Inkwell Growth

Hello Inkwell family! It’s been too long since I’ve posted anything about Inkwell. So let’s fix that! There have been plenty of feature changes, but that information is available under ‘What’s New’ and the roadmap. You might recall we have the transparency page that is linked in

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#Inkwell #Growth

Hello Inkwell family! It’s been too long since I’ve posted anything about Inkwell. So let’s fix that!

There have been plenty of feature changes, but that information is available under ‘What’s New’ and the roadmap. You might recall we have the transparency page that is linked in the footer. A couple of callouts:

• Inkwell broke even for the first time this last month. The founding members plus monthly contributions total more than what I’ve paid for the Inkwell infrastructure. That’s remarkable, and I am so incredibly grateful for everyone who has pitched in with Plus and Founding Member memberships. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

• I also added metrics on the transparency about who is writing on Inkwell (not actual accounts but data) to see how we’re growing, how the community is interacting with each other, and how many new users are coming back.

Now, it’s not all roses and butterflies, unfortunately. You will see that Inkwell's monthly cost isn't sustainable, and that the founding members' one-time payments got us to break even. I raised the founding membership price to push more people to monthly payments. It may be a mistake, but most of this is a big learning experiment.

Below is a summary of what the data tells us. Our friend Stoicalgeezer put it best: Come for the writing. Stay for the people. I want Inkwell to be a welcoming community where people can get to know others from other parts of the world, with different cultures, religions, etc. I created Inkwell to get back to the honest and raw roots of the early web, when you got to know strangers based on shared interests.

I’m hoping those who follow me will help make that a reality for Inkwell. And the statistics below show it is happening. But more of us need to reach out to newcomers. For a lot of people, not getting any type of response to their first post is a sign the site is dead, or worse, they wonder what was wrong with their post for not getting engagement. I don’t want that for Inkwell. I try to respond to everyone, but as you can see, the site is outgrowing me. So let’s build a welcoming community together that keeps writers and newcomers coming back.

Check out the data:

Growth

• Real accounts went from 168 at the end of July to 368 now.

• People who published in a month went from 8 in July to 33 in October.

• October was the biggest writing month ever at 63,119 words, ahead of March’s launch month at 50,023.

• Members have written about 223,000 words in all, not counting my posts. That’s more than two novels.

Spam

• 205 of 600 accounts have been caught as spam, about 1 in 3.

• October was the worst month, with about 95 spam accounts caught against 72 real signups.

• November so far has 31 real signups and at most 13 spam.

People who are here

• 63 people used Inkwell in the last week, and 142 in the last month.

• 58 people have published in the last 8 weeks, and 20 of them wrote in at least two different weeks. In July and August those numbers were 19 and 6.

• 118 people published something. That’s the honest size of the writing community.

People answering each other

• Posts that got a response within a week went from 5 of 32 in August to 107 of 184 in October.

• 7 of the 19 people who first published in September came back within 30 days, up from 1 of 9 in August.

The ask

• Only 18 people wrote all 153 footnotes in the last 60 days.

• Since October 1, only 3 of 32 first posts heard from anyone other than a couple of us within 48 hours.

• 42 people who have published have never had a response from anyone.

If you made it this far, you can see that only a handful of people are engaging with others. Let’s fix that. If you have ideas on how we can improve, please let me know. I am thankful to those who have reached out and offered advice and feedback. I believe teamwork makes the dream work. It’s cliché, but I’ve been successful in life because I collaborate with those who help me realize my goals.

Thank you for reading!