200 Words a Day is One Year Old

200 Words a Day is already celebrating its first birthday. What a ride. 

17071 published posts. 5,500,000 words. 325 words per post on average.

We are 3869 registered users, and 46 daily active writers on average. 65 patrons generating a Monthly Recurring Profit of $121 are currently keeping the website afloat.

The biggest problem right now is that 79% of the users never even start developing a writing habit, and 16% drop out before publishing their 10th post (8% users of the total user base are one-posters). 

On the bright side, 239 users showed up for more than 7 days. 105 for more than a month. 48 for three months. 32 have more than a semester’s worth of posts, which means those 32 users already wrote more than 36,600 words, enough to publish a novella. We are 5 users with more than a year’s worth of posts.

Traffic-wise, we registered 430k page views over the past year, including 50k new users and 120k sessions. A user stays 5 minutes on the website on average according to Google Analytics. The bounce rate of 50% is average.

A third of those users originate from direct traffic. Another third comes from organic search. The remaining third is redirected from social networks (Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook - 21%) and referral traffic (Product Hunt - 7%).

The growth is not very startup-like, but I’m here for the long run. We have developed a fine community of proactive members, but we still lack features to ease the development of the writing process. I hope you will like all the ideas I keep in store. I can’t wait to implement them all and try them out.

The first thing coming up next week is the new chatroom that will replace our Slack workspace. I finished the private message feature yesterday and I’m now working on polishing the interface. I temporarily removed the Writing Circles feature to improve it, but first I’m going to release the badge system and the new Writing Prompt system to help those who struggle with finding writing topics.

200 Words a Day is the product of my own journey. I started it because I wanted to write to become a better human. I took on many side-projects but it always ends up teaching me things I’m reusing to improve 200 Words a Day: writing a book taught me about the pain points involved in the process of writing long-form content, developing my personal brand landed me my first gig as a freelance writer (I’ll be paid on December 5 so I’ll wait until then to write about my experience and how you can earn money writing as well), and I’m currently writing my first article for Hackernoon, a notable tech magazine.

Thank you everyone for joining me in this journey, I hope I helped you somehow.

Keep writing,

Baz