The full report, including a coupon for 50% off your first year is up on the the blog

kinopio.club/blog/posts/37

10/10

It’d be awesome if the last 6 months marked the beginning of a hockey stick growth inflection point, but it's really too early to tell right now. As long as people love using Kinopio, and new users continue to subscribe, then I'd like to keep building it.

↓ 9/10

It would still take a couple years at the current growth rate for Kinopio to be minimally economically sustainable. But now that the technical foundations are firm, there are a bucketload of promising ideas I'm looking forward to building in the new year.

↓ 8/10

I prefer to think of these things as the cumulative result of all the work that came before. Doing a single push up won't change your life, but a steady thankless sequence of workouts just might.

↓ 7/10

Silver bullet explanations are enticing because they whisper that you can repeat success by shooting at the same thing. But that's a trap. You can't predict virality, and chasing it is cringe. Even performance improvements eventually hit a point of diminishing returns.

↓ 6/10

a couple potentially related things happened around this time:

- Right before this, I spent a month on major improvements to stability and performance
- Kinopio went mini-viral on TikTok as a way to make handmade-feeling birthday cards
- The price was increased

↓ 5/10

📈 Midway through the year, the MRR and subscriber graphs really started climbing. TBH I'm not entirely sure why though.

↓ 4/10

Comparing % increases to key biz metrics to the same period last year paints a rosy picture:

(side-note : because of server optimizations, costs have largely stayed the same)

↓ 3/10

Being bootstrapped comes with major financial hurdles early on, which is why you can count the number of solely customer-funded software companies on one hand.

↓ 2/10

This work the side-benefits of:
- fixing a critical drawing bug in prod where erasing wouldn't let you draw over the previously erased area.
- being way simpler makes it way more performant, huge/complex drawings should be possible without slowdown.

next, i moved to @kinopio.club so i could rearrange my ideas on a canvas and better visualize everything that's going on at once kinopio.club/caged-in-the...