus on.
2. We cleaned our “Saved Replies” section to be faster and more efficient when we reply to you guys. The saved replied feature of HelpScout is great for repetitive requests, follow-ups and reminders.

Testimonials

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In July we received 1 new video testimonial 🙂. You can watch it by clicking on the video down below.

Product

Our product range currently includes Wild Mail, Automation University and very soon Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics (WMX)

As you know, in June we completed the alpha version of WMX and our next steps were:

• To gather feedback from our first alpha users via zoom calls or loom videos to identify our next use cases & improve our UX.
• To add Facebook as our third integration to cover ROI-based use cases.

Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned.

We did not add any new features or use cases due to some infrastructure problems we experienced while onboarding our first alpha users.

Basically WMX started to crash all the time, typical early product experience you could say ..  😅

In order to really test WMX with users live during a zoom call, we had to fix our infrastructure and that’s what we did:

• We moved everything to AWS and then implemented pooling which allows us to queue connection requests so that the app doesn’t crash when there are a lot of connection requests at the same time (which happens quite easily).

• We automated the data import process. To give you some context here – depending on the account size – we usually deal with half a million of data points per account at this time so manual data import was not an option anymore.

• We also moved our login process to auth.

These three things took us the whole month of July to resolve but we now have a stable alpha version (yay!) and we can do user calls again to gather feedback and move on with the next features.

Hopefully we can give you a demo soon 🙂

Wild Mail

In July, CXA Customer (Experience Automation) for Marketing was released.

CXA for Marketing is a complete set of marketing tools that help businesses orchestrate connected customer experiences across channels like web, social, email, chat, and text. 

You’ve now got new marketing channels and integrations, and the ability to personalize web pages using customer data collected from touchpoints throughout the customer journey. With the new functionality, you can now: 

• Create high-converting, interactive landing pages in minutes, with simple set up and easy-to-use templates. In an ongoing commitment to value, we’re now offering landing pages for free to all current customers.
• Personalize any web page using data stored in tags, such as past purchases, shopping preferences, interests, demographics, and engagement data (coming soon)
• Automatically trigger push notifications and SMS messages based on any action taken during the customer journey via Twilio.
• Automatically trigger Slack notifications based on customer behavior (like when a customer subscribes to email, creates a support ticket, or writes a review).

You can read it all about it in this article but how exciting?  😏

If you’re new, Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits. Learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

Oh and we also fixed 4 bugs this month 🤖 but it’s time to talk marketing now.

Marketing

Traffic Data:

We added 217 new contacts to our list this month against 156 last month. There is definitely an improvement this time which is good as we were still working behind the scene this month, focusing on strategy and creating a new game plan for our growth phase. I’ll tell you more about this in a minute.

You can also see that our traffic is still mainly organic inbound traffic (50%) and direct (30%) which means that we get very high quality leads at the moment and we like that! 🙂

Let’s have a quick look at the funnel data now.

Relationship Funnel Data:

Breakdown for July 2020:

Traffic: 3162
Leads: 217 (6,86%)
Trials: 45 (20,74%)
Customers: 17 (37,78%)

What can we say about those numbers?

1. Our traffic is usually three times higher than this number when we publish content and for now we don’t.
2. Our benchmark numbers are 30% conversion rate for lead to trial and a 15% conversion rate for trial to customer so overall it’s not too bad.
3. Remember that our data is not accurate but we are making great progress with our software Wildmetrics (which will be using a tag-based approach and will finally provide real & accurate data in real-time) so we are happy.

So our Relationship Funnel seems to be working and that’s music to my ears. 🙂

Also this month we launched our brand new funnel!  🎉

Growth Strategy

As mentioned above, we spent a lot of time this month putting our new growth strategy together which means:

• Creating a growth plan (with strategy and implementation phases).
• Defining our main channels and the goals for each of them.

We just started the implementation and for now, our focus will be on this three channels: Youtube, Blog and PPC.

Here is our plan for the next three months:

1. YouTube:
   – Produce 1 video in Spanish each week.
   – Rank Youtube videos.
2. PPC:
   – Retarget website visitors on Google Display & YouTube to increase conversions & do low-cost branding
3. Blog:
   – Translate articles into Spanish.
   – Rank first Spanish articles in Google.

Everything we do is quite organic-based and focusing on these three channels makes sense for us because:

• We do organic YouTube videos and also run ads to grow the channel and help as many people as possible with our tutorials.
• We use Google display because we want to create a branding experience with a low budget
• We translate our existing content in spanish which is an easy way to rank first in Google for spanish.

And the focus on spanish content leads me to the other project.

Translation Project

This month, we hired a spanish translator which means that besides our YouTube tutorials we will now also be able to publish more articles and case studies in spanish. As mentioned above, translating our existing content is an easy way for us to get rank in Google for Spanish with a low budget and it makes sense as well since our overall strategy is quite organic-based.

Here is a little sneak peek on our translation pipe with all our articles (case studies, breakdown, sales funnel, marketing guide):

Founder Talk

The last few months made us rethink our situation a little bit. We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on who we are, who we want to be and how we want to do it.

And this month, we took the decision to go fully remote as a team inside the European region. We’ve all been working fully remote for the last five months and it’s been working really well.

While work is important to all of us and we are all very committed, we also appreciate and value life outside work. And this decision gives us the freedom and flexibility that we all want.

Having a European remote setup allows us to:

• Create a European team & culture.
• Work in same/similar time zones with the freedom of living where-ever you want.
• Work with like minded people who help us learn and grow as individuals.
• Slow down and spend more time outside work doing what we love.
• Reduce our impact on the environment by travelling by train (vs flying) for our team retreats.
• And so much more ..

For us, it’s about working smart, with ease and be relaxed while being challenged. We want to keep it simple, no fancy offices and no big expenses. We want to focus on profit, not revenue.

At the moment we have two people in Spain, one in the UK and one in Argentina moving to Europe in the next few months. And we are looking for a new developer within the European region.

On my side, I rented my flat in Barcelona to a Swedish guy and moved down south to follow the wind and the waves.

Who knows where we will be next but that’s the solution we found that works best for us to work and live at the same time. I hope you find yours and I guess we will see you in the water! 🏄

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Outlook

Let’s see what’s in the pipe for August now!

Check out our public roadmap to see the progress of our team in real time.

In August, we will work on the projects circled in red color.

We are back on track and excited for another month.

Emilie will be working on cleaning and organising all the articles of the blog section of our website in preparation for our new website which I am working on at the moment aside from Wildmetrics.

Benji on his side, will be working on growth. He will continue to implement our new strategy by recording new Youtube tutorials, publishing new articles in spanish and creating a new MasterClass for Automation University.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our August 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

You are reading our monthly Transparency Report series. Past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: Q1 2020, April 2020, May 2020.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

As of June 30th 2020 we are dangerously approaching the €15k with €14,701 MRR which is great!

If 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.

June was a pretty good month. While we are still not actively growing our MRR, the numbers are going up and we are about to jump into our growth phase.

This month every team member felt that their hard work paid off which is very exciting.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

June 2020 was a good month in terms of MRR growth. We grew a whooping +15.84% compared to a month ago.

MRR:

That’s our second biggest month after January 2020 were we achieved +19.48% in growth. But in terms of added new business, June 2020 has definitely been our biggest month. We added €1,990 in new business to our MRR.

Great 😎

The main reason for that was that we acquired a few bigger accounts as customers. We closed two €400 MRR accounts as well as 5 +100 MRR accounts. Just to put this into perspective, in May 2020 we did not add any account with more than €100 in MRR, which was also the reason why our MRR growth in May 2020 was only at +4.48%.

This can also be seen by looking at our average sales price.

We increased our ASP from around €30 in May to €90 in June which can be explained through the bigger accounts we closed this month.

Churn:

We managed to decrease our Net MRR Churn rate a little more from -0.89% in May 2020 to -1.12% in June 2020. As long as we keep it below 0% for now, we are pretty happy.

For the people who don’t know what it means to have a net negative MRR churn rate..

..We keep growing through expansion MRR and reactivation MRR even if we would not add any new business.

Customer Success

It’s time to talk about you guys (yes, you!), because you are and will always be the most important people in our business.

In June we had a total of 151 conversations (218 in May) with 113 customers (185 in May).

June is the beginning of the summer and things usually tend to slow down a little.

But the fact that these numbers continue to go down also means that our onboarding process is on point and that all the knowledge you need is available in our Help Center for you to consult at any time.

You gave us a 100% happiness score for this month and we are very happy to see you happy! 😍

Our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket is still one of the most important metrics for us when it comes to Customer Support. Our “First Response Time” on average is between 4-5 hours and we keep monitoring it every month.

This month it was at 3h23.

To give you an idea, our First Response Time for the last two months was:

April: 4h58.

May: 3h46.

Not bad, heh? 🙂

Two things we are currently working on:

(A) The way we answer our support tickets.
We are trying to answer your email with loom videos as often as possible. It is more personal and usually easier (for you and for us) especially when it comes to technical questions or to show you how a feature works. It’s definitely quicker and seems to make everyone happier 🙂

(B) “Our First Time Response”.
While some emails require more time as we need to investigate further to find the best answer or solution, we are currently trying to reply to your emails within an hour. Let’s keep an eye on our First Time Response during the next few months and see how we’re doing.

Product

Our product range currently includes Wild Mail, Automation University and very soon Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics

We spend the whole month of June building our first tangible MVP. And it’s ready!

Quick reminder before I jump into it: 
We believe that accurate data is the key for growth but we struggle to get accurate data ourselves so we decided to find a solution for this that is called Wildmetrics. 

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking for marketing campaigns, funnels and channels. It integrates with your marketing tools natively & uses a tag-based tracking approach as your source of truth to not rely on in-accurate cookies, pixels or UTM tracking links.

Alright! Now that things are clear, let me tell you more about our MVP and the approach we took to build it.

It’s pretty simple, we have followed a use case based approach and have identified a number of use cases which Wildmetrics will be able to cover. Here are a few examples:

• Use Case #1: How much revenue generated lead magnet A in May 2019 compared to lead magnet B?
• Use Case #2: What channel generated the most revenue in Q2 2020?
• Use Case #3: What is the ROI of funnel X in the last week?
• Use Case #4: What is the sales cycle length of funnel Z in the last year?
• Use Case #5: What is the CAC for customers for funnel Y in May 2020?
• Use Case #6: How long does it take until FB ad campaign X breaks even?
• Use Case #7: What is the ROAS of each of my FB ads campaign in the last 30 days?

These are just 7 out of 68 use cases we have identified. You can see them all here.

By working out use cases together with our alpha users, we want to prove our hypothesis right or wrong.

At the moment, our MVP is purely functional and has no real design on purpose. Here are our first 4 use cases WMX supports (see screenshot below).

In summary:

• We have completed infrastructure and user research.
• We have identified the most common use cases.
• We have built the first version of Wildmetrics which covers 4 use cases.
• We are about to onboard our 10 first alpha users.

Next steps:

• Gather feedback from our first alpha users via zoom calls or loom videos to identify our next use cases & improve our UX
• Add Facebook as our third integration to cover ROI-based use cases

More about this in our next transparency report and we might also share some screenshots of WMX to give you a little sneak peek but that’s all for today regarding WMX 😋

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Free ROI analytics features (Wildmetrics)
• One month paid by us (click here to learn more about this)
• Our unique method & templates
• Automation University discount (link)

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

In June, a new integration with Salesforce was released. You can read it all about it in this article.

We also fixed 10 bugs this month 🤖

Ok let’s move on to marketing now ..

Marketing

Traffic Data:

We added 156 new contacts to our list this month against 154 last month. As you can see there isn’t a big difference from last month and the reason behind this is simply that we got less traffic this month. This is because we stopped publishing content like blog posts and YouTube videos to focus our time on our big Funnel Update Project.

But more about this later.

When it comes to the origin of our traffic, you can see down below that our entire traffic is still mainly organic inbound traffic.

More about data in the next section.

Relationship Funnel Data:

I am gonna break down our funnel for June 2020 now, so let’s have a look at the numbers:

• Traffic: 3,108 uniques
• Leads: 156 (5,02%)
• Trials: 43 (27,6%)
• Customers: 22 (51,2%)

These numbers don’t look too bad at first sight but the problem is that they are not accurate. The 43 trials could come from the 156 leads which we collected this mont h but they could also come from any month previous to June or it could be people who registered for a trial but without becoming a lead first.

The solution to the problem?

Wildmetrics 😎

Our benchmark numbers are 30% conversion rate for lead to trial and a 15% conversion rate for trial to customer. So we are not doing too bad.

Funnel Update Project

For the last two months we have been working hard on building a whole new funnel for Wild Mail (in English and in Spanish). This project involved all team members and took us a lot of time (see screenshot from Everhour below).

For this project we’ve had to take some time to reflect and analyze the status quo aka our current funnel. We needed to have a clear idea of what was working well and what was not.

Our WM funnel includes 43 automations, which gives you an idea about the complexity & volume of this project.

We re-wrote 24 new emails for our different sequences such as our RBS, Sales Sequence, Onboarding and Customer Success Sequences.

We also created a new lead magnet. We updated every single aspect of our funnel and there are two reasons for this:

1. We needed to update our messaging to be in-line with our new positioning in order to communicate “Grow your business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.” everywhere in our messaging.
2. We wanted to focus more on user experience, customer journey and success as well as on bringing you more value.  

We are pretty happy about the result and can’t wait to see our Relationship Funnel live.

Founder Talk

As a SaaS business, June has been an amazing month. It’s been our best month in terms of growth and once again we have made enormous progress in our journey from 10k MRR to 50k MRR. After all the hard work that every team member has put into the foundational phase for the last 6 months, it’s an incredible feeling to finally see some results.

In this founder talk section, there are two things I would like to highlight today:

1. Slowing down over the summer and connect with life and with ourselves.
2. Celebrating the achievements and the work we have done so far and continue doing every day.

It’s important to work but it’s also important to have fun at work and outside of work everyday. We encourage everyone and ourselves to slow down because we don’t want to wait for the weekend or the holidays to live. We want to live and connect with life every single day especially now over the summer months.

We all have interests and passions outside work that we want to nurture, enjoy and now is the time. And it’s also a great way to celebrate the work and everything we have achieved so far.

Of course, as a business, we do want to grow, we do have goals and we do work hard to achieve everything we want to achieve every single month but one doesn’t exclude the other.

We want to make sure that we combine both (work and hobbies/passions) and that we find a balance if such thing exists.

So if I had to give you a little advice for the next two months, slow down and live your life whatever that means to you.

Success is really not everything.

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in July!

Check out our public roadmap to see the progress of our team in real time.

In July we will work on the projects circled in red color.

As you can see, we got a little behind and we will be wrapping up foundational projects beginning of July, finally!

The first two weeks of July will be an “integration sprint” where we ship our last big projects (WM Funnel Update Project and Wildmanual Update) and jump into a new cycle (3 sprints) where we kick-off our growth phase (yay!).

Benji will work on creating our new growth strategy focusing on YouTube, PPC and Partners while Emilie will focus on Customer Success (meaning you guys).

Besides that I will continue to work on Wildmetrics (with the feedback of our first users) and with our new UI designer & illustrator to create a new look and feel for our brand Wild Audience. And I will also be looking for a full time developer to join our team so if you know anyone, reach out to me via bastian at wildaudience dot com.

July will definitely be another big month for us and to say that we are excited is an understatement.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our July 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

You are reading our monthly Transparency Report series. Past Transparency Reports can be accessed here: Q1 2020, April 2020.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

As of May 31st 2020 we are at €12,667. That’s 25% of our target revenue. Great!

If 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.

This month has definitely been an interesting one.

In terms of growth, it was slow and frustrating (for reasons I’ll explain later). But as a team, we achieved so much and reflected a lot too. 🙂

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Founder Talk
6. Outlook

Revenue

MRR:

Our MRR at the end of May 2020 was €12,677 which is a 4.29% increase over April 2020.

May was definitely a slower month for us and to be honest it was not as good as we hoped for. Let’s put the 4.29% in comparison to previous months:

1. January growth: +19.47%
2. February growth: +12.37%
3. March growth: +7.31%
4. April growth: +11.03%
5. May growth: +4.29%

That’s an average month to month MRR growth rate of 10.89%.

Meaning our May growth rate was well below average. Here are two reasons why I believe our growth performance was below average:

(A) In May we had smaller deal sizes compared to April. The difference in ASP (average sales price) was almost €20 per account less. Even though we onboarded in May only 5 customers less than in April, due to the smaller account sizes our New Business MRR in May was 50% less compared to the previous month.

In other words, we usually close a few bigger accounts – €250 MRR and up – per month but this month we did not close any big accounts. That explains our lower ASP and also smaller MRR growth.

(B) We are sill not actively growing our MRR as we don’t engage in any type of growth activities until July 2020. That means no PPC, no retargeting, no outreach, no new articles, no new YouTube videos.

Everything we do currently is 100% organic & inbound. This will change from July 2020 onwards when we launch our growth campaigns 🙂 (first real results to be expected in autumn 2020..)

Churn:

We are trying to improve our Transparency Reports every month and become a more real & transparent team. And that is why this report covers a new metric: Churn 🙂

At Wild Audience we are looking at Net MRR Churn Rate which is the rate at which you are losing MRR through downgrades and cancellations, offset by expansion and reactivation MRR.

In the screenshot below you can see that the first 3 months of 2020 we still had a positive Net MRR Churn Rate – which was not so good. That was mostly due to missing features which customers wanted. We built them and shipped them at the end of Q1 and you can see the results 🙂

We are now at a negative Net MRR Churn Rate which means that even if we would stop adding new business every month we would still slightly grow.

A negative Net MRR Churn Rate is a great foundation for our growth campaigns coming soon 🙂

Customer Success

Here, we talk about you guys because you are the most important people in our business (always!).

In May we had a total of 218 conversations (313 in April) with 185 customers (212 in April).

As you can see that these numbers have decreased since last month and that can be explained by two things:

(A) We have recently been working on the content of our Help Center (design is a work in progress ..) improving our existing articles and creating new ones to make sure you are as independent as possible.

(B) We have shipped a lot of new features (discount, cancellation, .. etc) and improved our billing system in Wild Mail last month to make your life easier.

You seemed pretty happy in May as you guys gave us a 91% happiness score so thank you! 😍

As you know, one of the most important metrics for us when it comes to Customer Support is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. We aim to have a “First Response Time” between 4-5 hours and we constantly monitor it.

The main factor that seems to influence this metric are holidays, as reflected by the data.

With no holidays in the last two months combined with our efforts to help you succeed, I am happy to say that in May 2020 our “First Response Time” was at 3h46.

To give you an idea, our First Response Time for the last two months was:

March: 7h13.

April: 4h58.

This is amazing! 🙂

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In May we received 2 new video testimonials 🙂. You can watch them if you’d like (trust me, you want to watch them!), just click on the videos down below.

Product

May 2020 has been a fascinating month in terms of product. While April marked an important month for Wild Mail, May was all about Wildmetrics.

Here’s a quick introduction to both products..

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking software that enables companies to grow their business more profitably by showing them what campaigns, funnels & channels generate higher ROI and which don’t.

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

While Wildmetrics (WMX) is currently under development and not available yet, Wild Mail (WM) can be checked out here.

Wildmetrics (WMX)

Let’s start out with WMX. The new kid on the block 😉

This project is especially fun & cool for our team because we are building a new software product 100% from scratch. I have a never done this before and I am happy like a kid about all the new things I am learning 🙂

A challenging element is the novelty of the approach of our solution. Compared to standard analytic tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics, we integrate with your marketing tools natively & use a tag-based tracking approach as our source of truth to not rely on in-accurate cookies or UTM tracking links.

That’s one of the main differences.

We do this because we believe that accurate data is a foundational necessity for growth. And your current data – coming from all kinds of tools like Google Analytics, Stripe, Accounting, Calendly, ActiveCampign, Facebook Ads, Google Ads etc, are all painting a different picture.

How frustrating and difficult to work with..

Here’s what our developer (Leo) and myself have completed this month..

(1) Research:

I did a lot of different kind of research: Customer, Problem, Solution, Infrastructure, Competitor, Market, MVP & Product research.

Here’s an overview of my notes in Notion to give you an idea how I organize this project & my thoughts.

(2) MVP:

After defining our problem hypothesis and doing all the research, I defined our MVP.

The MVP (WMX V1.0) can be described in two words: Tag Analytics.

Here’s what you can do and what it solves: Integrate your Wild Mail account and Stripe account. Then see your revenue data per tag.

Here are a bunch of fun use cases:

• See collected revenue per lead magnet for a specific time period
• See revenue per Facebook ad campaign for a specific time period
• Learn about the probability of people who purchased product A, to also purchase product B
• Know how many leads within a specific time period schedule a sales call
• Know how many customers you get from lead magnet A within a certain time period and compare that result to customers generated through lead magnet B
• Know the sales cycle length of one of your products

Remember: WMX does not use UTM links or pixels to show results. But instead, we rely on a way more accurate data point – tags.

WMX V1.0 will be invite only. There are three requirmets to start using WMX:

1. You need to have a Wild Mail account
2. You need to have a Stripe account
3. You need to be willing to share feedback with us (so that we can build WMX V2.0)

If you’re interested in WMX & you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can start using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here (it also includes 4 additional benefits which you can check on that page).

(3) Roadmap:

Here’s how & in which order we add things to WMX (at the time I write this):

• WMX V1.0 (Alpha): Tag Analytics with Wild Mail & Stripe
• WMX V2.0 (Beta): ROI Analytics with Wild Mail, Stripe & Facebook Ads
• WMX V3.0 (Public): We will add ESP Analytics as well as an ActiveCampaign integration
• WMX V4.0: We will add Funnel Analytics and Google Ads integration

The above is obviously subject to change and will be updated as we learn.

(4) Infrastructure:

Our technology stack for WMX will be based on the Jumpstack philosophy. We will also be using a cutting edge framework called RedwoodJS.

Redwood is an opinionated, full-stack, serverless web application framework that works with React, GraphQL, and Prisma.

I kept this overview quite general on purpose. I am little unsure how much you guys are interested in the details of this 😉

Alright! That’s all about WMX. Let’s continue with WM now.

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Free ROI analytics features (Wildmetrics)
• One month paid by us (click here to learn more about this)
• Our unique method & templates
• Automation University discount (link)

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

Here’s a list of new WM features added in May:

• Freshly re-designed & added new functionality of iOS and Android apps (article)
• New integrations added: Slack, Twilio, Nimble CRM, Google Contacts
• New Marketplace to find automation templates (article)

Remember: Wild Mail is powered by ActiveCampaign but offers added functionality like ROI tracking.

Automation University

In May, we launched Automation University! Juhuu!

Automation University is an online university that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

Here’s what’s included for €25/month:

The launch was super fun and we took a slightly different approach. Here’s what we did..

We sent two pre-launch emails to identify interested people (based on clicking and replying). People who engaged, received another 3 emails within 4 days.

Results of the launch:

• 351 people took part in the launch (identified as highly interested).
• We got 46 new customers.
• So our sales conversion was 13.11%.

That’s €13,800 in ARR added every year. A good foundation now to start growing AU in an evergreen way as a supportive educational product to Wild Mail and Wildmetrics.

Our goal with AU is not to make money per se but to help our customers grow their business (because we make our money with WM & WMX).

Ok let’s move on to marketing now ..

Marketing

Traffic Data:

Safe to say that things haven’t really changed as we added 154 new leads to our list this month which is pretty much the same as last month.

As you can see down below, our entire traffic is organic inbound traffic:

Relationship Funnel Data:

Let’s break down our funnel for May 2020. Remember this data is not 100% accurate because in order to get this data accurately you either need to pay for a REALLY expensive custom solution implemented by a big data agency (and the data will still be in-accurate because they use pixels & UTMs) or you use Wildmetrics (which will be using a tag-based approach and will finally provide real & accurate data in real-time).

Breakdown:

• Traffic: 4,173 uniques
• Leads: 154 (3.69%)
• Trials: 44 (28.58%)
• Customers: 15 (34.10%)

Interesting huh?

Which other marketing company shares that kind of data publicly? 😉

But keep in mind that this data is not accurate because it’s not a cohort analysis. For example, the 44 new trials could come from the 154 new leads we added in May but they could also come from leads from previous months. In order to get accurate data, we and you need Wildmetrics 😉

Let’s talk about the improvements we will have to make soon. Clearly our weakest point is our ability to capture leads. The conversion rate from website visitor to lead is low (3.69%). This is due to three reasons:

• We don’t have any type of retargeting in place to re-engage visitors
• Our blog post content upgrades are still “under construction” as we switched from SurveySlam to ConvertBox recently
• Our whole blog will be re-designed and our CTA approach will be different (more about this in a future report)

Lead to trial & trial to customer conversion rates are great. Our benchmark for both KPIs is 15% and we doubled this. Our Relationship Funnel is clearly working.

Nothing to complain 🙂

Founder Talk

In summary, the month of May was not our biggest growth month but still a great month in so many other ways. We launched Automation University, which will be a great education vehicle for our customer base, as well started the development of Wildmetrics which is super exciting.

Virtual Team Retreat:

We also did our mid-year team retreat – this time it was virtually due to corona times. It was shorter than normal and 100% focused on strategy, reflection & future.

We usually start out by beaming us back to our last quarterly team retreat. We go over the goals we set out for ourselves and see what we accomplished and what changed. We then continue to reflect over all the lessons learned before we start planning the next quarter. We always do our quarterly retreats in the 2nd month of the quarter so that we still have one month to change directions – if needed – before the next quarter begins.

Deep-Dive 1:1s:

After the retreat I also did 2.5 hour 1:1s with each team member to really go deep into their purpose, goals, feedback, dreams, team, company strategy and ideas to make sure we as a team are super aligned and happy.

For me as the CEO of the company, this is really important to me and close to my heart. Without the team Wild Audience would not exist. I get a lot of joy seing team members develop their characters and learn new things. I, myself, also learn so much through each team member.

For us, emotion check-ins, feelings check-outs, sharing circles and reflection is really core to our culture. And I am happy to share that we as the Wild Audience team are super focused, healthy and work with great motivation towards helping our customers grow their business with marketing automation 🙂

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in June!

June will be our last month working on foundational projects. And we are so excited about this! You can look at our public roadmap to follow along in real time on how we as a team progress.

In June we will work on the projects circled in green color.

After our team retreat we came to release that our emails to sell Wild Mail did not reflect our most recent messaging and positioning (“building authentic relationship with marketing”) so we decided to re-do our funnel from scratch (new lead magnet, new lead to trial RBS, new trial to customer RBS, new customer onboarding experience and new customer success experience).

We will ship all of this by the end of June 🙂

We should also be able to go live with the first version of Wildmetrics and get the first users to play around.

Benji will be looking for a new translator to make more of our English content available in Spanish while Emilie will finally update our Wildmanual (the place with all our knowledge) and I will record 8 new YouTube tutorials which will be published in July & August.

Besides that I will also look for a new UX designer & illustrator to work on a new look and feel for our brand Wild Audience. If you know anyone, reach out to me via bastian at wildaudience dot com.

Things we will design over the summer:

• New Brandbook (identity)
• UX Mockups for Wildmetrics
• New graphics for our website
• New page designs for a few key pages on our website

Another big month ahead of us. We are definitely going into the right direction so we are pretty excited for what’s to come.

Alright, that’s a wrap!

See you in our June 2020 Transparency Report 🙂

Welcome to our second Transparency Report by Wild Audience. We have published our first ever Transparency Report about Q1 of 2020 last month.

I got a lot of messages and emails from people congratulating us about our new transparency initiative 😍 Which shows us once again that people want businesses to be more real, open & authentic.

The goal of our transparency reports is to take you along the journey of growing our new software products (Wild Mail & Wildmetrics) from €10,000 MRR to €50,000 MRR.

The monthly Transparency Report talks about what we do in order to grow and how we progress on our journey (including the good & the bad).

At Wild Audience we are helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business.

We do that through our suite of products:

1. Wild Mail [marketing automation software]
2. Wildmetrics [ROI tracking for campaigns, funnels & acquisition channels]
3. Automation University [membership to learn about marketing automation]
4. Accelerator [consulting program to implement marketing automation]

All our products have the same goal: Helping you build authentic relationships to grow your business.

Let’s dive in now.

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Sales
6. Founder Talk
7. Outlook

Revenue

Our MRR at the end of April 2020 was €12,194 which is a 11% increase over March 2020.

In regards to business, April was an interesting month. The corona pandemic was spreading around the world and we did not really know yet if or how bad our business would be impacted.

Our MRR growth rate in January 2020 was 20%.

Our MRR growth rate in February 2020 was 12.31%.

In March 2020 our MRR grew by 7.28%.

Our average MRR growth rate in 2020 so far is 12.64% which would mean that our April performance was in line with our average and the corona pandemic did not really have a negative or positive impact on our business.

In April our ARR got dangerously close to €150,000. Our milestones are:

• €100,000 ✅
• €250,000 (probably Q3 of 2020)
• €500,000
• €1,000000

The entire team is still in set-up phase. We are not yet in growth modus. This essentially means that each team member is currently spending most of her/his time on working on foundational projects rather than growth projects.

Foundational projects include stuff like backend cleaning, improving our funnel, re-branding etc.. These projects are scheduled to complete by the end of June or earlier.

Once we enter growth phase, we will be launching PPC lead generation campaigns, publish more YouTube tutorials and connect with more partners. This should then also have an effect on our month-to-month growth rate 😋

Customer Success

In this chapter we usually talk about you guys because you are the most important people in our business.

Thank you so much for believing in us and trusting us with helping you grow your business. We are very grateful!

In April we had a total of 313 conversations with 212 customers.

Our customers (you!) are giving us a 89% happiness score which is pretty good! 🙂

As mentioned in our previous report, the metric we are always working to improve is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. Our normal “First Response Time” is usually between 4-5 hours. After being above 7h on avg. during Q1 of 2020, we managed to get back on track in April despite Easter weekend which is great! 🙂

To give you an idea, our First Response Time in April 2020 was at 4h58.

Our customers keep sending us some love via video customer testimonials which we really appreciate. We publish all of them on our love page and on our Instagram account.

In April we received 3 new video testimonials 🙂. You can click on the videos below and watch them if you like.

Product

Our transparency reports cover the journey of growing our software products from €10k to €50k MRR. That is why I will focus on Wild Mail in the product section. In the future I will also cover Wildmetrics once it’s launched.

What is Wild Mail?

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

Wild Mail is in partnership with ActiveCampaign. So, if you currently have an ActiveCampaign account, you can use AC through Wild Mail to get our benefits:

• Analytics Features (Wildmetrics)
• Welcome Gift (click here to see what this is)
• Our Unique Method & Templates
• Automation University Discount

You can learn about the benefits of using ActiveCampaign through Wild Mail here.

In April, we shipped 4 new features:

• Cancelation feature
• New customer hub
• Automatic discount feature
• Spanish trial accounts

We also fixed 13 bugs 🤖

April marks an important milestone for the development of Wild Mail! We have completed all Wild Mail related development projects. The rest of Q2 and Q3 will now focus on the development of Wildmetrics. More about this in the May Transparency Report.

Marketing

Traffic Data:

In April, we added 208 new leads to our list. That’s not much. We also did some heavy list cleaning and unsubscribed a bunch of in-active contacts.

As a comparison: When we run paid acquisition we collect 100-150 leads per day. So that’s in two days what we do in only one month right now.

This may sound like a huge problem, but check this out below..

What are our current lead acquisition channels?

• Blog
• Partners
• Recommendations

Our entire traffic is organic inbound traffic.

And that also translates to the performance of our Relationship Funnel.

Relationship Funnel Data:

Now it gets a little more interesting.

To collect accurate funnel data is really difficult. It’s so difficult that we at Wild Audience are actually building a new product called Wildmetrics (WMX) to solve that problem.

Wildmetrics is ROI tracking for marketing campaigns, funnels and acquisition channels. We plan to launch the MVP of WMX in Q3 of 2020.

This Transparency Report will cover two main parts of our Wild Mail funnel:

• Lead to trial RBS
• Trial to Customer RBS

RBS stands for Relationship Builder Sequence and is part of our Relationship Funnel.

Let’s look at the stats now:

In April 2020, 78.22% of our leads also get a Wild Mail trial. That’s huge.

I get this data from our funnel dashboard build with Google Sheets. But this data is not 100% accurate.

Let me explain: It’s not 78.22% of the leads that signed-up in April (which was 208 people). Our dashboard considers all leads – regardless of when they signed-up – and therefore the numbers are not really accurate.

But it gives you an idea in which direction you’re heading. And we are definitely heading towards high conversion rates.

This is happening for two reasons:

1. Our Relationship Funnel is working well
2. The quality of traffic we were getting in April

Obviously the quality of traffic determines your performance. Quality input = great output.

Organic traffic is one of the best types of traffic you can get in terms of quality.

Our trial to customer conversion rate for April was 25.32%. Not too bad.

Data is great. And accurate data is even better. But there are lot of different problems when it comes to data accuracy and I honestly don’t trust our data at all. That’s also why we build Wildmetrics, mainly for ourselves first.

YouTube:

We were busy recording new tutorials for you guys! In April we published three English tutorials and one Spanish tutorial.

You can check the tutorials out below or visit the Wild Audience YouTube Channel.

Sales

We did 19 sales calls in April. Benji is responsible for sales at Wild Audience. He does sales calls only Tuesday & Thursday which means on a sales day he had on average 2 sales calls scheduled.

Considering that we don’t do any type of paid traffic acquisition like Facebook ads at this moment, 19 calls is not too bad. Our traffic and inquiries are 100% organic and inbound at this very moment.

Founder Talk

In the end, April 2020 turned out to be better than I thought 😊 That’s awesome!

In April we completed 2.5 sprints. At the end of each sprint, each team member documents her/his lessons learned and then we reflect over them during our Sprint Reflection Meetings & Sharing Circles.

This helps a lot to grow as a team and avoid making the same mistakes. Here are some of our lessons learned from April 2020..

1) Branding:

Throughout the last few months we shipped a ton of new features for Wild Mail as well as build an entire new website from scratch. We also launch new products like Automation University or Wildmetrics in the near future. The problem we keep running into is that we don’t know which design guidelines to follow when building new products or features. We don’t have a professional brand manual or brand identity.

That is why in May we will start to work with a branding professional, a graphic designer for our website and an illustrator to create mockups for Wildmetrics so that we can build an easy to use design system for our software products and web assets. This should solve our problem.

2) SOPs:

Another biggie for the team was to prioritize SOPs again. We have a ton of SOPs and but during April we could feel that there was quality issues for internal projects which could have been avoided by consulting our Wildmanual first. We have now changed our project management process and start all new projects with an SOP check. This should solve our problem.

3) Feedback Loop:

We changed the way feedback works at our company! The problem we ran into was that as soon as a team member completed a (sub-)task in Asana, I often pro-actively provided feedback before team members could complete their quality control.

We will change from pro-active feedbacking to being asked to provide feedback. That allows for the team member to own the outcome of the task 100% and the responsibility also lies 100% with the team member. Only when a team member is sure he/she did a great job and is happy with his/her results she/he will invite Bastian to provide feedback. Less work for Bastian. Better work experience for everyone else.

Outlook

A few excited things coming-up in May!

In early May, we launch Automation University which means in May’s Transparency Report we will share the results of that launch.

I will be doing customer research to validate some of our problem hypothesis for our new software product Wildmetrics. Super excited about this 😎

I will also work closely with our developer to prepare the development of our MVP for Wildmetrics.

Wildmetrics things we will be doing:

• Turning customer research into user stories
• Doing user story mapping
• Writing development specs
• Doing infrastructure research
• And start writing some code for our MVP!

Benji will be leading a project to update & improve our core funnel to sell Wild Mail (huge project!).

Emilie is improving our customer support infrastructure & systems as well as moving all our clients and customers to Thinkific.

That’s a wrap!

See you in our May 2020 Transparency Report.

If you have feedback or questions, email me at bastian at wildaudience dot com.

This is the first “Transparency Report” by Wild Audience written by Bastián (founder). And I am super pumped about this!

Wild Audience is known for doing Respect-Based Marketing and selling with Relationship Funnels through Wild Mail.

So it makes 100% sense for us to continue with our authenticity & transparency efforts to become a more open, real & transparent company.

From now on, we will publish a monthly Transparency Report in the first week of each month covering the past month to talk about how we grow Wild Mail from 10,000€ MRR to 50,000€ MRR.

In case you have missed it: We launched our first software product called Wild Mail (in partnership with ActiveCampaign) and we have hit 10,000€ in MRR in March 2020.

You can read the whole story of how & why we turned SaaS in this article.

The monthly Transparency Report talks about what we do in order to grow and how we progress on our journey (including the good & the bad).

In the past months, we aimed for a 16% growth rate. Looking at our performance, I can see that we grew on average 14% every month.

But due to the corona pandemic we have decided as a team to go with a more conservative approach moving forward as we are not sure yet how bad our company will be impacted.

10% MRR growth rate would mean that we would hit 50,000€ MRR in September 2021. A 14% growth rate would allow us to hit our goal in March 2021 (keeping a linear growth rate is hard to do so we will adjust our target as we go). We will do our learning over the next few weeks and months and may adjust our growth goal up or down.

Since this is a new initiative by Wild Audience & we missed the first two months (January & February), I will do a little exception and cover the first three months in this article.

Our goal is to have a super transparent business. Obviously we can’t go from 10% transparency to 100% transparency and that is why we will roll out our transparency initiative month-by-month, adding more elements to our Transparency Report each month. I hope you’re excited!

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Sales
6. Founder Talk
7. April 2020 Outlook

Revenue

We tested the waters with software for the first time in 2019 reselling ActiveCampaign. Our MRR for Wild Mail on January 1st 2020 was €7,014.

By the end of the first quarter of 2020 we managed to grow it beyond 11,000€. As the corona crisis started we experience some churn and ended the month with €10,442.

If I compare that to Q4 2019, I can see that we grew Wild Mail by almost 50% compared to the previous quarter.

We need to consider two things here:

1. We are still in the set-up phase. We had to build a new website (more about this later) and change our funnels & branding. We are not yet in growth modus.
2. Corona crisis is hitting as we speak. Let’s see what the impact will be over the next quarter.

Overall, we are happy with our growth. We managed to hit the famous 10,000€ MRR goal and 100,000€ in annual run rate.

Customer Success

In this chapter we will talk about you guys. The most important people in our business: Our customers.

Thank you so much for believing in us and trusting us with helping you grow your business.

In Q1 of 2020 we had a total of 1189 conversations with 579 customers. We are so happy to have Emilie in our team to support and help you guys.

Our customers (you!) are giving us a 94% happiness score which is great!

One metric we need to improve on this quarter is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. The reason it is slightly up in Q1 is mainly because of Christmas holidays.

Our normal “First Response Time” is between 4-5 hours which is also what we achieved the previous quarter in Q4 of 2019.

We also published three new customer success case studies!

Case Study #1:
How Frank went from €300k/year to €300k/month [Accelerator + Wild Mail]

Case Study #2:
How OMR built stronger customer relationships [Wild Mail]

Case Study #3:
How ActiLingua generated 71% of their digital sales with email marketing [Wild Mail]

Pretty stocked and happy for our customers 🙂

And we started a new initiative for customers to submit customer testimonials. We used a tool called VideoAsk for that and it worked out well. We received 8 new video testimonials which made us really happy 🙂 You can click on the videos below and watch them if you like.

Product

Let’s talk product! We have lots to share and we were able to ship a ton of new things. Here’s a summary!

“What’s new?” Page

We have a new public page since February 19th 2020 called “What’s new?”: Link

The goal is to publish all new things we ship on this page. Think Instagram Stories but in text format with links and screenshots 🙂

The goal is to keep the people that follow us in the loop of what we are working on. Most companies focus on new features but our What’s new? page covers marketing, sales, website, content, product etc..

100% Public Roadmap

In the spirit of transparency we have now made our internal roadmap public. This is the exact same roadmap we use internally to plan our sprints. It covers all departments of our business (not only product!). Have a look here.

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation. Here’s a quick demo:

We work together with ActiveCampaign to provide the product while we do the billing, support and marketing & sales ourselves.

While our goal is to build new features and products on top of Wild Mail, we focused in Q1 to build the foundation. That meant in order to support our customers best, we wanted to launch our own billing app.

Our most requested feature was for customers to be able to download their own invoices. So we built it 🙂

We released new banners to make it easier for new trials to schedule software demos with our team.

And we also fixed 30 bugs!

While Q1 and Q2 of 2020 is all about building a great foundation for our new SaaS journey, Q3, Q4 and beyond will be about launching new features and offering more value to our customers 🙂

Accelerator

Accelerator is our done-with-you consulting program that is designed to help companies implement a marketing automation system to build authentic relationships with their audience and grow their business.

While we have not changed anything inside our offer (it is rock solid and proven to work), we have done a lot to support our clients grow.

I asked Benji (our head consultant) how many consulting calls he did and how many questions he answered from our awesome Accelerator clients:

• Consulting Calls: 27
• Consulting Questions: 275

Pretty cool 🙂

We have also published a new Accelerator client success case study and have a few new ones in the pipe.

Case Study: How Frank went from €300k/year to €300k/month

Frank is such an amazing guy and keeps crushing it with his business. Here’s an email he sent me on the 5th of March 2020.

If you want to learn more about Accelerator and apply to work with us, you can do that here.

Automation University

In case you were wondering what AU is ..? Automation University is the new name for our previous membership “Automation Rebels”.

Automation University is an online university that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

What’s the difference between the two offers?

• We are changing the way we deliver the offer
• We will update the pricing
• We will move everything from MightyNetwork to Thincific

But we will share more about the change in our April 2020 Transparency Report. We are working on this project as we speak and plan to launch Automation University sometime in April 2020.

If you are a current customer of Automation Rebels, don’t worry. By the time you read this you will already have received a customer only email explaining what will change.

Let’s move on to marketing now..

Marketing

Giving insights & transparency into our marketing is something we plan to do more and more over the next few transparency reports. We take things step-by-step.

Lead Generation

In Q1 of 2020 we welcomed 3171 new people to Wild Audience and exposed them to our Relationship Funnel. So that’s an average of 1000 new leads per month or 35 new leads per day.

We were using a mix of paid advertisements like Facebook ads, Instagram ads and YouTube ads as well as content marketing. I won’t go into the breakdown of our acquisition channels at this point. But that’s something I will start doing a little later this year 🙂 Stay tuned!

In the same time period we also registered 148 new Wild Mail trials. That equals a 5% conversion rate from lead to trial. We will work on improving this in a few weeks.

Wild Mail Partner Program

In March we launched the official Wild Mail Partner program! You can find all details about becoming a Wild Mail partner here.

We have onboarded our first 23 partners so far and even generated our first partner MRR already. Pretty happy with that considering we have not started to promote this big time.

ConvertBox

We switched from SurveySlam to ConvertBox. We are super happy with the switch! We used to recommend SurveySlam in the past years but last year the team behind SurveySlam did not deliver what they promised and that is when we switched. We use CB now on all our blog posts and PPC landing pages.

New Positioning

I took a lot of time to think through how to best position Wild Audience and its products in the market. After going into myself, talking with the team, doing customer & competitor research we came up with the following positioning:

Wild Audience with all its products is positioned as “helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business”.

🙂

New Website

The biggest project of this quarter was for sure our brand new website.

Building a brand new website from scratch is literally a three months project. It took us two months to design & develop everything and around one month to add the content.

The website features our all new SaaS look, new positioning, new branding and two languages: English & Spanish.

We will do another round of improvements in Q2 adding more functionality and updating the graphics.

The technology we use:

• WordPress
• Gutenberg by WordPress

We used ThriveArchitect in the past but decided to switch to Gutenberg for a few reasons.

ThriveArchitect gives you great flexibility and allows you to build a lot of things. The problem with that is though that it’s hard for team members (especially with less technical experience) to follow best practices and brand guidelines if you can pretty much adjust anything.

So what we wanted is:

• Visual drag & drop builder
• Beautiful design
• Less flexibility and options
• Make it easy and fast for non-technical team members to build awesome pages following our branding

And we achieved exactly that 🙂

Sales

We did 70 sales related calls in Q1 (based on Calendly). That’s 1.17 sales calls a day.

Our team does Wild Mail demos and Accelerator calls only on Tuesday & Thursday. Keeping that in mind, it means we got 3 sales calls each Tuesday and 3 calls each Thursday scheduled.

Founder Talk

In this section I want to share some general thoughts about our first quarter.

Looking back, I am extremely happy with the decision we have made to switch from a service-based business model to a SaaS business model.

I also love our new transparency initiative and hope that other founders find this sequence of Transparency Reports helpful and can learn from our experiments and failures.

Cashflow:

As the CEO of Wild Audience, one of my main focuses is cash flow. Being able to have the right amount of cash available at the right time to pay team members and growth efforts is key.

And that is why I have doubled-down on my financial planning and cashflow forecasting efforts. As a result, I feel more secure now in my decision making. I suggest to everyone reading this to go over expenses & past revenue (growth) and then project your revenue & expenses for each month. This makes realistic decision making easier.

Corona Pandemic:

The corona pandemic is on our mind these days. If you are Wild Audience customer or a fellow founder friend .. we all think about it constantly & wonder how this may impact our lives & businesses. Personally, I am mostly concerned about our own customers.

If you are our customer, please know that we are here for you. If you have worries, reach out to us.

Sometimes a friendly person listening to your worries does wonders. Sharing the grief and worry with someone is how I personally approach this crisis. I am in constant contact with my friends to exchange our feelings about personal & business matters. It helps.

We understand that our customers are the heart of our business. And without you guys there is no Wild Audience. Thanks for putting your trust in us.

What’s coming in April 2020?

And lastly I want to share with you our roadmap for April 2020 and beyond.

(1) Automation University:

The biggest announcement in April 2020 will definitely be the launch of Automation University. We did our learning about running a membership the last few months and are currently implementing our realizations.

The launch will include:

• New product strategy
• New platform
• New pricing structure
• New delivery strategy
• New content

Stay tuned 🙂

(2) Wild Mail:

We will also ship a few fun features:

• New Cancelation Feature (to make it super easy to cancel)
• Discount Feature
• Our own API to connect data points of different tools (Wild Mail, ActiveCampaign API, HelpScout, Zapier..)
• In-app messaging for our products (to make it easier to talk to our customers)

(3) New Newsletter Strategy:

In the past we automated our newsletter 100%. It was called the “Evergreen Newsletter”. We have done our learning and will now update our strategy. We will add some cool tweaks. You will see everything in action this month (April 2020)!

(4) New Lead Magnet:

I will work on a new lead magnet for the top of our Relationship Funnel. We do this because we updated our positioning & product strategy.

(5) New Tutorials:

From sprint #8 onwards (April 13th), we will start publishing short video tutorials on YouTube to help our audience grow their business by automating their marketing.

(6) New Website:

And finally we will ship new features for our website which we launched in March 2020. Our development efforts will focus on new blocks for customer video tutorials, client case studies & brand new tutorial library. The development will go into May 2020.

That’s a wrap!

Remember: Wild Audience with all its products is positioned as “helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business”.

That’s our goal and that is how we can help you 🙂

Hey this is Bastián! Founder and CEO here at Wild Audience.

Today I want to share our story and tell you why we decided to change our business model from service to SaaS.

If you want to read the SaaS announcement and skip the story (I do this sometimes too haha) click here.

You can jump to each year here: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

I started Wild Audience back in 2017 as a one man show selling my first online course called “Relationship Funnel” while traveling the world.

2017

The first year was a crazy year. I left Silicon Valley in 2016 working with Steli Efti for Close in Palo Alto. My first stop was Costa Rica where I was able to reduce my living costs a lot and work from the beach.

I launched a blog about technical marketing to basically document what I taught myself while studying other marketers. This blog turned into my first online course called “Relationship Funnel” which I started to sell while being in Bali.

I found a fun screenshot from archive.org ..

It was just me alone having a great time generating $20,000 per month in revenue.

All of that revenue was generated through my online course “Relationship Funnel”. Most of that year was spent traveling and learning.

2017 learnings:

• My biggest lesson was about focus. When I started Wild Audience I was generating 1k-2k a month, not much. But my mind was everywhere driven by curiosity and wanting to do it all. Once I stopped and slowed down (and traveled less) I started to focus which worked wonders for me.

• My second learning was about doubling-down on one single traffic source instead of trying to get new leads from different corners. Suddenly I was able to drive the amount of leads I needed into my funnel.

• Facebook ads worked extremely well for me. Once I doubled-down on Facebook ads my revenue started to increase from 1-2k per month to 15,000-25,000 per month. That was a game changer for me!

2018

After traveling for a while I decided to come back to Europe (I’m from Austria) and chose Barcelona as my new base. I love the latin vibes, good weather, beach+ocean and Europe 😉

I hired my first two full-time team members James & Daniel when I arrived in Barcelona. James is a friend and Daniel was a Wild Audience customer.

During our first team retreat in Barcelona we talked about our plans. One thing we all wanted to do is launch our own software in three years 🙂

Now being three people, I had to learn a lot of new things like project management and leading a team. As a first time founder I was of course absolute clueless (even if I thought I knew stuff hehe) .

In 2018 we decided to start offering consulting. That meant creating a new offer (Accelerator) and finding product market fit with that offer. Along the way we had to learn how to do sales calls, client service and delivering results. The switch from selling online courses as our main product to offering consulting services as our main gig, was a big switch and took us some time to get right.

This was also the year I had to go through quite a bit of personal learning. I started to question the importance of Wild Audience and what we do as a company. In 2018 I became an animal rights activist (after being vegan for many years) and as a result my mind & focus got distracted as I started to get involved in more and more activism projects on the side.

One project I am very proud of is actually writing a book about the most common objections against veganism (here’s the PDF version).

2018 learnings:

• That year I experienced the rollercoaster ride of what it means to be an entrepreneur for the first time. I had months of +30,000$ in revenue (less than 5,000 ad spent) and then other months not being able to pay myself.

• In 2018 we were still getting most our leads through Facebook ads and that’s also when I learned how important it is to not be dependent on one source of traffic. It’s why we started to diversify our traffic channels and produce content.

• I decided that Wild Audience is my highest priority and as a result reduced the amount of energy flowing towards other (activist) projects. I will have more time to do activism again in the future 🙂 There is no hurry to do it all at the same time.

2019

In the beginning of 2019 we hired Emilie to join us as Customer Success & Project Manager. We love Emilie! We tried to convince her to move to Barcelona but so far she prefers the north of England. Who would have guessed, right?

This was the year of scaling things-up. We chose two ways to speed things up:

1. Spending more aggressively on PPC to book our consulting services
2. Opening the Spanish market
3. Launching a membership

Growth:

Overall our goal in 2019 was to have our first 100,000€ month (in hindsight an ego driven goal..).

We started to spend more on PPC (mainly Facebook ads) and as our Relationship Funnel was rock-solid and tested we got a lot of sales calls scheduled for our consulting services.

Revenue was going up quite a bit month by month but in the end we did not achieve our goal of 100,000$ (US dollar not Euros) per month but we got somewhat close. We were generating on average between 40,000€ and 60,000€ per month. Our biggest month was July 2019 with almost €70,000 and a 50% profit margin.

Even if we did not achieve our financial goals , life was very good 🙂 We had healthy profit margins and fun personal lives.

Spanish Market:

Wild Audience started with all its products in English language but as we were based in Spain and had Spanish speaking natives in our team we decided to open up the Spanish market.

Opening the Spanish speaking market came with a lot of learnings of course. We had to rethink some of our sales process. People in LATAM do business differently and we had to adjust to this new way of doing business (more WhatsApp and Skype, no Zoom, low show-up rates & lower email engagement rates etc..).

Membership:

When buying a ton of leads for a high-ticket consulting offer, the majority of leads won’t qualify for Accelerator as their budget or experience is too low.

These type of people are looking for something else. They want to learn stuff at a lower cost.

That’s why we decided to launch a membership called Automation Rebels.

We got 70 rebels at 97€ per month into our membership in the first month of launching it. That was a great success for us 🙂

We soon learned that running a membership is not easy. Producing new content, tutorials and online courses takes time and work. We spend most of 2019 figuring out the right format to offer our membership.

And I am happy to say now that we did our learning and I have found our way! We will rebrand our membership to Automation University in April 2020 and launch the 2.0 version 🙂

Looking at our affiliate income of ActiveCampaign, I decided it made logical sense to become an official partner of ActiveCampaign and resell ActiveCampaign to our own customer base. The launch was a huge success and we got more than 100 paying customers within two weeks (we had no initial billing set-up and so I hacked something together with TypeForm+ThriveCart+Stripe).

Reselling ActiveCampaign was our first experience with software 🙂 We hired our first developer Leandro working remotely from Argentina.

During this year we did a bunch of surf trips to France, some fun parties on our roof-top co-working space and just generally lived a really good life.

And we also welcomed Benji as our new head consultant & digital marketing manager to the Wild Audience family.

2019 learnings:

• I became obsessed with automating my business as much as I could and I was very successful with that. Some months I was able to reduce my work to 1-2 hours a day.

• Automating your business can also have downsides. For me as the CEO I lost touch with the most important people, our customers. Our processes automated pretty much everything: Our weekly emails, monthly promotions, PPC lead gen, content creation in form of articles, customer support, sales & consulting. Everything I once had to do in the past, I was able to delegate or automated (which is not an easy thing to do).

• During our team retreat in Q4 of 2019, we decided it was time to double down on software due to a few big learnings in 2019. More about this below.

2020

2020 is the year of SaaS for Wild Audience. SaaS stands for software as a service in case you were wondering 😉

We changed our focus from digital products to services in 2018. Now in 2020 we pivot one more time from services to software.

So why did we change our focus again? Or why would you change something that works?

I remember the day when I wrote down the pros and cons of my consulting business. Everything you read below is based on my own experience (I am not trying to generalize here) and might be useful to you or might be totally different for you even though you have a service-based business model yourself. Keep that in mind.

Consulting is great for many reasons:

• It’s easy to get started (no real upfront cost)
• The only thing you need is expertise which you can learn on the internet or from past jobs
• You keep learning a ton by solving your clients problems
• You get insights into other industries and become better at what you do
• As a business owner you can automate & delegate pretty much everything

But like everything consulting has its downsides. Here are my top picks..

(Revenue) Inconsistency:

Consulting did not bring in consistent revenue for us. For Wild Audience, our Q1 was usually pretty okay (meaning steady growth and profitable) and Q2 + Q3 were always amazing. Q4 was bad (end of the year and Christmas). That meant we had to generate enough profits in Q2-Q3 in order to take Q4.

There are a few reasons for that. One reason is the way our offer was and still is structured.

Our consulting offer is structured around a “done-with-you” model which is the opposite of “done-for-you”. The reason we chose that model (and I tried done-for-you in the past) is to be more human efficient. Implementing funnels done-for-you style for clients takes a lot of man power which means the only way to scale is hiring more talent.

Look at Vayner Media by Gary Vaynerchuk. They have +200 people in their team. As much as I love to work with an awesome team and build culture I prefer to do that with a small team. But this is not compatible with a service-based business model if you want to scale it.

Sure, we could have chosen an agency style container model and offer a 3 months done-with-you consulting service and then a recurring container for lead generation services for example. That might have changed our situation but in the end we chose not to do it due to the reasons mentioned above.

That meant most of our clients paid for a 3 months project and that’s it. If you run an agency you probably have similar projects. They go over a specific time period and then they end. In order to squeeze more money from a client you would have to offer another related service to the same client. We did not have that kind of high-ticket service offer in place which meant we had to go out and find new clients. But we did noticed that most of our clients started to use ActiveCampaign (more about this later).

So if I had to summarize in two lines why a SaaS business model makes more sense for myself and Wild Audience, this would be my answer:

• Predictability
• Recurring revenue

That is why I have always loved the SaaS model. It has both of those ingredients.

Predictability: From a personal point of view there is nothing I love more than hiding behind my screen and building models.

Recurring revenue: This means that you can close new deals today and add that new revenue to the revenue you closed yesterday. How awesome is that?

Let’s explore what our plan is for SaaS in 2020..

Wild Audience turning SaaS

We have been a long-time ActiveCampaign customer (I signed-up for AC in 2016). In 2017 we became an affiliate. In 2019 we became an official partner focusing on the European market. In 2020 we decided to build new software apps on top of ActiveCampaign. I will explain what this means in a moment.

Building software is not easy. Even more difficult is building something that actually solves a problem so that companies are willing to give you money. My thinking was that building a brand new SaaS company and product from scratch is a 10-year project. That’s how I tackled the situation.

But I also learned about myself that I did not want to spend years and years building a product which is a very personal choice.

From the age of 16, I knew that one day, I would have my own company. As a young boy I always wanted to be rich and successful. But over the years I learned that there is more to life than business. I learned that running a 100 million dollar a year company is not that important to me anymore. 1-3 million a year (in revenue) does it for me too.

I know this may not sound very humble for a few readers but this amount pays for the freedom of a small team and funds small activism projects. In summary, I became simpler in my desires and started to discover what really fulfills me in life.

For me that’s not millions, VCs, board meetings and it’s also not sitting in front of a computer all day.

Instead I discovered a non-capitalistic world of activism and different ways of living that bring happiness, passion and fulfillment into my life. I met new people and made new friends that opened my eyes in many new ways.

To be clear: This means that my team and I are here for the long-term. Our goal is to serve our customers as best as we can and build small products that solve their problems. We want to stay small on purpose and be as authentic and personal as we can with our audience and customers. We are also building a culture that supports freedom, activism (for me that is climate & animal rights activism) and allows us to pursue the passions that elevate our spirits.

Taking into account the above, starting from scratch was not an option for me. But instead, it made sense to partner-up with a company I love and believe in. That is how our partnership with ActiveCampaign started. They focus on product development. We focus on our customers, marketing and selling as well as building additional products & add-ons on top of ActiveCampaign.

This is a win-win. This is our strategy.

Let me explain our strategy step-by-step:

The first thing we did already back in 2019 was to create our own brand “Wild Mail” for our ActiveCampaign product.

Why did we do that?

Imagine one business owner is asking another: “What email marketing tool are you using?” If the other guy is actually using ActiveCampaign through Wild Audience but answers that he uses ActiveCampaign, then Wild Audience would not benefit from that referral.

That is why we launched the name “Wild Mail” so that our customers refer to “Wild Mail” and not “ActiveCampaign”.

That means if you’re currently using ActiveCampaign but you want to move your account over to Wild Mail, you can do that with one click here. The only thing that changes is the logo as well as you will get access to our additional features (read on to see what I mean).

The next step was to update our positioning. How do we compete with ActiveCampaign and other tools like MailChimp, ConvertKit and Drip etc.? These guys have huge brands and big marketing budgets.

For us it’s obvious. Wild Audience started with a product called “Relationship Funnel“. We then created a marketing approach called “Respect-Based Marketing“. Everything around building authentic relationships with an audience comes natural to us. Hence we found our new positioning:

“Grow your business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.”

This is how we position all our products (click the links and see for yourself):

Wild Mail (software)

Accelerator (consulting)

Automation University (membership)

Wild Tracking (stand-alone software built on-top of Wild Mail launching in 2021)

This is how we plan to create our own little world.

Now you’re asking yourself what Wild Tracking is, huh?

Think Baremetrics for marketing attribution. Or ChartMogul for marketing attribution.

With Wild Tracking we want to solve the marketing attribution problem.

Potential use cases are:

• Is most of your revenue coming from Facebook ads or YouTube ads?
• Is it cheaper to acquire a new customer through your blog or YouTube channel?
• What is the CLV from customers coming from Facebook ads?
• What is my ROI for Instagram ads?
• Should I invest my marketing budget into PPC or content marketing?

These are the types of questions we want to solve with Wild Tracking.

Our special sauce is a tag-based approach (in contrast to link-based or pixel based tracking). But more about this another time. If you want to learn more about Wild Tracking and become a BETA customer, you can get in contact with me here.

2020 learnings so far:

• Changing business model also means changing your mindset. SaaS requires a completely different mindset than consulting and I love it. Our day to day changed quite a bit for us as a team.

• Changing business model also means to be smart with cashflow forecasting. The dynamics of cash changed after we changed our focus to Wild Mail.

• Product development is a completely new game for us and I am super happy to step into my new role as Product Manager at Wild Audience and learn all I can about this new & exciting skill-set.

• I am getting better at enjoying every part of our process. I am trying not to project the future of Wild Audience into the present anymore and therefore miss the present moment. You might be able to relate. We always think and aim for the goal and often we totally forget the here and now. We have now incorporated this into our team culture and try to be more aware of this phenomena.

• And the last learning of 2020 so far is about slowing down. This silicon valley VC high growth capitalistic area we startups live in, makes us start & ship new projects extremely quickly and without thinking things through in a deeper way. Don’t get me wrong: It’s good to ship fast and move on but at least at Wild Audience we shipped so many things too fast (even my founder friends asked me how we did that..) and thus we had to change things over and over again and simply missed out on the present moment.

Alight! That’s a wrap.

I know some of our lessons as a team and my personal lessons may sound a little strange to you and you might not relate to them. That’s cool! We are all different and want to create different lives for ourselves 🙂

Conclusion:

In summary, I am extremely proud of our journey so far and what we have learned.

Building & selling software has changed my attitude towards business again. I feel like it’s 2017 again where I worked 11 hour days and loved every minute of it. This next chapter of Wild Audience is an exciting one.

I am forever grateful especially to my team. Without each team member that has joined me on this wild journey so far, this would not have been possible. Thank you James, Daniel, Emilie, Benji & Andrew for riding along. You all taught me so much!

I am grateful for the 220+ Wild Mail customers we already work with. We love you guys to the moon and back. Wild Audience was and is 100% customer funded and we will keep it this way.

To the 1000s of customers and clients we worked with through our consulting services and digital products: Thanks for making this possible!

Thank you for putting your trust into Wild Audience.

Bastián
Founder

FAQ:

1) How do you fund the development of Wild Tracking?

Building software is not cheap of course but we are fortunate to have revenue streams from our consulting service called Accelerator and our membership Automation University that pay for the development of Wild Tracking.

2) What happens if I am an existing Accelerator client or Automation University (former name was Automation Rebels) student?

If you are a customer, client or student there is nothing you need to worry about. We will continue supporting all our clients and invest into both products. We will still grow both products and are very excited about our roadmap for Accelerator & Automation University.

3) Can I still become an Accelerator client or Automation University student?

Of course! You can apply for Accelerator here and enroll for Automation University here.

4) How can I get started with Wild Mail?

You can try out Wild Mail by getting your trial account here. Wild Mail is perfect for service businesses (use case), online businesses (use case) and SaaS startups (use case) that want to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

5) How can I move from ActiveCampaign to Wild Mail?

You can do that with one click here. The only thing that changes is the logo as well as you will get access to our additional features. The whole process is simple and literally takes 1 minute.