Respect-Based Marketing & Funnel Automation

Emilie Chartier

Q1 2022 Transparency Report

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(my view while hiking the remote parts of Skye, Scotland in January)

Hi everyone, this is Emilie queen of culture at Wild Audience. 👸🏻
Welcome back to our Transparency Report series.

2022 here we come! I am almost (sort of) back on track with this report and I am ready to dive into 2022 with you all. I hope you’re ready because (as usual) we’ve had a lot going on!

If you’re behind (like me) and would like to catch up on our past reports, go visit our Transparency page here where they can all be found.

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. Wait, we’ve actually reached our goal of €50k MRR!! 🥳

We now have to sit down and reflect our next goals but this will take some time. In the meanwhile, here are two of our growth goals:

  • Grow Wild Mail from €50k to €84k MRR (which equals 1,000,000€ ARR)
  • Grow Wildmetrics from 0€ to €10k MRR

I hope you’re ready for 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:

  1. Wildmetrics [ActiveCampaign dashboards & analytics]
  2. Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
  3. Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]

Before I get into this, here are some pictures of the team from the beginning of this year:

  • Alban with his friends in Scotland 🙂
  • Pancho and his beautiful family 🙂
  • Andreea and her husband attending a wedding

More about us at the end of this report, for now let’s dive in.

Here is what you’ll find in this report:

  1. Success Update
  2. Product Update
  3. Revenue Update
  4. Culture Chat
  5. What’s next?

Success Update

Q1 was an interesting one. First, we onboarded two new team members (more about this in our culture chat later on). Andreea joined the Success team in January and did a pretty good job reducing our First Response Time to 1h28 (3h in the past) as you can see on the image below. She’s been focusing 100% of her time on Support and Success to make you happy and it has made a massive difference. I hope you’ve noticed it.

Product Update

Alban joined the product team and things got moving! The product team focused on two things this quarter, improving the user experience of Wildmetrics and building a new billing app for Wild Mail.

Wildmetrics:

You can find our changelog here where you’ll see all updates related to Wildmetrics.

  • We improved the design of the dashboard a little bit by updating the revenue & customer graph. More about this here, hope you like it!
  • We shipped “data re-syncs” for ActiveCampaign to guarantee data accuracy.
  • We added “change” and “compared to” values to your dashboard! You can now see how your data is performing compared to the same previous time period (see here and image below).
  • We shipped the first version of Integration settings! We are trying to bring more data transparency to Wildmetrics. More about this here.
  • We introduced:
    • Timezone in order to make data reading easier for you.
    • Drag & dropping for dashboards! You can now build your own custom dashboard and organize it the way you want. Watch a demo here.
    • Data Transparency, more details here.
    • An option for you to use your currency of choice inside Wildmetrics, see here.
    • Dashboard tabs feature, you can now create multiple dashboards to keep an overview about different products, funnels or conversion events.
  • Finally, we shipped our first version for revenue for ActiveCampaign tags. More about this here.

Another update is that, in 2022 Wildmetrics is 100% for free.  No limits. No limitations. No hidden fees. The reason we offer Wildmetrics for free is because we are still in beta. We plan to offer paid plans sometime in 2023. More about this news here.

Wild Mail:

On the other side, we worked very hard to build our new billing app for Wild Mail and make the management of your Wild Mail account and subscription easier. This app will also make billing more transparent and you know that’s what we are about at Wild Audience. This has definitely taken more time and energy than expected and I will reveal it to you in the next report (by the time you read this report, the new billing app has launched so if you are a customer, you’ve seen it and we hope you like it).

That’s it for the product update, now let’s talk revenue for a bit as we have some big news.

Revenue Update

We’ve reached a pretty big milestone of ours which is hitting €50k MRR and we couldn’t be happier. Click on the image to hear Bastian share a few words of gratitude for you all supporting our journey. We wouldn’t be here without you.

In terms of revenue, we definitely had a slower start than usual. Benji in charge of growth was on paternity leave from the beginning of February until end of March putting growth on hold for a little bit. However, you can see on the image below that it wasn’t as bad as expected with “New Business” and “Expansion” MRR still looking good. What really impacted us in Q1 and especially in March, was the amount of churns and contractions which were definitely higher than normal.

These results definitely reinforced our intention to grow the team and we started the hiring process for a growth specialist in January. Yes, we were late (again) and it would have been much better to have someone before Benji goes away but finding the right people takes time and you learn from your mistakes (you are supposed to at least). These results also reminded us of the importance of Success and how it goes hand in hand with Growth so Andreea started to work on a Retention project to reduce churn and make sure you guys are happy with your Wild Mail account and make the most of its features.

Some more stats about Q1 2022 which you can find on Twitter where we post regular updates too:

Before we get on with the team and I start rambling about culture, here is a screenshot of Wildmetrics to show you some data for our first quarter of 2022. That also gives you a quick update on WMX and how the dashboard looks like nowadays.

Culture Chat

First thing first, let me introduce you Alban and Andreea who joined us in January, growing the team to 7 people.

Andreea is originally from Romania and grew up in Spain where she currently lives with her husband and their furry family in the Province of Valencia. As you know, she has joined the team as a Customer Success Specialist and she’s doing an amazing job. When Andreea is not behind her laptop, she loves travelling, going for walks in nature, listening to music, reading books and spending time with friends and family. Very happy to onboard another woman in the team who’s bringing so much to the table. We love her and we hope you do too..

Alban is from France (yay!) and lives in Spain (Barcelona). He has joined the team as a developer trainee as the same time as Andreea. When not working on Wildmetrics, Alban will be either travelling around the world with his friends, visiting his family in France or chasing the wind to go kitesurfing. He’s been the perfect addition to the product team and we love having him.

Pancho and his family have decided to stay in Argentina and that is so exciting. It also means that the first few months of 2022 were quite intense on their side, trying to find a beautiful home and a school for the kids, making all sorts of important decisions and finding a new routine as a family. As usual, Eliah is stealing the show and we are extremely happy for them. I secretly hope I can go and pay them a visit soon!

On his side, Benji and his partner Iris were quite busy too, becoming parents of the beautiful Kiara. What a special time it has been and also quite challenging, requiring time and energy to adjust to this new life. They are doing an incredible job and we are so very happy for them. I won’t lie, we are selfishly happy to have Benji back as he is such an important part of Wild Audience and it’s not the same without him.

Leandro who is now based in the South of Spain has been going on hikes and adventures with his family to explore the country and his local area. He’s been busy getting in a new routine and find a good balance with his family. He has also got a converted van recently which I believe needs a bit of work so that will keep him busy for a while before the summer. How exciting!

Bastian on his side, was travelling around. He made his way back to the sunny Spain, with a stop in Barcelona where he learnt how to make kimchi (yum), took a work-surf trip to Fuerteventura for a month and started a van conversion project which will keep him busy for a little while I believe. Everyone is getting ready for the summer adventures.

On my side, I spent most of my time in Q1 travelling around the Inner and Outer Hebrides in the North West of Scotland, exploring and learning about the island way of life, reading by the fire, meeting new people and artists and simply slowing down. I must say, I have always been very fond of Scotland and this trip has made me fall in love with the country even more. I felt so connected to the place that I have made the decision to cross the border and move further north during the summer. I eventually came back to the North East of England where I purchased an old French motorhome with a lot of character to renovate and turn into a home.

Here is a picture of us all to wrap up our team update.

Seeing the team grow is amazing and it’s a really interesting experience. I actually wanted to share some thoughts about that.

This is a big thing for us as it would be for any company. It takes a lot of time and energy to find the right people and it has basically been my focus since the end of last year which I love as you can imagine. When I say the right people I mean people who will thrive at Wild Audience as this relationship with our team members work both ways. We invest in our team members but they invest in us too by sharing their time, energy, knowledge and skills and it’s a big deal. I don’t see our team members as a resource. They are human beings and while we need to make the right decision for the company, we also need to make sure that we are right for them too. We do this through building relationships, communicating, being as transparent and authentic as we can be and by considering everybody. I try my best to put the well being and the needs of everyone first and create an environment where everyone feels safe and included. We together make decisions that will benefit everyone as individuals but also as a team so that in the end it benefits the company too. It’s not always easy and I am not sure we always succeed but we constantly try and we do the best we can.

As we grow, things are changing and we need to accept. A structure created for a 3-people team won’t work the same way for a 10-people team. It requires a few changes so our challenge now is to grow while staying true to ourselves, our values and our culture to not lose who we are, what we have build so far and simply keep improving this beautiful work environment we have.

Stay tune for more thoughts on this topic as we reach another milestone of ours by onboarding 3 more team members next quarter bringing the Wild Audience team to 10 people.

What’s next?

In our next report you’ll find:

  • A big Wildmetrics update.
  • A new billing app for Wild Mail.
  • A growth update from Benji.
  • An introduction of our new team members: Jason, Álvaro and Franco
  • And a big life update from every team member too 🙂

Thanks again for following us along and for always supporting us. We wouldn’t be here without you!

See you in Q2 2022 Transparency Report 🤓

Emilie

Q3 & Q4 2021 Transparency Report

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(Pancho on the beach with his son Eliah – be ready for the baby spam 👶)

Hi everyone, this is Emilie queen of culture at Wild Audience. 👸🏻
Welcome back to our Transparency Report series.

I am sorry to be late for this report… again. I just haven’t had the time to sit down, think and reflect. The summer arrived very quickly and before we knew it, it was Christmas time. I am finally catching up, however I have decided that this report was going to be a 2in1 so that I can finally wrap up 2021.

The end of 2021 was quite a ride and I am very excited to share a bit more with you. As usual, if you’d like to see our past reports, go visit our Transparency page here where they can all be found.

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. We arrived pretty close to 50k MRR at the end of last year but we didn’t quite make it. More about this in our next report. 🙊

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:

  1. Wildmetrics [ActiveCampaign dashboards & analytics]
  2. Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
  3. Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]

Before I get into this, here are some pictures of the team from the end of the last year:

  • Leandro and Feli ready to embark for Europe
  • Bastian and his girlfriend Lena wandering the streets of Barcelona
  • Me at a local makers market selling my art
  • Bastian making friends on the road 🙂

More about us at the end of this report, for now let’s dive in.

Here is what you’ll find in this report:

  1. Q3 Reflection
  2. Q4 Reflection
  3. Culture Chat
  4. What’s next?

Q3 Reflection

Q3 was a mixture of slowing down and working hard. We had July and August when most of the team went on summer holidays (and you did too!) followed by September which is a time when we had a lot to catch up on. During the summer, we make slow progress, and that is normal for us. We take the opportunity to focus on wrapping things up and improving smaller things rather than shipping big projects. So we took time to recharge our batteries, focus on small details, do some clean up (especially with operations) and our most important job was to look after you guys.

The product team focused on improving the user experience of Wildmetrics during this summer:

  • We improved loading experience on first load with pre-rending & skeleton loading
  • We improved the design of the navigation inside Wildmetrics. You can open & close the navigation, the width is bigger and the overall look and feel of the application has improved (see video this page.
  • It’s very important to include our users (you!) in the decision process of deciding what to build next and what to improve and fix. This is why we set-up a new tool to allow you guys to submit feature requests and vote for your favorite features. You can now easily submit your bugs and feature requests by clicking on “Help” inside Wildmetrics.

Here is a Q3 update from Bastian where he talked about our summer holidays, Wildmetrics progress and what the plan was going forward (click on the image to watch the video):

In terms of revenue, Q3 was as good as Q2 so that was nice to see and very encouraging for the whole team. Looking at it in more details, July and August were great and September not as much due to higher churn and less new business. That is often the case in September, so it’s not worrying and it didn’t impact our overall performance too much.

Some more stats about Q3 2021 which you can find on Twitter where we post regular updates too:

Q4 Reflection

I think it is safe to say that Q4 was the quarter of many realisations and lessons for us.

I am not going to lie, Q4 was pretty intense and while our plan was to not hire anyone in 2021, we quickly realized it was a mistake. We needed more hands in the team to keep up with everything, so we decided (a bit late) to hire two new team members, a developer (for Wilmetrics) and a customer success specialist (to double down on our support and make you even happier than you already are). Obviously, that doesn’t happen overnight and it took us a couple of months to find the perfect additions to our team, but we did it. By Christmas, we had two new amazing team members – Alban and Andreea which I’ll introduce properly in my next report – ready to be onboarded.

The need to grow the team was felt during the holidays as some team members had to work hard over the Christmas period and couldn’t disconnect properly. Having mostly one-person teams is very difficult and we really want to grow each team now so that everyone can take the time off that they need/deserve to slow down, rest and simply live.

Another important realization was that we didn’t really know who was using Wildmetrics and who was our most successful user(s). We were lacking data, so the team doubled down on product. We started using June, did more research calls, created admin dashboards and simply started to get more in contact with our customers/users. This is absolutely essential, and gathering all this data will really help us to continue developing Wildmetrics.

When it comes to our revenue, Q4 was really good which was a nice surprise. Based on Q4 2021, we weren’t expecting great results at all so it’s nice to see that we turned things around and becoming a SaaS company was definitely the right move for us.

In November, we also reached our yearly revenue goal of €42,000 MRR and 500k ARR which we managed to achieve a month earlier than forecasted!  🤩

We had more profit than expected at the end of the year so we decided to offer a bonus (double salary) to every team member. The entire team has worked really hard during the whole year and we really wanted everyone to know that we appreciate everybody for their work, passion, dedication and loyalty.

Some stats about Q4 which again can be found on Twitter & Instagram :

Before I start rambling about us, here is a screenshot of Wildmetrics to show you some data of both quarters combined (from July 2021 to December 2021. This is also a little sneak peek and gives you an idea of what WMX looks like now.

I’ll definitely share more about it and go in more details in our next report but time for a little culture chat.

Culture Chat

On a more personal note, things were also moving fast for everyone. The team was definitely feeling a bit tired by the end of the year, not only because of work which got a little intense but also because we were all a bit distracted by life outside Wild Audience. When I say that, I don’t mean it in a negative way, quite the opposite. We all have a life filled with passions, projects, goals and dreams, not to mention family and friends we want to spend time with. This is just as important as our job, and I love that everyone is taking time for them.

So here is what we all have been up to:

As usual, Bastian was travelling between Portugal, Morocco and Austria during these last two quarters. He spent some time visiting friends and family, went on a few surf trips, met with clients and partners, had some down time to reflect on the year and everything happening with Wild Audience. Not to mention yoga and chess. 🏄

Pancho and his family left Germany to do some travelling in Spain around October and November time. At the beginning of December they went to Argentina to spend some time with family and friends for a few months (or maybe longer). Traveling and moving country is not an easy task, but even more with an entire family. Anyway, Eliah who’s clearly the star of the show is growing fast and seems to love going on adventures with his dad 😍

After planning the move for years and being stopped by the pandemic, Leo and his family finally made it to Europe. Yay! Another big move, and very glad it all went well. They relocated from Argentina to Spain for a few years and we are so excited for this European chapter, which will be filled with many adventures around the continent. It also means that we will finally be able to meet him in person, and we cannot wait!  🤩

On my side, I was travelling between the UK and France to see family and friends and most importantly meet my beautiful little nephew for the first time. It was so lovely and I had an amazing time. Back home in the UK, I spent a lot of time walking by the sea and paint. Along with my passion for the outdoors and the sea, painting has an important place and it is very cathartic. Being highly sensitive, painting helps me express and process my feelings and emotions. Talking about feelings, I can’t really wrap up this transparency report without being completely honest. Q4 was a bit tough for me. I got really overwhelmed at the end of September and let’s just say that it wasn’t really fun. The pace of life post pandemic was a bit too much and a lot of things caught up with me. It was really difficult for me to accept it but I opened up about it and felt better for it. Like many of us, asking for help is not my strength but things really got better when I did. After seeing a therapist for a few months, now I really feel like myself again and I am ready to share with you my next adventures.

Benji on his side, was finishing the renovation of his new home while getting ready to welcome his little girl to the world. I am afraid I don’t have any pictures to share with you right now because Benji is currently on paternity leave so you’ll have to wait for our Q1 2022 report. We are so very excited for him, his beautiful family and wish them all the best for this new life adventure. I won’t lie though, we cannot wait to have him back. 🙃

Here are some team pictures for you:

  • Eliah stealing the show during our standup 🙂
  • Cheers from the team as we celebrate another year during our team retreat 🙂

What’s next?

In our next report you’ll find:

  • A big Wildmetrics update
  • A new billing app for Wild Mail
  • An introduction of our new team members: Andreea and Alban
  • Our hiring roadmap for 2022
  • A growth update from Benji
  • And a big life update from every team member too 🙂

Thanks again for following us along and for always supporting us. We wouldn’t be here without you!

See you in Q1 2022 Transparency Report 🤓

Emilie

Q2 2021 Transparency Report

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(Leo admiring the sea with his son Feli)

Hi everyone, this is Emilie queen of culture at Wild Audience. 👸🏻 Welcome to our Transparency Report series.

I am sorry to be late for this report. I have a lot of updates for you, Q2 2021 was another busy quarter and then the summer arrived quicker than expected giving us a chance to take a well deserved break. I will extend to the summer for culture and more personal reflection as it is now September.

As always, I have been checking in with every team member to gather all the numbers and insights and hopefully you will 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 overview on how we spent our time during this second quarter:

The sprint projects included a lot of different projects such as:

  • Wildmetrics
  • Help Documentation Project
  • Content Creation (Youtube & Podcast)
  • Growth Plan
  • Partnership Program and Partner Campaigns
  • 2021 Q1 Transparency Report
  • Success Project

And many more projects but before I tell you everything about work, let’s talk culture and people because we all know this is my favourite thing. 🤩

If you know us, you know that we are very human focused and the well-being of every team member is something we really care about especially me. I am the queen of culture after all. I want Wild Audience to be a safe place where one can be their true self and where everyone feels supported and heard at anytime and in any situation given. I often feel like I am the mother at Wild Audience, looking after everyone, checking in with them individually to see if they are ok or not (it’s ok not to be ok, remember that), making sure everyone is resting and taking time off to do fun things with their loved ones.

Here are a few pictures of the team doing their things when not behind their laptop (see Leo above):

  • Bastian surfskating in Portugal
  • Pancho taking a nap with his son Eli
  • Emilie going surfing in England
  • Benji enjoying Costa Brava in Spain

More thoughts and pictures to come at the end of this report.

As usual, 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:

  1. Wildmetrics [API-based marketing analytics for funnels & ads]
  2. Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
  3. Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]

Let’s do this!

Transparency Report:

  1. Revenue
  2. Expenses
  3. Customer Success
  4. Product
  5. Marketing
  6. Culture
  7. What’s next?

Revenue

Here is a 2-minute video summary recorded by Bastian giving you an overview of Q2:

Let’s have a quick look at the numbers per month:

Summary for Q2:

  • We added €80k in total ARR (that includes all our products: WMX, WM and RF).
  • We added almost 7k in total MRR (includes all our products as well) and that is almost the double of Q1 which is amazing.
  • We added a total of 77 new customers.
  • Our Net MRR churn was -0.57% on average which means we are back below zero.
  • Our MRR growth rate month over month was 27% (average was 16% for Q1).

April was definitely our best and strongest month in 2021 and Q2 combined. The average growth rate this year so far is 7% and we can see that we are above this in April and June but not in May. We have noticed that we always have one month per quarter that is below. At the moment, we are looking at having minimum €1k new business and €1k in expansion per month. We can see that in May we were below €1k in new business and that explains why our growth rate is lower. In April, we had two big expansions (between €500 and €2k MRR) and in June 6 medium expansions (between €200 and €600 MRR). Regarding new business, June is clearly the best scenario for us.

When it comes to our churn rate, we were negative in April (-0,98%) and May (-1.53%) which is a good thing and then went up again in June (0.8%). Hopefully this number will go negative again in the next quarter.

Overall, Q2 was a great quarter and we are hoping it stays that way or gets better in Q3.

Expenses

In our attend to be as transparent as possible and improve (with your feedback), we thought we would include a new section to this report and share with you a little bit more about our expenses. In Q2, the total of our expenses was €94.5k which means that we spent an average of €31.5k per month.

On average this quarter:

  • 31% of our expenses was spent on team salaries
  • 0,3% was spent on advertising (we stopped running ads in May)
  • 4,7% was spent on marketing (partner commissions)
  • 5% was spent on operations
  • 46% was spent on ActiveCampaign licence fees and AWS for Wildmetrics
  • And 13% on taxes

Hope that gives you an idea on how we spend our money and if you have any thoughts on this, feel free to comment!

Customer Success

Always back to you guys! 🙂

In Q2, we had a total of 949 conversations with 460 customers which is very similar to Q1 2020. As you know, when it comes to Success we look at two things:

  1. First Response Time (aka how long it takes us to reply to and solve the initial ticket with a quality response).

Our First Response Time was 2h23. It is a little better than Q1 2020 but we are still above 2h. Our goal is to get closer to 1h but we seem to be stuck over 2h every quarter which is a bit frustrating but I am not giving up. I will keep working on it and think of ways to improve this. We might also have to rethink this goal and ask ourselves if it is unrealistic or not.

For that, I’ve had a look at the data of this quarter to see when and why we took more time to reply to your support tickets:

  1. Funnily enough, I was working on a Success project back in April/May and that took a lot of my time which means that I was slower at replying to tickets.
  2. We have team meetings or 1:1s every Friday and that means that we are not able to reply as fast as we usually do during that time.
  3. The holidays taken during that time also had an impact on the first response time.

Knowing this is really helpful for us to understand why we are struggling to reduce our First Response Time and hopefully it will helps us improve it.

2. Happiness Score

I am really happy by this report. We’ve received 40 ratings from you in 3 months and every single one of them was great. We always try our best with Benji to give you the best success experience we possibly can and we will continue to do so. I can’t thank you enough! 🤩

I also took advantage of Q2 to work on our new help documentation. Yes you heard me, we have created a brand new help center where you can find all our documentations for Wildmetrics, Wild Mail and Relationship Funnel. You can take a look here.

Product

Wildmetrics

Here is a video from Bastian giving you a summary of what happened:

Q2 Summary:

  • The product team marked a total of 159 tasks in Asana (116 in Q1).
  • And invested 574 hours into WMX (548 hours in Q1).
  • We improved our Funnel Management and you can now save funnels.
  • We worked on design & user experience for funnel feature.
  • We built a new data infrastructure & architecture (this was clearly the biggest task of the quarter).
  • We created a new database and migrated our old database to the new one.

Here is a little overview of how the time is spent on WMX per team member:

Here you have a top 10 of the tasks that took most effort (measured via time) to complete:

Here you can see the total of hours spent in Wildmetrics during this quarter:

More (and big) updates on Wildmetrics coming in our next report.

Marketing & Growth

This quarter, Benji is taking you on a little journey to see what happened:

You can see all our traffic data on this page.

We worked on 10 partner campaigns in Q2:

Our Youtube Channel looks a little bit different as you can see below and you can find a lot of new videos. Check them out here.

Summary Q2 2021:

  • We are getting a lot of organic traffic (61% of our traffic is organic) thanks to our focus on partners.
  • In terms of funnel performance and during Q2, we got 450 new leads. From these 450 leads came 170 new trials and 27 of them became customers. Not all our new customers go through this funnel and that is why numbers differ from the ones mentioned earlier.
  • We updated our Growth Plan like we do every quarter.
  • Benji worked on the partnership program to improve it and created 10 partner campaigns.
  • He spent some time giving a new face to our Youtube Channel and published one new video (tutorials, interviews and much more) every week.
  • We have also been publishing behind the scenes content and financial insights on our social media channels Instagram and Twitter every week too.

Not to mention that Benji went to Patrick Wind Mastermind BBQs this summer to build relationships and have fun with like minded people. Here are a few pictures:

  • June 2021
  • June 2021
  • August 2021
  • August 2021

Culture Chat

I (Emilie) am writing this report sat at the terrace of my dad’s bar in a small village in France. I have been there for nearly three weeks visiting my family for the first time in nearly two years. It’s been incredible walking in the beautiful french countryside, foraging food and watching sunsets with friends and family. I didn’t realise how much I had missed it. This, among other reasons, explains why I am late with this report.

Here are a few pictures for you:

You got it now. Q2 was a very busy quarter for us, working a lot in the back end of Wildmetrics, Growth, Operations and Success. The team has been working really hard and it was essential to take a break. We do so many things at the same time (and we love it!) that we sometimes forget to look at the bigger picture and don’t see how much we do and achieve. At the end of Q2, we all felt the need to take a break and it was a good timing as the summer was finally here (sorry Leo, summer is on its way to Argentina too). If you’ve been following our journey for a while, you will know that the summer is when we all slow down and recharge our batteries. For us, it is a time to disconnect, step back and also reflect. It is definitely been a time of reflection on my side and I am sure for the rest of the team too.

During that time, our priorities change a little bit maybe as we slow down and that’s why things get put on hold like our team challenges and this report. It also means that we are slower at communicating things within the team but also with you guys. The good thing is that we have learnt to slow down and still show up for you guys.

So this summer was an opportunity for everyone to focus on themselves, spend time with their family and loved ones, do fun things and breathe a little bit. We really want everyone to disconnect completely and we have created a work environment that allows it. This is essential to me and everyone knows that I take it very seriously especially as the queen of culture. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean that we wait for the summer to live and enjoy life. This is not the way we see things (we encourage people to take long weekends and days off during the year) but it is a time when we as a team disconnect all together (just like Christmas).

This summer was even more special as everyone had a lot going on personally to say the least. Here is a little recap of everyone’s life lately:

This is Pancho and his beautiful family. This year, they’ve welcomed a little addition to their family Eli and adjusting to life with a new family member in a middle of a pandemic is no easy task. Pancho took a break this summer to travel to Spain with them. The holiday included a lot of beach time, a yoga festival and a van trip. This holiday in Spain was also in preparation of something very exciting as they are planning to leave Germany in a few months and move to Spain.

  • staycation with his family in Germany
  • father and son moment 🙂
  • holidays in Spain

This is Bastian enjoying some family time, having fun and working with friends between Portugal (Ericeira) and Spain (Barcelona and Costa Brava). As you know, surfing is his thing so he’s been surfing a lot and went for a surf trip in Fuerteventura where he was also working. This summer, he’s been disconnecting completely for a few weeks to really slow down, enjoy the little things, spend time with family in Spain and reflect on Wild Audience and its future.

  • Ecstatic dancing & kirtan singing in Portugal
  • Family time in Costa Bravo
  • Surf trip in Portugal with friends
  • working with friends in Fuerteventura

Benji has also been busy on his side buying and renovating his new flat with his partner Iris in Barcelona. They have also announced the arrival of their first baby which is wonderful news and we are incredibly excited for them. A lot of important life changes coming up and for that, some holidays in Costa Brava with friends and family were needed too.

This is Leo and his lovely family. As you know, they are currently living in Argentina, by the sea where Leo has started surfing. He’s been spending a lot of time with his son Feli, playing, going on adventures and visiting his family in the city. Something exciting is coming for them too as they are preparing to move to Europe (Spain) in a couple of months and we can not wait.

Last but not least, half of the team met in Barcelona while Pancho was on holiday in Spain. Leo and I were a little jealous but hopefully we can all meet next year for our first physical team retreat in 2 years. 😍

What’s next?

In Q3, there will be a lot of improvements and changes for Wildmetrics. The team will be working on:

  • improving the loading speed of Wildmetrics and make it way faster than it is now.
  • creating a trial & onboarding experience.
  • creating the first version of billing.
  • improving the way we import ActiveCampaign and Stripe data.

We are super excited to share it all with you as it feels like a new chapter for Wild Audience.

Thank you for being here and see you in our next Report 😌

Q1 2021 Transparency Report

by

(Bastian surfing in Fuerteventura)

Hi everyone, this is Emilie queen of culture at Wild Audience and I am delighted to be back! 👸🏻

Welcome to our Transparency Report series. I have so much to tell you since our last catch up (2020 wrap up). 2021 started slowly but now things are moving pretty fast. As always, I have been checking in with every team member to gather all the numbers and insights and hopefully you will 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 overview on how we spent our time during this first quarter:

The sprint projects included a lot of different projects such as:

  • Wildmetrics
  • Relationship Funnel
  • Content Creation (Youtube & Podcast)
  • Growth Plan
  • Partnership Program and Partner Campaigns
  • 2020 Q4 Transparency Report

Anyhoo before we dive into this in more details, I’d like to have a little chat with you about culture and share a few pictures of what we have been up to when we were not working. It is important to show you who we are outside Wild Audience, and that we are real humans behind our screens.

Bastian was in Portugal then moved to Fuerterventura for a couple of months where he spent a lot of time surfing and enjoying the sunshine. Pancho has been enjoying the snow in Germany and spending time with is family (big news later in the report) while Benji surfed a different type of waves in Barcelona. Leo who has recently moved to the seaside has started surfing too which is awesome! On my side, I have been enjoying the little things, surfing and living a slow life in my little fishing town in the North East of England.

  • Benji riding the waves of Barcelona
  • Pancho skying in Germany
  • Leo surfing in Argentina
  • I am still enjoying the cold water of the north sea, UK

Mental health and physical health go hand in hand and it is something we value a lot at Wild Audience. We have created an environment that encourages everyone to take time for themselves, to rest, to exercise, to go outside, to spend time with their family and simply do what they love. We all have different realities, and it is important for us to understand, support and encourage one another whatever the situation or the needs that we have. We really benefit from it on a personal and professional level and it simply makes us happy. This is something we are very proud of but we are aware of the privilege that it is.

More thoughts and pictures to come at the end of this report but for now the culture chat is over so let’s get started.

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:

  1. Wildmetrics [API-based marketing analytics for funnels & ads]
  2. Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
  3. Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]

Let’s do this!

Transparency Report:

  1. Revenue
  2. Customer Success
  3. Product
  4. Marketing
  5. Culture
  6. Founder Talk
  7. Coming in Q2 2021

Revenue

Here is a video summary recorded by Bastian (don’t worry it’s short and sweet):

Revenue summary for Q1:

  • We added €42k in total ARR (that includes all our products: WMX, WM and RF).
  • We added 3.491€ in total MRR (that includes all our products as well):
    • MRR for WMX: 300€ (3600€ ARR)
  • In total, we added 26 customers paying recurring revenue.
  • Our Net MRR churn was -1.7% for Wild Mail & Wildmetrics combined which means we are back to normal compared to last quarter.
  • Our MRR growth rate quarter over quarter was 16% (average of 2020 was 19%).

Let’s have a quick look at the numbers per month:

January and March were a bit slow but February was a good month and definitely our best so far! If you remember our last report, I told you that we had hit a plateau so it feels good to know that we are moving again and in the right direction!

Customer Success

Ok let’s focus a little bit on you guys because you are my (our) priority! 🤩

During Q1, we had a total of 962 conversations with 456 customers which is a bit less than Q4 2020. When it comes to Success we look at two things:

  1. First Time Response (aka how long it takes us to reply to and solve the initial ticket with a quality response).

Our First Time Response was 2h56. It is slightly better than Q4 2020 but we would like it to be under 2h. This number is mainly affected by holidays so it is always a little higher around the time I am off or during bank holidays and company holidays.

We will keep working on this 🙂

2. Happiness Score

We are pretty happy with our happiness score, it is nice to start the year on such note!

I really want to thank you all for the ratings and comments like this one:

or this one:

Benji and I work really hard to make sure we provide you with the best support possible so that means a lot to us and it is very encouraging so again thank you! We are grateful for you all! 🙂

I am also excited to take it to the next level in Q2 so be ready to see my face and hear my french accent a lot more from now on. 🙃 I have already started jumping on success calls and I will focus even more of my time on you in the coming months. That means, checking in with you all on a regular basis to build stronger relationships and make sure you’re happy with our products and simply us in general.

Product

Wildmetrics

Here is a video from Bastian giving you a summary of what happened:

In Q1 we started to work in cycles. Each cycle is 6 weeks long which means we do two cycles per quarter. In total, we shipped 4 projects:

  1. Email Report (Cycle #1)
  2. Automation Report (Cycle #1)
  3. Design v1.0 (Cycle #2)
  4. Funnel feature v1.0 (Cycle #2)

Here is a little overview of how the time is spent on WMX per team member:

Here you have a top 10 of the tasks that took most effort (measured via time) to complete:

You can see that the the first 7 tasks of the list above are all related to building our latest Funnel feature for Wildmetrics. We did it and we are very proud about what we accomplished!

What happened in Q1:

  • We marked 116 tasks completed in Asana.
  • We invested 548 hours into WMX with 2 full time developers (Leo & Pancho) wich means:
    • 183h per month
    • 91h per developer per month
  • We are currently at 78,250 lines of code (wow!)
  • We did a total of 25 user research calls.

Conclusion:

In January, we had to make some technical decisions as WMX was too slow. In February, it was ALL about design and services. In March, there was nothing tangible for the user but we made a lot of progress and shipped a lot in staging.

All in all, we are pleased that we were able to to ship the foundation (of the foundation) for Wildmetrics.

2021 will be all about building the core functionality of Wildmetrics (Q1 was all about creating the base foundation for this).

And fun fact: We onboarded our first paying customers for WMX (happy dance!) 🥳

Relationship Funnel:

In Q1, we worked on building our new platform called Relationship Funnel (RF). We wanted to build a new platform from scratch using WordPress to make it simpler and more in line with us and our branding but also to gather all our courses and resources in one place.

We also wanted to go back to our roots, to where it all started for us at Wild Audience and that was with Relationship Funnel.

Here is a sneak peak:

We have created a brand new RF course (step-by-step video course on how to implement a relationship funnel in your business) and also added 15 bonuses (workshops on ads, video production, MRR forecasting, lead generation and more as well as a template library and a copywriting course).

We have stopped our monthly subscription (Automation University) and onboarded all our current customers. Our Wild Mail customers have free access to it and is available to purchase on the side with a one time payment (lifetime access) so feel free to check it out here.

Marketing

Here is a little Q1 wrap up video from Benji:

Project we worked on:

  1. Q1 Growth Plan (Cycle 1)
  2. WA Partners and WMX Outreach (Cycle 1 / Cycle 2)
  3. Partner Campaigns (Cycle 1 / Cycle 2)
  4. English & Spanish website Update (Cycle 2)

Traffic and Relationship Funnel Data:

insights coming from Wildmetrics
insights coming from Simple Analytics

As you can see, our numbers for Q1 are pretty similar to our last quarter in terms of conversion rates. However, the amount of website visitors increased a lot due to our partnership program and collaborations. The same happened for leads and trials but we actually got less new customers than Q4 2020. That can be explained by the fact that while our recent partner collaborations gave us a lot of visibility, the campaigns and/or online courses which we created with them will only be launched in Q2 and Q3 2021.

One step at the time 🙂

Youtube:

Bastian published 4 new videos, you can check them out here.

Some numbers:

  • Views: 24045
  • New Subscribers: 137
  • New videos uploaded: 4
  • Average View Duration: 2,59 Min (Around 3)
  • Website visitors coming from YouTube: 494

We got a lot more visitors, subscribers and increased the average view duration during the whole quarter especially in March. We can see that the YouTube videos we created with our partners in their YT Channels paid off.

Partner campaigns we worked on:

1. Emprende Aprendiendo:

You can find the course on this page.

2. Digital Riders:

3. TEKDI

The course we created together will be launched later in the year but you can visit their website on this page.

What’s next?

The growth team (Benji and Bastian) will focus on the following channels:

  • Partnership Campaigns
  • Partner Prospecting
  • YouTube
  • Podcast

They will focus on 3 differents tasks:

  1. Contacting new partner and customer opportunities for Wild Audience and Wildmetrics using outreach (recording custom loom videos and reaching out to them personally).
  2. Creating new content all around educational training.
  3. Collaborating with new and current partners to create value for you and their audiences.

At the same time, we will stop all PPC campaigns (to be able to focus on our partners) and I will also start a new Success initiative to join forces with the growth team to work on a specific project focused on our current customers.

The goals are:

  • Add €4K in total MRR:
    • €3K coming from WM.
    • €1K coming from WMX.
  • We want to achieve the following milestones and goals:
    • Hit €28K in total MRR.
    • Run at least 6 partner campaigns.
    • Create 12 new pieces of content for our YouTube channel and Podcast.

Culture

As the queen of culture I am always trying to make sure that everyone is happy, and I am not only talking about work here but life in general. I also want to make sure that each team member is content with their job, with themself and within the team too.

In order to do this, I have a 1:1 with all team members every month. During this call, we catch up on life, work projects and feelings. We basically talk about anything that we want and usually get personal quickly. These 1:1s are a safe space where they can share anything they want and I will listen.

I also do a monthly culture reflection call with Bastian where we go over team spirit, the dynamic, what went well or didn’t go well, feelings of everyone and ourselves. We touch base on the team, the culture of the team and reflect on what we can do and what I can do to be better as a queen of culture.

I have also put in place a monthly challenge for us to have fun while working and bond over a shared activity. It usually last 1 to 2 weeks and can be about sports, reading, cooking, movement, meditation, etc.

So far we have done an exercising/moving challenge (measured by time) which by the way I won 😌 and a meditation challenge where we all had to meditate at least once a day for two weeks. They are really fun to do and bring us so much. I can’t wait for the next one!

  • We use the app “calm” for the meditation
  • our leadership board using the strava app

It’s really fun to create a culture, develop it with the team and I am very excited to see where it leads us.

Founder Talk

Some thoughts coming from Bastian about our Q1:

More pictures about the team and our new member. Everyone meet Eliah, our first Wild Audience baby. He loves working on WMX with his dad or should I say he loves sleeping while his dad works on WMX 😍

  • Pancho and Eliah working on WMX
  • A friend and I (Emilie) catching the first light
  • Leo spending some quality time on the beach with his son Feli
  • Bastian and Benji catching up looking at a sunset over Barcelona

Coming in Q2 2021

Here is an overview of what’s gonna happen in Q2 for WMX:

  • Benji will be working on growth with partner campaigns, sales calls, and with the goal to get 1k MRR for WMX only.
  • Bastian will join forces with Benji to get 1k MRR for WMX while working with the product team on WMX.
  • I will be working on this report while taking care of Wild Audience, the team and you guys! I will start focusing more and more on Success.

That’s a wrap! I hope you liked it and I’ll see you in our next report 😌

I’d love to hear from you so if you have any feedback or if there is anything you’d like to see in your next report feel free to email me at support@wildaudience.com.

Q4 2020 Transparency Report

by

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 a huge progress with product development so there is a lot to be happy about.  🥳

We’ve had a very busy end of 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.

  • I have been surfing in the NE of England where I am based
  • Benji’s been surf skating around Barcelona waiting for the waves
  • Bastian’s been sailing in Mallorca to get his yacht license

More pictures to come at the end of this report but for now let’s dive in. So much has happened since 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:

  1. Wildmetrics [API-based marketing analytics for funnels & ads]
  2. Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
  3. Relationship Funnel [a step-by-step online course to build a Relationship Funnel]

Alright, let’s do this!

Transparency Report:

  1. Revenue
  2. Customer Success
  3. Product
  4. Marketing
  5. HR
  6. Founder Talk
  7. 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 down 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 on that, 7 customers with a +100 MRR downgraded their account too.

2. Cancellations (churn)
3 big accounts with a 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 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 was higher than 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:

  1. I (Emilie) was on holidays for a few days in October.
  2. 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 email 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 everyone 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 a 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.

Here is a little video from Bastian giving you some insights on the time spent working on Wildmetrics and our Wildmetrics Manual & Docs.

 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 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 login.

Alright, that’s it for 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 a conversion rate for trial to customer of 41% (benchmark is 15%) so it’ really good and can be explains 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 in 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 joining 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, 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 progres. 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 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.
  • Partnership is very powerful so we put a lot of time and energy in 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 (yaay!) 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 has 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.

Here is a family picture just for you 😍

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 ❄️

  • Pancho enjoying the snow in Germany with his family
  • Snow on the beach in the north east of England for me
  • Bastian hiking with his family in Austria

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 work 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 whichs means adding the funnel analytics feature with a 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 😌

Q3 2020 Transparency Report

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

Before we dive in, I have to tell you something.

We have decided to turn our monthly report into a quarterly report. You might be wondering why. The truth is, producing such report on a monthly basis takes a lot of time and energy which we simply don’t have at the moment.

It also makes more sense as we feel like we will have way more insights and progress to share with you on a quarterly basis.

If you’ve read our last report you know that we have decided to slow down a bit during the summer and enjoy the little things. Here is a sneak peek of what we have been up to. More about this at the end of the report here. 🙂

Ok, let’s kick this off because a lot has happened since last time we spoke.

The last three months have been pretty good to us and we made a lot of progress. We are now at 20,423 MRR which is pretty good (more details to come).

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.

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.

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]

Time to dive in now and see what happened in Q3 of 2020.

Transparency Report:

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

Revenue

By the end of the third quarter of 2020 we managed to grow our MRR to 20,423€. Let’s do a breakdown and compare the numbers with the last quarter (Q2).

Quarterly Breakdown:

If you look at the image down below you can see that our growth rate was 33% in Q3 against 37% in Q2 and which is fairly similar so we can say that our growth rate is stable.

We can also see that the average growth per month was 10% for Q3 and 11% for Q2 so again it’s pretty much the same and above 10 is good for us.

In Q3, expansion MRR was always higher than new business MRR so the majority of our revenue came from expansions which was was the opposite in Q2. That’s interesting as it means that for us that growth will mainly come from existing customers in the future. It also means that existing customers will be our new growth focus. We like that a lot.

In August, we also experienced what it means to acquire a really big customer (above 1k in MRR) and we learnt a few things from it. Revenue can grow very quickly with big accounts but it can also decrease very quickly if they decide to leave.

Losing a big account could mean losing a big part of your MRR if they leave so relying on really big accounts is too risky and that’s definitely not what we want. We would rather have a majority of small and medium accounts because when they go, it doesn’t impact our revenue that much. I guess, it’s all about balance here.

Monthly Breakdown:

Let’s have a look at our monthly progression now:

  • July 14%
  • August 4%
  • September 13%

So our average growth rate this quarter was 10% because of August. This was to be expected as it is always a slow month with the summer holidays and it is not worrying us.

When it comes to new business, our monthly goal is 1k so we were close to reaching it in July and September. If we take a closer look at new business in September and do the maths we can see we have 21% of medium/big accounts (above €100) and 70% of small ones (between €0 and €46).

Churn:

Our churn rate is looking good and we are pretty happy about it. In average our churn rate was -6.3% in Q3 against -1.6% in Q2. That means that we would still grow without adding new business (thanks to expansions).

Remember, when it comes to your churn rate, the higher (negative) the better!

Customer Success

Back to you guys because you are the most important people in our business.

In Q3 of 2020 we had a total of 905 conversations with 456 customers which is lower than usual but totally normal during summer time.

You gave us a 97% happiness score (30 great and 1 not good) which is great!

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 Q2, our First Response Time was 3h25 and we managed to reduce that number to 2h02 in Q3 which is amazing. Our goal is to get that number to 1h and the summer definitely helped us in getting closer to that goal. We are not sure how it will progress in Q4 with the holidays coming up but we will do our best.

We also published new customer testimonials! You can click on the videos below and watch them if you like.

Product

Wildmetrics

In Q3, we achieved a lot and shipped a total of 113 tasks. Our biggest achievement was to have a stable version of Wildmetrics (WMX) meaning that you can now login, use the app and it won’t break which wasn’t the case in Q2.

WMX integrates with a lot of tools so we work with a lot of data. In Q2, we had problems pulling the data and our app crashed a lot. In Q3, we started to implement a queuing process by improving our infrastructure to solve this and that allowed us to have a stable version.

We built a lot of a new features and the two most important ones are:

  • Our improved tag analyzer, our tag query builder can handle tag groups and added logic like “add”, “or” and “contains”.
  • A new dashboard with the following metrics:
    • Total subs
    • New subs (based on time selection)
    • Number of total customers (from Stripe) -> probably “active” customers
    • New customers from Stripe (based on time selection)
    • Total revenue (based on time selection)
    • Revenue per subscribers (based on time selection)
    • % of subs that are customers (not based on time selection)

You can watch our demo video to get a sneak peek and if you want try it out or schedule a demo with us, go there.

Next-up in Q4:

We are planning to develop and work on:

  • Adding new data points like emails, campaigns, automations, contacts
  • Revenue per email and automation
  • Preparing the alpha launch in early January 2021

Automation University

During Q3, we launched a new masterclass on how to produce video Ads for Facebook & Instagram which covers the following:

  • Wild Audience Methodology: “levels”.
  • Video ads vs Image ads.
  • Tools to produce video ads (Advanced / Intermediate / Beginner).
  • How to use Wave.video to produce your own ads.
  • Best practices to create high-performance ads.
  • How to implement ads in your campaigns and what metrics you should focus on.

Next-up in Q4:

We will be publishing a new MasterClass on Google Ads Lead Generation And Retargeting that will cover the following:

  • Google Ads Overview.
  • Different ad types & campaigns.
  • Wild Audience’s PPC strategy for Google Ads.
  • How to create ads using Google Ads.
  • The implementation process explained step-by-step.
  • Best practices to create & analyze your ads performance.
  • How to implement ads in your campaigns and what metrics you should focus on.

Click here to join Automation University and get access to our latest MasterClasses.

We currently have 154 students with new joining every month and it’s just €25 per month. We keep the price low on purpose so everyone can learn marketing automation. You can join here.

Marketing

Traffic Data:

We added 398 new contacts to our list over the last three months. Nothing much has changed lately as we have been working a lot behind the scenes and the summer holidays slowed down everything.

To be honest with you, it’s too low but that number does make sense considering what I have mentioned above. And that’s also on purpose because we are currently focusing on building a partner network and that brings us customers directly and not leads.

You can also see that our traffic is still mainly organic inbound traffic (52%) and direct (30%) which means that we get very high quality leads.

It’s worth mentioning that we would get way more leads by running paid traffic but the quality wouldn’t be as good and as mentioned above, we focus more on customers through partners at the moment.

Relationship Funnel Data:

  • Traffic: 8,031
  • Leads: 398 (4,95%)
  • Trials: 125 (31,40%)
  • Customers: 42 (33,6%)

A few comments about these numbers:

  • Traffic is a little bit lower than usual due to summer holidays and our new partner strategy. On average we have 3,000 visits per month so it should be minimum 9,000 now.
  • Our conversion rate for lead to trial is 31% (benchmark is 30%) and a conversion rate for trial to customer of 34% (benchmark is 15%) so it’ really good.

Once again, we can see that our Relationship Funnel is working well and the only thing we need to improve is the top of our funnel (cold traffic to lead).

Growth Plan

In Q3, we spent a lot of time creating a new growth strategy and implementing it. We worked on different channels:

  • Youtube
  • Partners
  • Blog
  • PPC

We translated 10 articles in Spanish and published 8 new Youtube videos in Spanish based on your feedback and questions. They are all about how to build a funnel, strategy, lead scoring, segmentation and double opt in.

After looking at the numbers and analysing each channel, we realised that most of our customers were coming from partners so this channel is the most promising one. We then decided to pause all other channels and focus on only one which is developing our partner network.

We also want to focus on branding which is very important so we are now using Google Ads Display for branding only as it is cheaper than other channels.

Website

We have been working on another really exciting project during the last few months: a new website design! We have built 15 pages so far in Q3 and we hope to finishing creating everything in Q4!

Here is a little sneak peak until we release it.

Next-up in Q4:

  • New website launch with new design & branding (new colour, new font,..) and much more added functionality. The look and feel is very important to us and we have put a lot of thoughts into it. The idea for us is to be technical, young, fresh and transparent but we will share everything is another article later on.
  • We will be focusing a lot of our time on our Wild Mail partnership program to improve it and develop it.

HR

In Q3, we also decided to hire a new developer so that means:

  • Creating a new hiring process.
  • Creating a hiring timeline.
  • Putting together a job offer and a coding test.
  • Researching the platform to publish the offer.

It took us two weeks to put everything together which is fairly quick. On the other side, our hiring process is quite long as it involves different people from our team and is divided in 4 different phases. Here is our new hiring process:

We are pretty happy as we received more applications than expected and our new hiring process worked really well. We’ve received a total of 102 applications and selected 16 candidates to do the test. From there, 6 people were selected to do a technical call with Leandro (our current developer). We are now doing the culture calls hoping to make an offer in the second week of November.

We are really excited to onboard this new team member as well as Leandro who is joining the team as a full time member of WA. Leandro has been working with us for a few months as a freelance developer. This is very exciting for us and we can’t wait to introduce them to you in our next report.

Next-up in Q4:

We will be making an offer to the selected candidate and onboard them with Leandro.

Founder Talk

We have learnt of a lot in the last three months and while we achieved a lot, the summer gave us the opportunity to slow down. I think it was very important for all of us to take some time off after all the hard work we put in since last year. In average, we worked less hours and that allowed us to rest, spend time in nature with our loved ones, explore, surf, and reflect.

Here are some pictures:

Emilie spent the summer at home by the sea in the north east of England. I was travelling between Spain and Portugal and Benji was somewhere between Costa Brava and Fuerteventura.

This, was also possible because we have decided to go fully remote as a European team. It’s working well for us and we love the freedom it gives us. We also realised it was time to hire a new team member and with all these new changes, we needed to create a new vision.

Our 2021-2023 vision is the result of hours of thinking and reflection on my side while having a slower summer. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, reading, talking to people and talking to every team member to create a vision that speaks to all of us.

Now I feel more focused, more connected with the whole team and happier. That vision is us and it’s a huge thing for us and for the future we are creating together (we will share our vision with you next year).

I have also been working a lot on getting Wildmetrics (WMX) ready to onboard our first paying customers so that we can focus 2021 on getting our first paying customers and getting closer to product/market fit.

In November, we will have our Q4 (virtual) team retreat where we will reflect on the year and plan all of 2021 with specifics. Very exciting!

More about this in our next report 🙂