semi-regular business Q&A session

[mark]

It's been a while since the last one, so denise suggested that we do another Dreamwidth-the-Business Q&A session.

But first, some data. One of the things that we promised when we started this site - and still do! - is that we will be open with the details of how the business is run, how it's doing, where your money is going, etc. Given that, here's the breakdown of our first few months of operations (discounting May):

June: $7,500 income
July: $5,000 income
August (thus far): $2,500 income

This is pretty much what we expected. More people buying accounts towards the beginning of the site, tapering off as we come up towards the various renewal periods. We're comfortable with these numbers and trends so far.

Our current monthly expenses come to about $6,000. This breaks down roughly 50/50 into "server costs" ($3k/month) and "people costs" ($3k/month). We are presently paying a few people as contractors to do time-sensitive and business-critical work for us. (Systems administrators, ToS enforcement, and some development time.)

We are not, currently, paying any salary to Denise or myself. (Which is one thing we really hope to fix...but stay tuned for today's news post.)

Summary:

Dreamwidth is running slightly in the red, but has enough money in the bank to keep the site running for several years at the current run rate. We have a few things in the pipeline which we hope will allow for us to increase the attractiveness of the site to paying customers (features) as well as give us more sources of revenue (credits, virtual gifts, etc).

There will be more data about our next-6-months plan in the upcoming news post. But for now, if you have any particular questions about the business, things you want clarified, or anything, please comment. Denise and I will be happy to answer!

Comments

[piscinarii]

I don't know if this suggestion is viable but... If there were subcategories or something in the vgifts to determine the "type" of gift (gag gift, alcohol related - like the St. Patty's day green beer or a glass of wine, holidays, etc), would it be possible for people to opt out of just specific types of vgifts? That way folks that don't mind them, but have issues with certain types for certain reasons, can opt out of just specific ones?

[denise]

That's an idea to consider! But in general, we try to avoid introducing new options if we don't have to, for usability purposes -- for every option you add, it increases the chances that new users will view your site as too hard to use/navigate and won't stick around. This doesn't mean that we can't add new options (and we have already), but they have to be really carefully considered and something that the majority of people are going to want to play with the settings on. I don't think this is something that the majority of people would want to change the settings on, so I'd be really hesitant to use an option for something like this.

I actually need to make a post sometime about why options are bad! Or, well, not bad, but something we should view with Great Suspicion.

[azurelunatic]

Most of the discussion I've witnessed on LiveJournal even with some of the less-savory gag gifts tended to drift from "These vgifts are bad period and no one should send them" to "I trust these specific people to know my tastes in vgifts and would only send me ones that I would appreciate; I want to restrict allowable senders to them". Sometimes it was the whole friends list; sometimes it was a subset, but it usually boiled down to trusting individuals to not pick an (intentionally or innocently) offensive gift, and trusting individuals to not put an offensive message on an innocuous gift.

I can see a quick and easy way to make pretty good vgift content control but still allow infinitely wacky ones. It does involve some settings, but they're fairly broad.

Vgifts: on or off.
Predefined vgifts: who may send them? Everyone (allows anonymous), Circle, Access List, Custom Security Group.
Custom (user-uploaded into their own pic storage area) vgifts: who may send them? Everyone (allows anonymous), Circle, Access List, Custom Security Group, No one.