Bear Blog

Bear now has over 6000 sites running on it. These are mostly personal blogs, but it has been used for more complex things like gyms and JustSketchMe which is multi-language and fully styled.

The conversion rate from free to paying is about 5%, which is healthy. Currently there is 0% churn (but that's because it's a yearly subscription and it's still under a year since I implemented upgrading).

Bear has gotten to the point where I have to seriously think about monetisation, as it has over 3000 blogs running on it now.

I was inspired recently by a post by Lichess about how it is 100% free and always will be. They run no ads, have no paywalls, and don't sell data. This is what I want for Bear.

I started out by emailing all the subscribers about my thoughts with a recurring donation link. 14 people immediately hopped on and started supporting the project, which made me pretty happy.

It's not much, but it covers the servers and buys me coffee while I work on features. We'll see if I can hit the goal of $2000 per month in contributions over the next 6 months.

I've been working on the new features (analytics and custom styling) and thought an interesting way to check their validity would be to provide beta access to people who bought me a coffee via BuyMeACoffee. I had the following snippet on the analytics and styling pages:

Still in beta. Buy me a coffee to get early access <link>

Over the past 2 weeks I've had a few coffees rolling in. My assumptions (slightly) validated, I've gone ahead and added a paid subscription for those features.

Just created a nifty analytics tool for the blogs, as well as a much requested dark mode.

I also received $5 via Buy Me a Coffee for beta access to the analytics, which felt pretty good :)

Here's what the new analytics system looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/kBc55N1.png

Bear Blog now has 2000 blogs running on the platform. You can check out the discovery feed to see what people are writing about.

Pretty much all of the traffic is coming from 2 posts that did very well on Hacker News. The rest of the traffic is coming from the virality of the product as each person's blog has "Made with Bear" at the bottom of each post.

My next goal is creating some paid features. First one is analytics, which is 80% done.

I started building out a new personal blog for myself, but (as the joke goes) built out an entire blogging platform instead.
It took 3 days to finish the MVP which I released on Hacker News. It got 900 signups in 18 hours. I feel like I'm onto something.

Read more about the launch here: https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-hacker-news-hug/