July Update: Stalling, Learning, Pivoting

June was exciting. A few people started paying for CFP Land's new Pro Plan, and I was thinking that if I could continue that growth, the project might get profitable by October.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's going to be that easy (never is, is it?). So, revenue was flat, but most of my numbers are up:

• 2599 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1244 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $123.50 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

One thing that was encouraging was that three of my paid users reached out and mentioned that their companies would be paying for their subscriptions, and that they would be interested in purchasing team plans if those were coming in the future.

I'm learning that individual conference speakers are not a great target market. Speaking isn't part of their job, so they're very price-sensitive. Even $10/mo may be too much.

That said, DevRel professionals - people who speak and travel as part of their role - are very likely to pay, and likely to make their employer pay...this is encouraging.

So, now I'm thinking of pivoting a bit. I'd like to adopt a Trello or Slack-like freemium model where individual speakers can use the platform for free, but in order to access team features, analytics, or past conference data, they'll need to purchase a license. This means the monthly price can be higher, and I can use the free users as a crowdsourced means of collecting more conference data.

In August, I'll be working on some fundamental platform updates that will give free users and subscribers more features. In September, I'll be introducing team features and starting to convert users to those plans instead.