The Proseful Blog

Recap & Roadmap

July 2019 Recap & Roadmap

I'm loving working on this Proseful thing! As promised, here's the monthly recap of what I accomplished in July and the roadmap for August ✌️

Recap

Some of the highlights from July 2019:

  • 🚢 Shipped excerpts: Now you can write a custom summary of your post, which overrides the default, automatic summary (i.e. using the first paragraph of a post).

  • 🚢 Shipped dividers: Add thematic breaks between your content with dividers. Dividers is something I wanted for my personal blog and for the Proseful blog itself. See it in action at the bottom of this post.

  • 🚢 Shipped canonical tags: Proseful now adds a canonical tag to your blog's pages to help with SEO. If you use a custom domain, we'll use it as your canonical domain; this helps prevent your default proseful.com domain from appearing in search results. Shoutout to Kevin Alves for pointing this out 🙏

  • 🐞Bug squashing: Lots of minor tweaks and fixes this month, though that's usually the case every month 🤷‍♂️

  • 🎉 Reached ten paying customers: Woot woot! Thanks everyone for giving Proseful a shot.

And some stats for the curious:

  • 💳 13 paying customers (+62.5%): This includes myself; I'm using Proseful for my personal blog.

  • 💵 $91 MRR (+62.5%): 13 paying customers at $7/month.

  • 🚦 519 unique visitors (-25%): Indie Hackers was my biggest referrer for the month, followed by my personal blog, which saw decent traffic to the Passwordless Authentication from Scratch with Phoenix tutorial I posted last month.

Roadmap

What I'll be working on in August:

  • Platform love: Like June, I have more work to do on the platform behind the scenes. This includes improving provisioning and deployment of servers. Will make things a lot easier when servers have issues and new ones need to be started.

  • Editor improvements: Dividers was shipped, but, as noted last month, there's lots more to do. This will be an ongoing thing. I'll be looking into: improved code block editing, syntax highlighting, more markdown shortcuts.

  • Annual payment option: I'd hoped to get to this last month, but it proved more involved than expected. However, some progress was made. I'll continue picking away at this. If you're interested in paying on an annual basis, I can hook you up behind the scenes; send me a note at jonathan@proseful.com.

That's all for July. Stay tuned for the next update!

Featured photo by Erwan Hesry.