(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:
- Wildmetrics [ActiveCampaign dashboards & analytics]
- Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign with two awesome benefits]
- 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:
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