October report! Month one of this experiment in sustainability

It’s been a little over a month since I quit my job and decided to work on 750 Words full time for about 6 months (or however long my portioned savings last). The experiment is to see if it might be possible to survive without getting another job in tech for even longer than that, because working on this would be so much more fulfilling and fun.

The goal remains: to find a way to grow from ~4,500 paying members to 8,500 before the summer of 2025. To do this in a way that keeps 750 Words feeling simple, non-annoying, and focused on helping people more than making money.

Here’s what happened in the last month in terms of the goal:

• Member Growth: We started the month with 4,620 paying members and ended the month with 4,656, which means we gained 36 paying members in the month. This is a slight increase from the 31 paying members we gained in September (16% increase). Not much but at least it’s in the right direction.
• Trials: I’m only counting Member Growth for people who actually paid for membership after the free trial ends, but if I look at the number of people starting memberships but who are still in their trial phase, we grew from 33 in September to 51 in October, which is 56% increase month-over-month. That looks more promising and I’m hoping this trend continues.

To be on pace to hit the goal we’d need to grow by about 500 members per month consistently. We’re not going to get their in incremental steps, we’ll need to find a way to reach a lot more people than we currently are. October was really about getting the foundation set up for us to do a bigger marketing push to reach people that aren’t hearing about 750 through word of mouth alone.

Here’s a list of improvements to the product that happened in October:

• I announced this little experiment in growing 750 Words on October 11th, and got a very encouraging amount of excitement and offers for support! There are still many ideas and offers I haven’t followed up on yet, but that will hopefully start to happen more when we get to the marketing phase this month.
• Moved new.750words.com to be the default domain at 750words.com (and moved the original 750words.com to original.750words.com). This was trickier than it should’ve been but overall happened fairly smoothly.
• I drew the 750k words badge (Anthology). I have a backlog of a few more badges I promised in October that I haven’t gotten to yet. I’m sorry! It’s just a different workflow to draw rather than write code, but I should block out time for it every week. Maybe it can be a Friday afternoon kind of thing?
• Added a way to share your stats page and get credit for any new signups and members that come through your link. It doesn’t seem to be used much so far, so will need to think about if that’s because it’s tough to discover or the page still isn’t quite interesting enough to share. I also haven’t yet implemented the part where you get a badge when someone signs up from your link. I should at the very least get that implemented.
• Added 3 more font choices to the customization options for your writing page. Now those of you who are fans of sans serif and monospace fonts have some options to pick from!
• Asked people to [invite their friends to the November Challenge](https://750words.com/play/word-of-the-day! One thing I love about the community here is that people seem very very willing to help. As a result we ended up having more people in the November Challenge than we have in a long time. I will probably repeat this every month for the near future… so get ready to help spread the word!
• Fixed a bunch of small bugs, including but not limited to: improvements to the daily nudge email to show you where in the monthly challenge you are (if you are), make the green boxes at the top of the writing page and profile pages work a bit better, made search case-insensitive, improved the export to be more like it was in V1, made the monthly challenge page load better by adding pagination.
• Started a larger feature around groups to clear the way for different ways to add prompts for people who want a bit more structure and/or fun in their daily writing. Word of the Day is the first proof-of-concept, which didn’t launch in October, but since this update is late I’m going to include it anyway. Early feedback is pretty positive!
• Quietly launched a $10/month “fancy” membership tier (also in November, not October) to see if there was any interest in it with new signups, and if it actually worked (looks like the answers are yes and yes after a couple days). This will make more sense when I finish the new Silly Robot group that will be part of the $10 tier and a few other perks. For now, if you have any interest in switching to the fancy plan just out of the goodness of your heart, you can do that now by going to your Account page and clicking on the Edit Membership button.

So, that’s both a lot and not a lot when I think about how I have 6-9 months for this and I’m now already done with one of those months.

November will be the month that I hope to be able to start doing some real marketing out in the world. To do that I want to create a few more badges, polish up the Word of the Day group, finish the Silly Robot, and hopefully find 5-10 people who work with writers or participate in writer communities to help be my marketing think tank. I know a few people have already offered to help here so this is my reminder to myself to actually follow up and get this phase started!

I feel very grateful to have such a supportive community of people here, and am excited for what we’re gonna do this month.

If you have any questions or feedback