People posting panicked flapping like "Cohost is dying????? Where am I going to go now???" and people backseat-webdevving like "If I were @staff I would simply have had all possible revenue-generation AND user-retention features implemented at launch" locked in a life-or-death struggle to be the most annoying mother fuckers on the website
- The website is not going anywhere anytime soon - read @staff's latest post for full details, but they currently have access to regular funding for the foreseeable future
- There's a whole-ass feature request forum if you want to post your big ideas
- If you got frightened & scared reading the financials post, you can subscribe to Cohost Plus! and give @staff five dollars (or more!) and become five dollars less scared
- Something that's arguably easier & undeniably cheaper than subscribing to Cohost Plus! (while being just as important for the site's good health long-term) is - assuming you enjoy using the site and the general vibes of the place - encourage your friends to hop on! More active users means more people who might potentially sign up for Plus! (and generate revenue from future methods as well), and the more people who're actively posting on here, interacting with other users, and contributing to the evolution of the site's culture, the more attractive a location it becomes for even MORE new users to sign up! If YOU think this place is cool and important, maybe your friend group will feel the same way if they give it a shot!
Also, hopefully this doesn't come across as too familiar or whatever, but I think some people might be misreading Jae's tone in the financial update as... doomer-y, or something, and extrapolating from that that Cohost Is In Big Trouble. And, like, let me just set your minds at ease a little bit by saying that this is kind of just how your brain starts to work as any kind of responsible small business owner. You are constantly, at all hours, worrying about the state of the small business. Even when things are going the way you expected them to, you are worrying about them getting worse. Even when things are going BETTER than you expected them to, you are worried about the moment that your luck runs out. You keep the worst possible outcome for every possible change at the forefront of your mind because the alternative is being confronted with one of those outcomes and Not Being Prepared For It.
I think a lot of people who don't have experience running their own business don't realize the reality of this mindset - or of the tenuous material realities that inform it - because standard practice is to never, ever let on how worried and stressed-out you are, ever, because outside parties (potential users, customers, investors, whatever) tend to interpret honest admissions like this as evidence of weakness or incompetence. Which tends to lead to, say, uninformed panicking or shitbrained condescension.
If I can provide a modest tonal counterpoint to the financial update post: I've been using the site for almost a calendar year now, since a few weeks before the official launch. In that time @staff have added a truly impressive array of features - features that make the site functionality analogous to basically all of their competitors, and in some cases (like with the "Hide Shares" button on user profiles) providing functionality I've wanted from similar sites basically my entire adult life. The site WORKS great, too - if you could have seen how slow and janky it was before launch, you'd have a WAY different perspective on where it's gotten today. And, like, 130k total users with 12k active users is no fucking joke when you're talking about a site that hasn't even been around for a full year & doesn't have VC money to throw at a full-court-press marketing campaign! That shit's all positive word-of-mouth, baby!
For a platform like this, there are two essentials for attracting new users: an easy-to-use set of desirable features, and an active userbase with a distinct culture. Considering that Cohost launched with a PRETTY bare-bones featureset, I think it's pretty impressive that they managed to get over that initial hump and attract a solid core of regular users who're now giving the site its unique flavor every day of the week. Last year when the site launched and I was trying to get people to give it a shot I'd basically have to be like "yeah so it's pretty slow and there aren't many people and it's hard as fuck to find the people that ARE on there but if you squint I PROMISE you can see the potential just trust me bro trust me I swear. Oh and you can post porn". Today, if I were pitching the site to a new user, I can basically say "alright baby what's your pleasure. You want jokes? Cats? Architecture? Photography? Video games? Porn? You like porn? Brother have we got porn". There's a pretty strong value proposition there, is what I'm saying.
None of this is to say that challenges don't exist, or that Jae (and the rest of @staff) aren't justified in the constant (constant!) worry that accompanies a project of this scope. But, also, this shit is good. It's viable! You got people using it! That's huge! Yeah it'd be nice if the site were financially sustainable inside the first four quarters, but I'm pretty certain every single member of @staff never realistically expected that to happen, and (implausible though it might seem,) the current state of affairs is actually extremely promising & very possible to build from. It can be hard to see that when your physical/mental health isn't great and you're fried from grinding away at a feature and you're exhausted from dealing with site moderation but surprise you dumb idiots you got a good website and every chance in the world of turning it into a sustainable business. Fuck you
