Emilie Chartier

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.

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).

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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.

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 ❄️

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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 😌

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:

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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 🙂