Well, it’s time to abuse my readers and alienate my audience. Let’s do this!
Below is the chart of my paid subscriptions since mid-2022. It looks bad, but without working 365 days a year, doing a dozen posts a day, paying for engineers to add new features, and begging and pleading free accounts to have the common decency to subscribe, it would have been much worse.
Why the slide? Simple. Many subscribers turn out to be what I call foul weather friends. If the market is plunging, they cheerfully sign up. If the market is rising, they tell me to face the other way, stab me in the back, and leave the room. They have no loyalty. None. Zippo.
I wouldn’t give this a second thought were it not for the fact that, after endless hectoring from NYUGrad, I decided to start a little site over on Substack. To be clear, my Substack site is a SHADOW of what exists on Slope. Slope has literally over a hundred features. Substack? Zero. It’s just a SUBSET of my blog posts, and nothing more.
What does my paid subscription chart from Substack look like? I’ll be glad to show you!
Starting from absolutely nothing only months ago (versus the 21 years Slope has been around), I’ve built up a nice subscription base of people who……….DON’T FREAKIN’ QUIT! This is jaw-dropping to me and is telling me maybe my efforts are being directed in the wrong direction!
I’ll simply say to the folks at Substack – THANK YOU. I appreciate your loyalty. I’m more dog than human, and loyalty is, for me, always what it’s all about. I probably had better stop griping about users hanging out on the site for free year after year, or else {hilarious double entendre redacted}, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
