happy friday july 26th! here’s the financial update from june.
i’m sure you all have some questions.
Q. Why did this take so long?
A. honestly? thought I already did it. that’s on me.
financial update follows.
numbers numbers numbers
| Category | As of June 30 | As of May 31 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expenses | $57,951 | $39,581 | 46.4% |
| Income | $19,013 | $14,937 | 27.3% |
| Net income | -$38,937 | -$24,650 | 58.0% |
| Active subscribers | 3,224 | 3,287 | -1.9% |
| MRR | $20,655 | $20,986 | -1.6% |
| Subscriber churn rate | 2.77% | 2.03% | 36.5% |
| Revenue per subscriber | $6.41 | $6.38 | 0.5% |
| MAU | 17,868 | 19,127 | -6.6% |
| MAU → Subscriber conversion rate | 18% | 17.2% | 4.7% |
| Artist Alley listing weeks sold | 92 (30 in the last 5 days) | 160 | -42.5% |
notes
- the spike in artist alley listing sales corresponds with the introduction of the @artist-alley page. this pattern has held so far in July, although those numbers won’t be final until the next monthly member meeting (currently scheduled for August 6)
- as mentioned in previous financial updates, expenses are funky. we expect them to stabilize for July.
- most of the good things are down. we don’t love that. we’re still working on shipping two major features, which we discuss below.
what we’re working on, and how they’re going
there are currently two major features we’re working on. they’re both huge, both taking a long time, and both currently being tested internally and (in one case) externally, with a small group of users.
the new post editor
this has been a major undertaking. it turns out the existing post editor is, by far, the most complex piece of client code on the website and fully rewriting it (as we are doing here) is a massive undertaking with lots of little bugs popping up. (you may have noticed me inadvertently creating “empty shares”. that was a new editor bug that we fixed.)
we get two major features out of the new editor:
- you can drag and drop attachments to any point in the post, not just at the top.
- as part of this, you can also have all your attachments in vertical order instead of grouped together in a twitter-style square.
- lays the technical foundation for our fully block-based editor, including (way down the road, don’t hold your breath) full WYSIWYG support for users who don’t want to mess with markdown, and better code support for users who want to throw straight HTML into that bad boy.
this is a big investment on our part, but we think it’s worth it. we’ve been testing with a select group of users for a few days and response has been great. we’ve still got some bugs to fix and some varnish to apply, but we’re hoping to have a wide release on this soon.
one thing to note: we will not be doing a phased rollout for the new editor. however, we are adding a setting allowing you to turn off the new editor during its launch window, in case you stumble on a bug that breaks your workflow. depending on how this goes, we may move to a similar method of releases moving forward.
tag synonyms
this is one of the most requested features in the history of the website.
tired of needing to guess if you should post in “#videogames” or “#video games” for the most attention? not sure if you should use “#Turn A Gundam” or “#∀ Gundam”? wonder no more, because soon they will be The Same.
our tag synonym implementation (currently) comes with two types of tags: identical, and similar. identical tags effectively merge them, making results for one show up in searches (and bookmarked tag feeds) for the other. similar tags don’t show up in searches for each other, but will show them as suggestions when you’re on a tag page. (we eventually plan to extend this to tag suggestions while creating a post).
as an example: “#touhou” and “#touhou project” are identical, while “#touhou” and “#imperishable night” (this CEO’s favorite main-series touhou game) are similar.
at launch, these synonyms will be managed by us with suggestions made by users. over time, we plan to add an ao3-like “tag wrangler” system to help manage this load.
we think this will help with the learning curve associated with tags (especially for users coming from non-tag-oriented sites) and improve discoverability (a major pain point) for all users.
this is currently in internal testing, although we have some performance issues we need to work out before wide release. we’re hoping to have an initial release for feedback out soon.
that’s it
thanks for reading. we’ll be back in a few weeks. thank you, as always, for using cohost 
~jae
