playit.gg

I've decided to go full time with playit.gg. I'm a long way from being self sufficient with the project but I can see a path. I'm fortunate to have savings to keep me afloat till I get there.

My last day at Cisco Meraki is March 12, after that I'm 100% on playit.gg. I'm both excited and a little afraid.

My goal is to keep focus on the customer and product and offer the best experience possible. I'm hoping that's enough to drive further sales but I wholly imagine I'll need to re-evaluate.

• over 7,700 servers have been setup
• every day over 1,000 people play on a server we tunnel
• every week over 1,100 people tunnel their server

This is up 3x from the beginning of December. It's also been really rewarding to Google playit.gg and see organic questions and content being produced.

I finally took the time to parse the logs and gather stats:

Users are considered active if the ran the program allowing remote connections to their game server.

• over 350 weekly active for each of the 4 past weeks
• retention seems to flatten at 14%
• I get 20-40 new users each day and about 10-20 never get a connect to their server
• day 2 retention is around 50%

So on average 15/30 new users fail to get setup and almost 100% of users that do, use the product the next day. 30% of users that successfully use the product say around.

I only have data for the past 4 weeks but I think I have a good bit to go on. If I figure out why 50% of my users fail to get setup, that's 2x the growth! I found there were a few bugs in the setup guide, with those resolved I'm eager to await the stats to see if that made a noticeable difference.

It looks like my growth rate is about 4 long time users per day. I'm stoked with that. I want to grow it and break event with server hosting costs!

Today I got my first customer outside of Patreon. A whole $2/month! Right now it stands that 1/35 people that view the stripe checkout page have made a purchase. Given I get over 1,000 unique monthly visitors I should do more to increase the premium feature's discoverability. One more step towards covering costs. :)

Doing a fairly low effort product hunt launch, we'll see how that lands. Not expecting too much, but we'll see. Probably should have added a banner on our website stating we launched on product hunt to drive more traffic there to vote. Then again, who has time for that? https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playit-gg

I had a tiny bit of revenue ($12/month) via Patreon. To show my thanks I was setting users up with custom *.playit.gg domains. Now I've properly integrated stripe checkout to make it a paid feature. Here's hoping I can grow that to cover costs. I also want to expand and add more servers across the globe to lower latency. These things cost % so hopefully values align and I can continue to make the project more ambitious.

Had a huge bump when the latest Terraria version got released and have been slowly growing ever since. YouTube videos appear to be our largest source of new users so I'm looking for ways to double down. There's been no takers on my $6 credit to create a TY video, so I'll need to look for something different.

Currently getting users by reaching out directly and helping them get setup. Able to get about 2-4 new users each day by doing this. They're all really eager to help after getting them setup. In lieu of a proper website a Discord shall do. Currently just sending people a development build of the program that connects to my public servers. Here's the Discord: https://discord.gg/ZNGKgG