Get 1000 users by 2026

I’ve spent so long building the platform (3 years) but have spent 0 time growing the user base. We need to reach critical mass to get some motion and commotion on the site! As tempting as it is to keep adding features and refining (engineers love this- “one more feature and they’ll come!”) it’s time to focus on community building.

I’m glad I started marketing. When handing out flyers and speaking face to face with people, it’s much more personal than a random ad, and people have been surprisingly receptive. Conversion rate is low, and posting rate even lower, but it’s a start- have gained maybe 30 users in 4 days. @michelle demo’d some of the flyers to her students, a bunch joined today, and I’ll be chatting with them next week (spoiler!). That was good proof that a well placed connection is more valuable than random attempts.

Admittedly getting users is harder than I expected. No responses from any content creators, which I thought was a sure way to buy exposure. Even if we don’t hit our target, I think this focus will step up the needed foundation for later. https://opus.cafe/store let’s get people curious

It’s funny I’m building a social media when I don’t use them. So I’ve always ignored people saying “you should really market on insta and tiktok!” I DEFINITELY should have done this long ago. Although no conversions yet, we’re building up the presence. It’s pretty cool seeing others appreciate how interesting our community is. Almost there!

As fate would have it, I met @juliet on a train, who has been helping me with content partnerships. Get a sneak peak of the cool projects @colincreates will be dropping here! More to come as well. We’ll see how conversion is from these.

With the help of @piyush_lodaliya We went from 1 download a day to 200! Wow! Running Google ads in apps has been super effective

I’m able to see new user joins and how they interact with the app after joining. The trend has been pretty obvious, so I plotted it for confirmation: Many people are signing up but almost immediately stop using the app. You can see on the top chart, we’re (kind of) hitting the revered “hockey stick” growth curve. But, using goal views as a proxy, we can see avg app usage per user is way down now. New users are just not sticking around. Although this is disappointing, it highlights the next challenge I’d like to address. How can we instantly make the app more engaging? Every creator wants “instant and uncontrolled growth” of their invention, but that’s not the reality. Of course at times I wonder if we’re growing slower than we should, or question “why aren’t friends of friends of friends aren’t joining?”. As all difficult goals go: progress is slow and it’s good to look back and see what we’ve achieved! Just a month ago- there was maybe 2 posts a week. Now some days we have 10 a day! The next theory is, with more instantaneous engagement, maybe users will find instant fun and value and share with their friends. Some thoughts for this include starting a goal on signing up, a better tutorial (video) and easier goal setting. Stay tuned!