Six months update, learning by growing a 'viral' startup

In September last year I launched my first web app, lofi.co (backstory in this IH post), and I'd say it's been quite a ride so far. The website has been used by over 600,000 users in 150+ countries, and to this day it's getting about 150-200,000 monthly visits without any marketing (paused it in late January). But how did I get here, what did I learn and what's the plan now?

The viral factor

lofi.co has got millions of views on social media not even 3 weeks after launch, some from paid influencer ads and some from people who genuinely liked the platform and shared it on tiktok/instagram.
I've been dealing with social media for over 8 years, I've grown and managed pages with millions of followers and at this point I'd say I know what goes viral and what doesn't. So no, I was not surprised by the traffic itself, even though I'm an overthinking pessimist I knew people would have liked the platform. I was mainly scared that no one would have bought the premium membership (which was not the case) but hey, there are always risks and I was willing to take this one.

Great! Nothing could go wrong at this point, right?

Well... If you know exactly what you're doing, probably not, but as I said, this is my first app. I'd say I've learnt a lot, the hard way. After one video got 1.8 million views, bugs started showing up and I started getting a weird feeling every time someone bought a monthly or yearly membership, I was incredibly scared that they would not like the premium features and I felt as if I didn't 'deserve' their money (can someone relate to this?). As a result, churn in the first month was 26%, November was and still is the only month MRR didn't grow, I realized the website was not optimized for conversion and I also found out how much it costs to maintain a website with high traffic and a ton of heavy files. Not a bad start but not even a great one.

What did I do?

Paused any kind of marketing effort, fixed all the bugs, implemented a ton of user suggestions and changed most of the copy (that's still something I want to improve, actually). I also started an email nurture sequence and collected a lot of user feedback from different surveys. As a result, churn went from 26% to 12% (in February) and it's projected to go even a little lower this month, without any changes to the platform since the end of January. Overall growth has been consistent as well.

What's the plan?

There's going to be an important update in a few days, which will make the timer tool of the platform way more powerful and it will also make great improvements to the UI of all the elements.
Future plans include finally adding a well designed landing page, continue increasing the scenes library, launching a sister web-app which I'm very excited about, restarting influencer marketing (which I paused in late January) and also launching our very own record label focused on chill/focus music as an effort to improve the music experience of lofi.co.

I'm learning a lot through this journey and I would really love to start sharing more about it, which is why I decided to try and use Twitter more regularly. If you'd like to follow or contact me on there, you can find me @Orazio.
Thank you for reading and as always, your opinion/advice would be much appreciated!