April 2020

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

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

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

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

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

We do that through our suite of products:

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

Let’s dive in now.

Transparency Report:

Revenue

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

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

Our MRR growth rate in January 2020 was 20%.

Our MRR growth rate in February 2020 was 12.31%.

In March 2020 our MRR grew by 7.28%.

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product

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

What is Wild Mail?

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

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

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

In April, we shipped 4 new features:

We also fixed 13 bugs 🤖

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

Marketing

Traffic Data:

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

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

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

What are our current lead acquisition channels?

Our entire traffic is organic inbound traffic.

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

Relationship Funnel Data:

Now it gets a little more interesting.

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at the stats now:

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

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

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

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

This is happening for two reasons:

Obviously, the quality of traffic determines your performance. Quality input = great output.
Organic traffic is one of the best types of traffic you can get in terms of quality.

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

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

YouTube:

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

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

Sales

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

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

Founder Talk

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

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

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

1) Branding:

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

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

2) SOPs:

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

3) Feedback Loop:

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

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

Outlook

A few exciting things are coming up in May!

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

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

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

Wildmetrics things we will be doing:

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

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

That’s a wrap! See you in our May 2020 Transparency Report.

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