Want to help 750 Words become sustainable?

This is a bit weird to write, but here goes. I left my lovely job at Medium a couple weeks ago to try something kinda crazy. Between now and the summer of 2025 (the next 6-9 months), I’m going to be working hard to try to grow 750 Words enough so I can work on the site full-time in a sustainable way (it currently requires dipping deeply into savings, hence the kinda crazy part, but also a very fortunate opportunity to have).

750 Words turns 15 years old in December, and it’s a project that I have always felt inspired and delighted by because it seems to just work, and there are so many stories from people about how private journaling has helped lives in meaningful ways. I cannot express how great it would be to be able to dedicate all my time to increasing that impact—there are a bunch of ideas piled up over the last 15 years that are dying to become real!

Over the next 6-9 months we’re gonna try to grow 750 Words from 4,638 that we have today, to 8,500 paying members. Yeah, that’s almost double, which is a LOT! But then again we’ve never done any marketing or sales or anything like that since this launched in 2009. I guess it’s time to give it a swing?

We want to do this all out in the open because that’s how 750 has always been run (including that time back in 2013 when we almost shut it down because it was still a free site and growing too fast to support). We want to invite people who want to help, whether it be with ideas, skills, moral support, snacks, interpretive dance, bardic inspiration, tasteful roasting, or anything else! I know there will be ideas from the community that will be much better than anything we are able to come up with ourselves.

Consider this post, and other posts tagged with #make-750-sustainable as an open invitation for you to share thoughts, ideas, questions, etc anytime between now and whenever my savings that I’ve put aside for this crazy experiment run out.

Let’s brainstorm! 🧠🌩️