September 2024: New Beginnings

September was an eventful month across the board.

Startup Poznan

Piotr and I hosted the first ever Startup Poznan meetup at the beginning of the month, and I'd call it a success! Something like ten people showed up in the end, including the two of us, and we had a couple beers and good conversations. Unfortunately, the idiot that I am, I forgot to take a selfie with everyone for proof of good vibes (and to promote the next one). So I've included the selfie I took in the next meeting (October 3, the day I'm writing this) instead.

But all in all, a successful meetup.

Campfire

September was focused on delivering the EPUB update to our users. This made it so that authors can publish their EPUB files (the standard for publishing platforms) onto Campfire without first importing them into our writing software (a process which would often have artifacts and fail to maintain the exact formatting specified in the source file). This update removes the final major barrier to publishing on Campfire, so having it out in the world with no hiccups is a relief.

Next up is growth–and on that front we're continuing to work on special edition ebooks with fairly well-known authors. Our first such project, Faerie Fruit, remains the bestselling ebook on Campfire, and our second project, The World of Tea Princess Chronicles is already the second-most-sold project in 2024 despite still being in pre-order status! The hope is that it becomes #1 overall over the course of October. After that, we have an illustrated companion to The House Witch in the works, which will be our biggest launch to date. Plus, the full three books of The Ties That Bind by Rob J. Hayes.

I also wrote up the 2025 strategy and have been workshopping it with the team. It's very close to being ready to go, and I'm excited for what we have in store for next year.

Unfortunately we're dealing with some MRR contraction since the price change that we pushed out in the spring. It may have been overly ambitious. We'll be working on fixing that with some discounting and churn reduction in Q4. Part of the churn reduction involves taking a page out of Duolingo's book, which segways nicely into...

Trophy

I mentioned in my post last month that I'd begun advising a new friend I'd met through Rehance, Charlie, on his SaaS project. It's called Trophy, and its core idea is to provide Duolingo-caliber re-engagement emails for other apps. So anytime you have a website or app where users are making some metric go up, you can integrate with Trophy in a couple of minutes and your users will start getting emails like this one:

In these types of apps, an email campaign that celebrates a user for their wins, encourages them to build a daily or weekly streak, and attempts to reactivate them when they start slowing down can go a long way toward improving retention. Campfire is the perfect first customer, seeing as we're looking to reduce our own churn, and the #1 reason that customers report churning is that they're taking a break from writing or quitting entirely. So the best way to keep them around is actually just to help them keep writing!

I'm joining Charlie as a co-founder on Trophy, and will be helping him build out the email system, design the product, and sell it. I'm excited for this one; it feels like a much easier sell than Rehance was! Speaking of which...

Rehance

After talking to Ernesto, we decided to stop working on Rehance and just leave it up until we have some better idea to pursue. When we do, we can pivot and keep the same brand and domain (hopefully) or at the very least, the same company (since we did incorporate and trademark it).

Plans for October

• Launch the Manuscript 2 Update at Campfire
• Launch a bunch of reading & publishing improvements at Campfire
• Finish all written materials for the illustrated companion to The House Witch
• Prepare Trophy for launch by the end of the month
• Host another Startup Poznan meetup Done ✅