Happy monday, coposters! As is fitting to cap off a big week, we also had a big weekend!
As a reminder, there are three full-time employees here; we do not currently have the staffing to be on-call 24/7 unless there is a time-sensitive crisis. Our office hours are Monday through Friday, 6am-6pm PST (jae’s the only one awake for those first few hours). We also take off holidays — one of these is coming up this Friday, which is Veteran’s Day, a US federal holiday. If you email us on a weekend, we won’t see it until Monday at the earliest!
Terms of Use Update
We are aware of some critique of our terms of use that was floating around this weekend. There were a few valid concerns raised, and we’re taking them to our lawyer1 this morning to get the terms clarified. We’ll update y’all once that’s done.
Minor Trust and Safety Update
We have made a change this morning to prevent shares of posts from showing up in a tag search. This is a change to reduce the risk of harassment from someone sharing a post, adding tags, and thereby causing it to appear in tag searches that the OP didn’t want it to appear in. We acknowledge that this is a quick fix and are open to making adjustments down the road.
Activation Queue Length
Up until our big sign-up surge last week, we had been able to clear out the entire activation queue (usually 100-300 people per day) each business day.
The activation queue currently sits at around 30k users. Astute readers will recall that this is only 8k less than the total number of users we had in our last financial update.
We will not be activating all 30k of you today; sorry. We plan to activate 1k at a time roughly every work hour so that we can keep an eye on site performance and the support backlog. We’re hoping to have everyone posting soon!
On that note…
Soon Hiring
The core assumption we’d been running cohost under has been “we can’t afford to hire more people right now, but we also don’t really need more people. when we need someone, we should be able to afford them.”
We’re ambivalent to report that we now need someone, and we think we can afford them! We will be posting a job listing for a Customer Support Operations Lead (actual title pending) early this week.
Our absolute biggest blocker to scaling up to sustainability is our support and moderation load. We know from experience that a lot can be done to lessen the overall load, but we don’t have any clue how! So we want to hire someone who does. This role’s primary responsibilities will be around defining better support processes and improving our first-touch automation so we can reduce the human workload required. Most of our support tickets have to do with the same dozen or so questions, and we shouldn’t have to manually handle every single one of those.
We’ll have the listing up soon (probably tomorrow), but until then PLEASE DO NOT pre-emptively send us your résumé, application, or throw your name in the hat. We will lose it, because we don’t have any way to track it yet. We’ll post again when it’s actually up. A few important bullet points to set expectations:
- Starting pay will be $87,285/year, the same as every other employee, adjusted annually for cost of living; this is non-negotiable. Benefits include 13 company holidays (plus 5 floating holidays), 3 weeks of paid time off per year, unlimited sick time, and full reimbursement for a “gold”-level marketplace health/vision/dental plan, pre-tax up to the legal limit for a QSEHRA.
- After a year candidacy period, we will vote to make you a 1/4 owner of anti software software club LLC; this won’t be a monetary windfall but does signify that you have equal control over the future of the company with the rest of us.
- We’re a 100% remote company, but to keep our legal and regulatory situation manageable right now, candidates must be located in the United States and have the legal ability to work here. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the resources to assist with visas.
That’s all for now! Thanks for using cohost! 
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yes, we do in fact have a lawyer! an hour of their time costs almost as much as a day of ours, so we try to only involve them when necessary, but they did write our current terms of service and have helped us work out issues raised by our users in the past.
