Bigg

The tall man who posts

I'm a writer and indie game dev of indie games with cum in them. One half of @BPGames. Most recent project - Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story.

Other Accounts

@zippity - goofy porn game screenshots
@BiggHoggDogg - this is where I do most of my porn following & sharing
@BiggBlast - high-volume shitpost/screencap posting

Current avatar by @julian!


staff
@staff

Happy Tuesday! This money update is a weird one, given that the last week has been full of both much more revenue, user growth, and hosting expenses than normal.

As usual, there are no new terms to define this update (check last month’s for that) so let’s just get on with it!

Users

We’ve got more of them! A lot more! Unsure why, as far as I know none of our competitors recently closed a multi-billion dollar deal to be acquired by the most obnoxious man alive. If anyone has more information on this please let me know.

As of right now, we have 38,165 users, up from 20,793 last month. Roughly 16k of those new users came in the last week! Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to fully keep up activations, although we are activating a couple thousand new users per day. Hopefully we’ll be caught up here soon. New user growth has slowed from the peak, but we are still averaging 180 new users per hour during the day and 60 per hour at night, and these numbers have been consistent the last few days.

Before we talk about active projects, I want to remind everyone how it’s calculated. While the active project count is likely somewhat inflated due to the new users, simply signing up for an account does not count you as active. You are only counted as active if you follow someone, like a post, make a post, or leave a comment. We only care about actions, not just seeing posts. We want this number to be accurate so that we can make decisions better.

As of now, we have 9k active projects, up from 3,837 last month! Pretty good! If every single active user had a cohost Plus! subscription, we would be profitable; if only 60% had subscriptions we'd be sustainable. To be clear, this is 60% of active users, around 5,500 subscriptions. This is the first time we’ve ever been able to say that and it feels fucking great.

Conversion Rate and Subscriptions

Speaking of cohost Plus!, we’re seeing strong growth there as well. As of 10/30/22 (stripe’s numbers are delayed a few days), we have 763 active subscribers, good for $3,535 MRR. These are up from 550 subs and $2,549 MRR last month. As with users, the majority of this growth has been in the last week.

Our active project conversion rate is 9.06%, down from 13.8% last month. As we’ve said in the past, as long as this number remains in a healthy range, we are fine with it going down as long as the number of active projects goes up. It is healthy, monthly active projects has gone way up, so we’re good here.

Overall profit/loss

We ended October with just over $85k in the bank, giving us a Q4 spend thus far of a bit over $22k. This includes our elevated hosting bills this last month and is thus a pretty accurate representation of our actual expenses. We expect to end the year with a bit over $22.5k in the bank, up from $16k last month. More revenue will do that! We are still in the process of securing new funding from our existing funder (the ball is entirely in our court; we need to decide how much we need).

Looking forward

Overall, things are much healthier right now than they were a month ago. It will be interesting to see how much of this growth is sustained and what it will shake out to in the long run. We do think that the network effect has grown dramatically and that’s part of why we’re seeing continued elevated sign up growth.

One of the big issues we are running in to right now is that our frontend architecture is absolutely reaching the limit of how many users it can feasibly serve, leading to decreased performance and a generally worse site experience. We have fast-tracked a rearchitecture that was already planned to try and get things in a more stable state, which will carry the added benefit of reducing our hosting bills. We’ll be making this change incrementally so that we can load test it as it’s in progress. It should be an invisible change for users, but it’s vital for the longevity of the site that we get it done.

I’m not going to talk about other new feature work here since we just went over that in the patch notes last week (and will be doing so again tomorrow!) so go check there for more details.

That’s all for this month! We’re excited about where things are at currently and we’re hoping we can continue to grow the site just enough to make it sustainable. There is, as always, a lot of work to do, but we’re still trying to make it happen.

Until next time, thank you for using cohost! :eggbug: :host-love:

~jae


JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

This is a post I've been wanting to make for a few days, and a financial update is the perfect time to do so! So. If you're here because you want a new social media home (or just another, nicer one) that isn't being ground into dust by capitalism (algorithm, ads, badly moderated hate speech because engagement is profitable and bots can't hear dogwhistles), there's a really easy way to express your optimism for the whole project: subscribe to Cohost Plus!. For $5/month (or $50/year) you're concretely helping this website continue to exist.


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in reply to @staff's post:

I'm unclear on some things, like what makes a Project different from a regular user account, or why only some Projects are paid subscriptions while others aren't. Is there a previous post I should read to learn more about that? I'm sure it's basic info I just missed the boat on.

We've talked about this some in the past. Basically, we've got two concepts: Users and Pages (which i keep calling projects by accident b/c that's the name in code).

Users are what you log in as. They are basically just a shell for authentication information, some settings, and cohost plus information.

Pages/Projects are what you post as. Every User has at least one Project that is created for them on sign up.

The disparity is that we can't really track active Users since users don't actually do anything; all activity on the site is done by a Project. This gives us somewhat imprecise numbers, but it's Close Enough that we're not concerned about it.

Did I read correctly that this would mean that > 60% of users need to start paid subscriptions for cohost to be profitable? On the one hand that's not ENTIRELY unexpected given that we're not the product here and it's more or less in line with eg. online newspapers that ask for paid subscriptions. On the other hand it seems like a very high bar and I haven't seen paid subscriptions advertised before. Any plans to implement a Wikipedia-style begathon banner?

nope, just 60% of active users (roughly 5500). we'd need around 14% of all users to subscribe.

on the advertisement front: there's a button in the bottom of the sidebar advertising it if you're not actually subscribed. we have additional revenue paths before we would consider a donation drive.

yeah! as we mentioned, the number of pages actively posting on here has more than doubled in the last month, and it's still going up. every new user means that percentage drops. last month it was more than 100%, so we're moving in the right direction!

Thank you as always for these updates!! Would it be safe to say that gift subscriptions are on the back burner, given the architecture issues and other sources of revenue available? It was mentioned as a feature some time ago but I feel like it's been a minute since I heard anything

at the moment yeah, we're definitely prioritizing keeping the site up over everything else. in general, since there's only three of us full-time (and only two of us are engineers), it's extremely difficult to prioritize work; no matter what you do there's something else you should be doing. we still want to do gift subs at some point, but we don't know when.

I've attempted to compute this here; TL;DR is that at the current cost, I estimate that new users cost about 80 cents, while being expected to bring in about 45 cents. I would love to hear real numbers on this, though.

Your frank dedication to transparency is inspiring. I'm learning a lot and I (like other cohost Plus! subscribers) really appreciate it.

Glad to hear the ball is in your court re: funding! I think it might be a bit tough given the absence of say, a large competitor setting itself on fire, but you'll make it work!

Thanks as always for the transparency! It's a great time to be a Plus subscriber.

I know y'all are pretty swamped and this is a lil off topic, but I did want to forward a question about this bit in the ToS:

You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services.

The way this is worded makes it seem like you're not allowed to post fanart and such. I don't think that's the intent here, but it's made a few of my fanartist friends nervous about joining even though they're interested in the site. Would we be able to get an official clarification on this to put their minds at ease?

fanart is allowed and encouraged. we will only remove copyrighted content if we receive a DMCA request from the rightsholder, following the process we set forth in the ToS.

Thank you! I've passed that on to them and they're wondering if it would be possible to have that clarification (or a rewording so it says "you must not infringe upon rights" rather than "you must own the rights") in the ToS itself. I can hold onto this suggestion for a later point in time, though, maybe after the other policy updates are made?

An irony and a request: I don't do Cohost Plus because I'm not sure I'm going to make regular use out of Cohost, largely because I haven't been able to migrate any existing relationships here. But if Cohost Plus came with a pack of invites, even a small number, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.

Are there any plans for higher / multiple cohost plus subscriptions? I know there's some folks here who would pay more given the chance to support a platform like this (myself included). The reward tiers can be, "you get the good feeling of supporting the platform more"