smokage of the burning leaf

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

it's real gamer hours right now for the folks who are determined to get every last little crumb of rollback xrd before the beta shuts off at midnight.

it reminds me of closing out the frosty faustings sunday afterparty at the beginning of the year. the afterparty is great because it gives you time to come down a bit from the highs of tournament excitement and just play games with people who also want to hang out and play games. the ballroom starts out with a relaxed, friendly hum, buzzing with people who are just excited for a day of gaming.

then you leave for a minute to grab some lunch, and you see the first wave of ubers and carpools headed off for the airport. a couple homies leave because they have work the next day. the setups are a little bit less densely distributed across the room. some of the locals start packing their stuff up and starting their drive home.

eventually it was just a cluster of xrd setups keeping the party going. security lets us hang out for a little bit longer than intended since the rest of the event is still breaking down. every game could be the last. finally, security comes for us, and we have to hit him with the same line we used on our parents countless times: let us just finish this one last game. it's for Supreme Champion of the Universe.

the lobby is still open, for now, but the patch has been deployed. the moment i quit xrd, steam will delete the beta branch, and we're back in delay-based for the next few months.

i can't bring myself to quit the lobby but i'm too tired to play any more, so i'm just going to leave myself connected and idle in the lobby until something boots me out.

friday night started with me introducing a handful of coworkers to our local garage venue, gamecenter. one of them remarked on the walk through the parking lot that it felt like we were going to a place to do something illegal, and yeah, that's good vibes for a fighting game venue. ended up mashing on some 3s and a little UNI to knock off some of the rust for tag-in battle.