November update!

It’s now been 2 months since I set out to work full-time on 750 Words for 9 months and try to make it something that could sustain permanent full-time work. October’s report is here.

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 how that’s going!

Member Growth: We started the month with 4,656 paying members and ended the month with 4,821, which means we gained 165 new paying members (up from 31 in October). Our goal was 250, but we’re still ramping up our efforts and haven’t done any actual marketing yet. Most of this is attributed to actually enforcing the end of the free trial (oops, we weren’t doing that before) and asking people to become members after 30 days is up. I’m happy with this level of growth… the key will be seeing where growth levels off this month at a higher rate than it was at before. So far it looks like it will be.

Trials: All new members get a 7-day free trial before being charged, so in a way they are early indicators of future growth (especially since trials convert to paid at about 90%). In September we had 33 trials, in October we had 51, and in November we had 264! So again, good signs that growth is picking up, and I’m hoping this trend continues.

Cancellations: Just as important as finding new people to become members is making sure that we’re keeping as many of the existing members happy as we can as well. I’ve been tracking cancellations pretty closely the last couple months and am happy to see these numbers also going down, even though they were already pretty low. Last month our churn rate was down to 2.1%, down from 3.4% in October and 3.6% in September.

Anyway, last month the goal was to get to 250 new members. I think I’d like that to be my goal again this month, even though I had previously had it at 500. But, barring some very large influx of gift buying or something I don’t think that’s feasible. I’d rather have a goal I think I can hit than one that feels impossible.

One of my favorite charts that sums up all of these things in a way that I find pretty interesting and helpful, is this retention chart. You can see how many people become members each month, and from that group what percentage are still members 1, 3, 6, 12 months afterwards.

I’m really proud of the fact that even a year ago 74% of the people who became members last December are still members today. Having worked at a few different subscription product companies, this is a lot higher than you typically see. Of course, my absolute numbers are also a lot lower than you’d typically see, and maybe this is working as well as it is because I’m not doing any marketing, so people who find 750 are the kinds of people that are actively looking and interested in exactly what it offers. For those people more versed in marketing theory and practices, or business strategy in general, what are your thoughts?

Here’s a quick list of little improvements that happened in November:

Added a way to gift a year of membership to your friends and loved ones! It’s 20% off for the rest of the year, just in case you might have any interest in giving someone the gift of private journaling, mental health, inner peace, etc.

Officially launched the “Fancy Member” tier for $10/month, and have implemented all of the perks other than the one that grants you access to a Fancy community space here, because the Circle.so API is giving me trouble. As of today we have 32 fancy members!

Added the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day to complement the Wordnik Word of the Day for people who prefer words that they’ve likely heard of before. Everyone but Bill Wright is allowed to switched to the easier word group if they want.

Added the Red Panda badge for people who share their stats pages and get people to sign up. Congrats to cheneymeaghan for being the first person to earn this badge in the wild!

Improved how exporting entries works, especially for those of you who were users of V1. Now you can export entries from both sites from V2.

I wrote up a long report that attempted to understand and group “notes of inspiration” from the last 14.9 years in a way that helped me better understand how 750 Words was helping people. There’s still a lot I want to do with this but here’s the raw first pass at trying to make sense of it all.

Very quietly launched Silly Robot for fancy members that allows you to opt-in to getting writing prompts based on your past day’s writing. Still testing to see how it feels, but if you’re an early adopter Fancy member, come check it out and let me know what you think!

December and January will be months where I think I’ll start focusing more on marketing, and trying to find ways to bring now people to 750 that haven’t yet heard about it (basically everyone in the world). I can tell I have some inner resistance to the idea since I keep putting it off a little bit longer, so please hold me accountable!

And have a great December and holiday, however you choose to celebrate! If you wanna help support 750, the best way to do that right now is to share thoughts here, and to maybe buy a gift membership or two to help spread the word a bit!