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staff
@staff

Welcome to Thursday That Feels Like a Tuesday Thursday! We had our end of month meeting yesterday, our financials are up to date, let's talk money.

At this point, I don't think there's any terms left to define (check August and July's updates for all those) so this month we can just have some NUMBERS.

Users

As of right now, we have 20,793 users (up from 19,056 last month), every single one of which is activated and able to post. While previously we've been seeing 40-50 new sign ups a day, these last few days we've averaged around 180 per day! We assume this spike has to do with Certain Competitors making Weird Decisions that People Don't Like but it's impossible for us to know for sure. Oh well!

Our Monthly Active Project count is unfortunately down from last month, from 4,314 to 3,837. We think most of this decline is due to the fact that, as of last report, there was still an incoming flood of brand-new users who didn’t come back after their first visit, and they’ve been becoming inactive again over the past couple of weeks — but in the longer term, this is one of those metrics we kind of need to get bigger, so we're thinking about stuff we can do there. We'd ask "what missing feature is keeping cohost from becoming one of your three websites" but our numbers would be skewed by the only people seeing and answering that question being active already.

Conversion Rate and Subscriptions

Subscription growth is also down, but we also haven't done anything to promote cohost Plus! in the last month so we're not feeling especially bad about that. As of September 27, we're at 497 subscribers, up from 483 the month before. That's not great! MRR is now at $2,305.92, up from $2,255.20. Also not great! We clearly need to be doing more to make cohost Plus! more appealing, as well as maybe promote it a bit more. It remains difficult to find a work priority balance between "things that make us money" and "things the site needs that may not make us money."

Active user conversion is at 13.8%, up from 11.39%, but this growth is directly attributable to the decrease in Monthly Active Projects, and thus not actually a win.

Overall profit/loss

Unfortunately, this section needs to start with some major errata.

While preparing the financial update, I discovered that, due to bad timing with when we were preparing over the last few months, our end of month payroll was not being included in our expenses, making it look like we had more money than we did. I’ve made the adjustments for this month, but August is also incorrect. We’ll be adjusting our timing for when we prepare our financials internally to prevent this from happening. This is, unfortunately, entirely my fuck up. At this point, all I can do is fix it going forward.

First, corrections for August. We initially stated we ended August with $158,711 in the bank. We actually ended with $136,224. This means that our estimated EOY cash on hand, which we initially estimated at $39k, should have been closer to $16k. $23k is a lot to be off by! Instead of having about an extra month and a half of runway, we have closer to two weeks. Fortunately, new funding is coming (more on that below) so this doesn’t mean we’re in shutdown mode. (Also: this would be a really good time to consider signing up for cohost Plus! if you haven’t already. Check your settings page for details.)

As of today, we have $108,189 in the bank. We lost $69,712 in Q3, which puts us just barely ahead of the $70k estimate we had last month. Our proportion of expenses to revenue hasn't meaningfully changed since last month, nor has what all the money is going to, so I'm not going to break it down again.

Since the end of Q3 met our predictions from August, our EOY cash on hand estimate remains around $16k (ignoring any additional funding).

On the funding front, we're currently in the process of actually getting that funding (meetings are scheduled). There's a few necessary components here, but by far the hardest is "figuring out how much money we actually want/need." There's a lot of still open questions about how many people we’ll need next year, especially for shipping tipping and creator subscriptions (two relatively complicated and high risk features that get us much closer to paying our own bills). We're still working these out, but we anticipate everything being done in time.

Looking forward

As mentioned above, we're still planning on shipping individual user tips and individual subscription management in the future. We're thinking through how we want to do this (with assistance from our funder) and so, like always, don't have timelines. We'll share more once we have things to share. Gift subscriptions for cohost Plus! also remain in the pipeline, although somewhat deprioritized behind larger quality-of-life changes.

We've got work in progress to improve the experience of popular tags, including hiding posts with certain CW's from these tags. We really appreciate that everyone posting Borderline content so far has been extremely consistent with their use of CWs, as it makes things like this much easier for us. In the interest of transparency, we'll be sharing a full technical ruleset once things are done.

As you've likely seen in the patch notes, progress on shipping new features has been slowed by my being out or unavailable for the past month, and generally having trouble with long covid recovery over the last few months. I'm hopeful this situation will improve because I, personally, don't like it. To be clear: I am the only person pressuring myself to try and work when I'm having this much trouble, so don't get mad at anyone else.

We are still working on moving away from Cloudflare. This is proving to be a very complicated process (which isn't necessarily surprising, but still) and we don't have anything to share regarding timelines. We will have a scheduled downtime when the switchover occurs, which we will post about here and on status.cohost.org.

Thanks for reading! As much as these can be a pain to write, I do enjoy having these numbers out in the open, and I hope y’all do as well. We’ve got some Someday work to make things more accessible than just a post we put out every month, but there’s a lot of higher priority things to do first. So for now, you’re stuck with this.

Thanks, as always, for using cohost! :eggbug: :host-love:

~jae


jkap
@jkap

unfortunate news in this one, slow growth + accounting errors means EOY is lookin a little less hot. at least we figured it out now i guess????? ah well


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in reply to @staff's post:

Oh my god I wrote out this whole thing about advertising and then I hit back to lower my keyboard and my phone went to the dash and deleted everything 😭

I'll try and summarize

-initial word of mouth is waning

-growth is going to be slow as long as the platform is in beta

-once tips/subscriptions are up that will create a positive feedback loop of earned media attention as creators plug the site to fund themselves on other platforms bringing in more users that bring in more creators.

-I like the image you've made for yourselves so far and that you're avoiding push advertising because I personally see it as not only unethical but really annoying and ineffective to the target audience

-you can generate more pull marketing by creating a "cohost tips" page that makes easy to copy/paste infographics of cohosts many wonderful features. This makes the site more welcoming to new users who dont know all the amazing possibilities on cohost and gives opportunity for regular users to share advertising to other platforms and friends who might be interested in one specific feature.

-most of my personal experience getting people to sign up has stemmed from "social media bad" conversations and for sustainability you need to get ahead of a "cohost good" narrative

Also if you need someone to make infographics I have half an advertising degree, two years experience in graphic design, Proficiency in photoshop and illustrator, and 6 years making a living as a social media influencer(barf, just call me a slur) with a small but dedicated following.

I would literally do it for free if I had the time but I cant afford it right now.

Brainstorm time: what can the Cohost Community be doing to support Cohost morely? (Aside from +Cohost+ +Plus+ of course.) We want you to succeed.

I've been hesitant to e.g. submit links to The Orange Site, because I don't want the poor eggbug in the hamster wheel that powers the servers to get too tired. But maybe eggbug is not as fragile as I imagine, and additional exposure is worth the extra server strain? (I also don't have an idea for how server costs scale with load).

tl;dr should I proselytize?

I've been hesitant to e.g. submit links to The Orange Site, because I don't want the poor eggbug in the hamster wheel that powers the servers to get too tired.

definitely don't stress about it to this extent; just post links to cohost around like they're links to anything else. while we can't guarantee we won't have availability problems, that's for us to figure out.

potential site load is not a reason to avoid submitting to the orange site, "jae will get too heated in the comments and get into fights with people who want to fuck marc andreessen" is a reason to avoid submitting to the orange site

One of the main things I can think of for why people might not come back is that it's kinda difficult to find things on cohost right now. The search function only looks for users and tags, and that doesn't really help if posts don't have lots of tags. What I would personally like to see is search covering post titles and content. Maybe also a profile section where you recommend accounts you particularly like? Hope this helps.

Piling on the discoverability train. Even just being able to skim the firehose would be better that having to fight through the search feature to find people/topics/etc. I've taken to being diligent with tags on my posts hoping to shout into the void and show up in some interesting stranger's search.

It'd also be nice to have an easy way to find out who I may already know on CoHost. I know address book slurping has a bad rap, but something akin to that would be cool.

Looking forward to having other ways to throw money at the site! I'm a bit squirrely when it comes to committing to recurring payments, especially when it comes to social media where I tend to vanish suddenly for long periods of time.

For now, I've bought a yearly sub and canceled it, but more graceful ways of making one-time donations will be welcomed with enthusiasm. (I'm assuming that whenever tipping is added, we'd be able to make contributions to the site by tipping the staff page, or maybe @eggbug?)

Also, it seems like y'all are using Stripe as your payment processor, which could become a problem in the future as iirc they don't allow adult content. Are there plans to move away from them? (Might be worth seeing what Pillowfort is using, since they ran into similar problems with PayPal.)

i don't know if it's in your plan for gift subs or not, but if it's technically reasonable, it might be worth copying twitch's "gifting subs to the community" feature. though, on twitch it's pretty easy to figure out who to assign them to since they can just look at current/recent viewers and pick from that set, and i'm not sure what the analogue would be here (randomly assigning them to mutuals as a starting point?). but that feature does make it easier for people who have the money to throw around to do so.

of course, the other side of that is the classic twitch conundrum of "should you gift subs to potentially grow community investment at the cost of The Bezos Tax or just directly give money to the streamer?", but i think we currently don't have any way to give eggbug our money except subs? providing a way for people to directly chip in to the funding of the site beyond their own subscription might see a few bucks too, if that's not somehow A Business Crime or something when you're a Webbed Site and not a streamer

I appreciate y'all aren't heavily pushing cohost plus to people, but I also wouldn't have remembered it was an option as a returning but infrequent user unless I had read this post! I wonder how many more folks would be interested in supporting if there were a more visible reminder? I found the button to find out more info, but it's below the fold on my laptop screen. I think folks are receptively to the message that you're a small team and this needs to be financially sustainable without external advertisements etc, and hope that making that a bit more visible (especially as the site grows) might result in more subscriptions. thank you for all of this visibility! it's super cool to read