Annie D

Ittttt’s thursday! This last month has been kind of a lot. There’s a lot of good news (the financial trajectory of the company is DRAMATICALLY different) and a lot of bad news (holy shit we are all so fucking tired) but mostly good!

No new terms! Check the past updates for definitions! I wanna make this quick because there’s a lot to do!

Users

When we last spoke, we had seen roughly 18k new users (up to 38,165) over the last month. We were overwhelmed by this, both emotionally and logistically. We now understand that this was bullshit baby time.

As of right this second, cohost has 111,128 users. You do the math on how much of a change that is. User growth has slowed in the last week or so (b’’h) but it’s Still Happening.

We’re now at roughly 37k active projects, up from 9k last month. This number for me is somewhat scarier than the total user count, as this is the number of users we actually need to moderate.

We’re underwater on activations, but getting closer to having everyone able to post. Our big blocker remains support capacity (more on that below) and we’re trying not to make ourselves too behind there while still keeping activations up. If you’ve been waiting for a while, we’re sorry it’s taking this long. Things grew way more suddenly than we anticipated or were able to plan for; ideally the jump from 22k to 100k would have taken longer than a month, but that’s websites.

Subscriptions

As of 11/29 (as always, stripe’s numbers are delayed a few days), we have 1852 subscribers, giving us $8,648.48 in MRR. This is well over double where we were last month (763 and $3,535).

Our active conversion rate is at 5.32%, still within our healthy range, but also deeply down from last month (9.06%). While we are getting plenty of new subscribers, we’re getting new active users faster, so this number isn’t quite keeping up.

Overall profit/loss

This is the big one. We ended November with just over $84k in the bank. This is, as you may note, around $1k less than where we ended last month.

With the exception of some mismanaged hosting resources at the beginning of the month (issues which have been resolved), we are Profitable for the month of November.

This obviously doesn’t mean we’re fully sustainable as a company; our MRR is enough that employee #4 is effectively free for us, but we’ve still got a long way to go for consistent sustainability. The majority of our revenue this month was from the first payments on yearly cohost plus subscriptions, which we won’t see again for another year (everyone remember this when November rolls around again next year.)

You’ll recall that last month we expected to end the year with $22.5k in the bank, a healthy number that was, on its own, higher than the previous month by over $8k. We are now expecting to end the year with $54k in the bank, over double where we were last month. We’re still going to secure additional funding, but this gives us incredible buffer and means we likely won’t need as much funding overall.

Looking forward

We remain underwater on support requests. Our upcoming hire for Support Ops is absolutely vital for the continued growth of the website, and as such we’re taking the hiring process very seriously. We’ve been spending most of this week interviewing candidates and hope to have an announcement there within the next few weeks.

Our long term plans still include user tipping and subscriptions, but these require a lot of care to ensure we get them right. We don’t have timelines here yet.

We managed this month to get most of our performance issues under control. There’s still some major issues we need to tackle (namely, speeding up post rendering), but for the most part things are running well and are stable.

That’s all for this month! Stay tuned for the patch notes later today, they’ll have the details on what’s coming up in the immediate term.

Until next time, thanks for using cohost!

~jae

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