New year, same eggbug! I am personally very, very glad that Q4 is over because it was kind of a nightmare for us.
The biggest change right now is that we now have four full-time employees! We announced last month that @kaara would be joining the team and she started yesterday! She’s vital for fixing one of our biggest ongoing issues: our support backlog and response times. She’s obviously still onboarding, so don’t expect immediate (as in “today”) results, but expect things to improve soon.
Once again, no new terms! Check the past updates! Unless otherwise stated, all numbers are accurate as of January 4, 2023.
Users
Growth has slowed from our big twitter-driven signup spikes, and we currently sit at just over 118k users, up from 111k last month. We have now gone through the entire activation queue and are back to activating users every business day.
We’re currently at 21k monthly active projects, down from 37k last month. We expected a drop here; many users will create an account, share or like a few posts, and then never log in again. That said, we expected a much larger drop and, while we’d obviously like better retention, these numbers are still fine.
Subscriptions
As of 12/31 (stripe’s numbers are delayed by a few days), we have 2027 subscribers, giving us $9,440 in MRR, up from 1852 and $8,648 last month. We’re averaging just over 5.5 new subscriptions per day, which isn’t great, but is totally fine for now. Notably, our MRR is now sufficient to pay an entire employee’s salary, benefits, payroll taxes, etc.
Our active conversion rate is at 10.04% (up from 5.32%), which makes sense given the drop in active users. I personally am glad that 10% of people regularly using the site like it enough to pay for it. Thanks to that 10%.
We’re still planning to launch gift subscriptions and pay-what-you-want subscriptions, with the latter coming first (there’s a lot of shared work that will be easier to do with pay-what-you-want). It’s still wild to me that some of you like the site enough that you want to give us more than $5 but get nothing new in return. We will be accommodating your requests to give us more money soon.
Overall profit/loss
We ended the year with just under $59k in the bank, which is huge given where we thought we would be at the beginning of Q4. We expected last month to end with $54k, and as always, it’s great to be wrong in this direction.
We lost a bit over $29k last month. Our hosting expenses have gotten truly silly; while our DB cost remains fixed and our compute cost is lower than it was, our CDN costs are ballooning rapidly. We previously were getting a very sweet deal on CDN services (I’ll talk more about this at a later date), but we’ll be paying closer to market rates as we move away from Cloudflare. We may need to make changes to how we serve images to offset some of this, but will communicate any changes we make well ahead of time.
We’re in the process of securing new bridge funding very soon — meetings this week — and expect to have it finalized well in advance of entering any Danger Zone.
We’re expecting a roughly 7.5% cost of living adjustment to keep up with inflation this month. We’ll include more details about this in next month’s financial update.
Looking forward
Our biggest issue last month was support. I already talked about @kaara and our progress on improving support in the second paragraph, and there isn’t really more to say yet.
As I said earlier, we’re still planning to ship gift subscriptions and pay-what-you-want for cohost Plus!. We’re planning to start work on user tipping and subscriptions in Q1, targeting a Q2 release, but there’s a chance that date will slip; there are a lot of complexities here, and we want to make sure we don’t fuck it up.
That’s all for this month! Patch notes will be up tomorrow, and we’ll go into more detail about user-facing features there.
Thanks, as always, for using cohost! 
~jae
