greetings, friends of eggbug.
it’s a new month! we won’t have a new financial update until after our member meeting next week1 but we had some news we wanted to share ahead of then, along with some of our thoughts on The Future. rest assured: there’s only good news in here!
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as a general rule, these are on the first tuesday of every month and this month is no exception. these meetings are where we present financial info internally, and those numbers need to exist before we can show anything publicly.
new funding
first off: we are pleased to say that we have secured funding for an additional six+ months1 of operation. this comes from someone other than our original funder2 (a cohost user who wishes to remain anonymous) and we appreciate them stepping up in an uncertain time. no ownership changes have occurred and they wish to remain as hands-off as possible.
a major condition of this funding is that we are consistent in posting public financial updates going forward, which is really something that’s better for everyone, so we’re going to actually be on top of that.
artist alley
as of now3, we have sold 404 weeks of artist alley listings. this is a bit over $4k, which is a bit over 20% of our current monthly deficit. artist alley pre-sales went live just under three weeks ago (april 12), although the majority of those sales are since the full launch last monday (april 22). these sales are obviously inflated due to pent-up demand and excitement, and we’re interested to see how everything stabilizes.
our internal goal was for artist alley to cover 10-15% ($2k-$3k) per month; doubling the low end in under a month is definitely nice, but likely not sustainable. either way, we’re happy with its performance so far and excited to see how everything shakes out.
expenses
we’re also excited to say that our largest non-payroll expense, our CDN and firewall contract with Fastly, is now 40% less than it was. we’ve really enjoyed working with Fastly during our time with them over the last year and we appreciate their flexibility in this new contract period. if you’re the sort of sicko who likes reading case studies from major internet infrastructure providers, you’ll be hearing more about this in the near future.
the future
I wanted to share a little bit of context from the funding proposal we sent to our original and new funders. as is standard in these docs, we talked about our general product roadmap and how they fit into our core goals. everything we’re doing right now fits into one of two categories: make cohost better to use, and build revenue. items from these categories can work together, but they’re inherently distinct.
artist alley, for example, is a revenue product. while we think it provides an actually useful and somewhat unique niche, it is first and foremost a way for us to make money.
inline attachments4, on the other hand, makes cohost better to use. there is no money involved here; the obvious way to do that would be to lock it behind cohost plus but that’s (a) hostile (b) kinda dumb, since you can already do inline images via HTML; the goal here is just to make it easier and a real feature.
the idea here is that by making cohost better, both via big new flashy features (easier to market) and quality-of-life changes (harder to market but better for retention), we’ll see growth both in total users and monthly active users. thus far, our cohost plus conversion rate has been pretty stable as our MAU has grown; the blocker to sustainability there is effectively Not Enough Users. these new users are also likely to use our more-direct revenue products (artist alley, eggbux) so we would see growth there as well.
I don’t want to say too much about our feature plans because no matter how much I say “THESE ARE NOT FINAL, SUBJECT TO CHANGE”, as soon as I write them down publicly we are locked in. so you’ll learn about them as they ship.
cohost plus
we’ve talked before about the absolutely unreal conversion rate we’ve got with cohost plus. ever since its launch, we have consistently seen great subscriber numbers relative to the industry as a whole. our conversion rate has held as the site as grown; active cohost users tend to like cohost enough to pay for it. therefore, it follows that the best way to grow cohost plus is to grow the userbase as a whole.
this is, like many things, easier said than done.
marketing
here is a summary of all marketing activities for cohost so far:
- twitter account that we haven’t posted on since july 2023 and haven’t used regularly since march 2023 (total spend: $0)
- one (1) tumblr blaze campaign in march 2023 (total spend: $10)
- that’s it
all our growth has been via word-of-mouth. this is, objectively, pretty great. user acquisition is generally hard, and we have thus far managed to spend a whopping $0.0005 per active user5.
the flip side of this is that we have no fucking clue how to market cohost. we think we’re probably past the point where we can get by on just word-of-mouth, and if we truly believe that more users = more cohost plus money, we need to put active thought into how to achieve that, ESPECIALLY how to achieve that while spending as little as we can.
wish us luck on that.
tl;dr
we still exist, we’re gonna keep existing, full numbers will be out next week, thanks for using cohost.
~jae 
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six months assuming flat revenue, but given the goal is to build revenue the money will last longer than six months.
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our original funder is, to avoid revealing anything, Going Through Some Shit. as we’ve said before, they were a friend even before all of this so we chose to work with someone new to reduce strain on their end.
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11:30pm EDT on may 1. insomnia’s a bitch.
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still in progress, we started internal testing last week and it’s got a lot of rough spots to work out before we’re comfortable with a wide release.
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file this under “numbers that make pretty much anyone else in our industry seethe with jealousy”
