Cove
Comments and communities for Ghost memberships.
Cove 2.0 launched today, with a number of updates 🎉
Cove launched almost two years ago to the day, in April 2020, offering member-based commenting on Ghost.
After +1,000 sign ups, Cove is now expanding to offer a small suite of useful audience-focused tools, enabling features never possible before on Ghost sites.
☑️ New audience tools
You can now add like buttons, member counters, emoji reactions and page counters to your Ghost sites.
These are all useful tools you can add to your Ghost site to gauge audience reaction and engagement and show how popular your content is.
And the best thing: all you have to do to get this working is copy and paste some small code snippets.
👨👧 Multi-user accounts
Alongside the new tools, Cove now lets you add multiple users to Cove accounts.
This is perfect if you have a team who needs access to a single Cove account to manage comments or your setup.
💵 New plans
With this update Cove now has three main plans: Tools, Comments and Pro.
It's possible to use just the tools or just the comments, or both! The flexibility is there for however you want to use Cove.
And now, you can easily switch plans and cancel subscriptions on your Billing page inside Cove.
🎨 An updated admin design
Alongside the new features, the Cove backend has been slightly redesigned. The pages are now wider and menus have been improved to be easier to navigate.
Code snippets throughout are now also easily copied with a single click.
And of course, there is full documentation to get the new audience tools set up quickly on your site.
A lot of work has gone into this update, and it's great to have everything live and ready to use!
June was Cove's second month and saw some yearly customers sign up which massively boosted revenue. I'm OK with MRR but looking to push marketing more in July.
I launched two features in June:
- likes and reactions (commenters can react to others' comments)
- email notification settings (commenters can opt out of email notifications for replies)
Here are June's stats:
Active installs at EOM: 15 ↑15%
Sign ups: 30 ↓33%
Visits to site: 721 ↑24%
New customers: 6 ↑500%
Revenue: $498.50 ↑592%
MRR at EOM: $58.50 ↑875%
The end of June sees Cove having been installed on 51 different sites, with 16 active comment sections in the last 30 days. These aren't huge numbers, and in July I plan to do more marketing.
There have been 770 comments made on a total of 2,983 posts. Interestingly, 770 members of these sites have been tracked in Cove.
For context, Cove launched in late April, so it's been two months.
Today Cove got its first paying customer 🥳
It's been less than a month since launch, with a few trials coming and going. It's a small start but a great feeling!
Yesterday, Cove was added to Ghost's official integrations list, which will hopefully boost its reach dramatically.
I've been building Cove—commenting for Ghost blogs with members—for the past 3.5 weeks. In that time I've built an MVP, polished the MVP, put it online and tested the system on a number of blogs.
Today I made the launch landing page live and opened Cove up to the public. It's been a wild last few weeks building something from nothing!
I'm not expecting traffic just yet but the product is at least launched. Next up is a marketing phase.
cove.chat is now live. It's a simple page with "Coming soon" and an email subscribe form.
It's actually a Ghost installation with a custom (hard-coded) homepage template. I'll develop the main site and blog on Ghost in the background before launch.
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