Second Wind Q1 Financial Report! (Jan 1st, 2024 - March 31st, 2024)
Extremely proud to share our Q1 (Jan 1st - March 31st) financial report today! While Patreon has expectedly slowed down, we've increased our revenue from other sources as we stick to our plan of diversifying our revenue streams to never rely on just one.
Starting in January, I set a goal for myself and our Head of Sales, Cisco Araneta, to bring in $20K of sponsorships per month and we've hit or exceeded that goal three months in a row now, including April already!
We've maintained our expenses, spent money smartly as we traveled a lot in March for in-person filming of Adventure is Nigh - Season 4 and GDC, and have sought out other opportunities to raise money like our recent collaboration with Slugfest Games for the AiN Kickstarter.
Overall things are going very well for us, and just like at The Escapist, the team is hustling every day to earn every dollar that comes our way. Our next big event is April 18th which will be a charity event, and then in May we'll do our six-month fundraiser.
We will no longer be doing a Kickstarter campaign for Second Wind. Not necessary at this point, but we will do a fun fundraiser event in May with the goal of continuing to add funds to our Warchest for sustainability as we will be adding insurance to our expenses very soon.
As always, we appreciate all the support you've given us and in May, along with the fundraiser, we have a lot of cool new things to share and announce!
Comments (32)
And here's to many more!!
This is a fascinating read, I wish more companies and creators gave a look behind the curtain like this!
Love hearing your goals and that you鈥檝e achieved them!
This is great, I'm glad you guys are doing so well, but I don't think this amount of transparency is really needed. If you were a magazine that you released every month we'd just pay for it and not worry - I kind of feel the same with patreon - I like what you do, I'm happy to pay for it. What you do with the money you get is up to you, and if I don't like what you're putting out I'll stop paying.
We do these reports because we want to! We want our community to be privy to our progress, and know how the money they're giving us is being used. It also helps to show some of the innerworkings of a media business like this as a lot of people don't understand how expensive media actually is.
Great to see!
Please be sure to always vet your sponsors before accepting them! Don't feel like you have to accept a bad sponsor just to meet your goal. I don't wanna see you guys doing business with the likes of Hello Fresh or Better Help.
What鈥檚 wrong with Hello Fresh?
The inconsistent formatting of these numbers is quite something. At first glance sponsorship looks no bigger than merch until you realise it's got no decimal point 馃槄 Great to see the non-patreon revenue streams starting to really make a difference.
Yeah, numbers should have similar significant digits. All have cents or round cents off.
Love the transparency. Super cool to see that indie games journalism can work.
This is great! I appreciate the transparency and love knowing that you are working to be sustainable. Definitely shows that you know what you're doing (as much as anyone can, at least)
Are "Donations" the superchats and whatnot from the livestreams split out from overall YouTube revenue and listed separately?
No Donations are payments directly through Paypal or Ko-Fi.
Glad to see you guys doing well. Keep on rockin'!
The content is consistently entertaining and posted regularly. Can't ask for better than that.
Glad to see ya'll are doing well!
Great work, everyone. Well deserved and deep down (maybe not so deep down?) it鈥檚 gotta feel good to be able to show Gamurs you were right all along.
Selfish request, but would you kindly put these posts in a collection for the future? Some of us nerds like to see trend data.
Good work Nick
This is a solid P&L so far. My biggest question is the "warchest." Is this a rainy day fund or to fund growth in the future or is it just an unknown at this point?
"Warchest" is basically what we have in the bank. The idea is to always have a good chunk of money there to make sure we're sustainable!
Love the transparency! Very excited to see an employee-owned business taking off
So glad to see you guys succeeding. Glad to be contributing a couple dollars a month + YouTube engagement. Sorry I can't contribute more, I'm unemployed and about to go back to school so I'm not getting a big boy paycheck for another few years haha
Dude, you are doing more than 99% of people are doing who watch this channel for free. Don't feel bad at all. You are helping bring some level of joy to a teen who has no money but enjoys watching games journalism.
Nice job - What do you think your cut-of point is going to be for growth, or how big do you envision getting?
As far as staff goes we're not hiring anytime soon. The next step will be creating a freelance budget to help bring in occasional new voices to streams, Bytesized, etc. Main goal overtime is to increase wages for people at a sustainable rate. We're already paying better salaries for every person that was underpaid at Gamurs, so we're off to a very good start! But other than that, aside from new video projects, we're pretty much set "size" wise!
This is awesome- love seeing this stuff. Great work!
Congratulations! Feels good to witness such a rapid ascent for what is now an independent media company! Proof positive that we don't need huge corporations!
I love the transparency and insight
The transparency is much appreciated, thanks for the update!
Keep up the great work, Nick!