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!

~jae

If every single active user had a cohost Plus! subscription, we would be profitable; if only 60% had subscriptions we'd be sustainable.

MAKE NUMBER GO UP