Q1 2022

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 on our next goals but this will take some time. In the meanwhile, here are two of our growth goals:

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:

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

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

Here is what you’ll find in this report:

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 in 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.

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

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. 

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 the end of March putting growth on hold for a little bit. However, you can see in 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 number 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 nowadays.

Culture Chat

First thing first, let me introduce you to 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 joined the team as a developer trainee at 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 into a new routine and finding 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 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 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 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 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 them. 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, and what we have built so far and simply keep improving this beautiful work environment we have.

Stay tuned 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:

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