November 2019—June 2020 Recap & Roadmap

So, yeah… it's been 8 months since the last update 🙈. But don't worry, it's simply because I've been slacking on the updates. Work on Proseful continues behind the scenes!

However, I do think the lack of updates is sending the wrong message. I've heard from a number of people, and that seems to be the case. Going forward, I'm thinking about doing shorter announcements whenever there's a new feature. And possibly less frequent, quarterly updates w.r.t. stats; will ponder on this though.

That being said, let's dive into it.

Recap

Some of the highlights from November 2019—June 2020:

  • 🚢 Custom time zones: You now have the ability to choose the time zone that your posts are published in. Before, the platform was simply using UTC, which could result in confusing publish dates depending on where you live. Since I'm in Toronto, I've set my blog's time zone to Eastern Time.

  • 🚢 Favicons (Pro): If you're a Pro user, you can now upload a custom favicon to make your blog more recognizable in a web browser. See it in action in your browser's tab bar above ☝️.

  • 🚢 Publish date improvements: The editor now lets you choose a specific publish date before publishing a post. Previously, the editor wouldn't let you do this until after publishing. This is handy when migrating old posts over to the platform.

  • 🛠 Admin UI improvements: In the last update, I mentioned that I started converting the admin over to follow the Material design system, using the awesome Material-UI component library. Good progress continues on this. Most of the changes have already been shipped. The look and feel still closely matches the original, minimal design. Still needs some more tweaks to tighten things up, but the bulk of it is complete.

  • 💪 Platform improvements: As always, lots of behind the scenes fixes and improvements to keep things running smoothly.

Stats

Some stats from June 2020 for the curious:

  • 🙋‍♀️ 2,066 total users: This number isn't that helpful, as it includes lots of inactive and spam accounts. Need to look into the number of active users. More difficult to determine though.

  • 💳 15 paying customers: This includes myself; I'm using Proseful for my personal blog. This number is consistently flat, as I've literally done no "hustling" since last summer. Not my forte. Keep saying I need to get on this.

  • 💵 $105 MRR: 15 paying customers at $7/month.

  • 🚦 300 unique visitors

Roadmap

What I'll be working on in the near term:

  • 🛠 Admin UI improvements: I'll continue to work on converting the admin over to the Material system. As mentioned above, a large part of the work is done, however.

  • ✍️ Custom HTML embeds: Will be taking a look at the ability to embed custom HTML into posts. This will allow you to add third-party newsletter forms and other fancy things. An oft requested feature.

  • 🎨 Design customization: Made some good progress on brainstorming w.r.t. a system for design customization. Think I have a plan materializing here…

If there's anything else you're curious to hear about, let me know!

Stay safe. Stay healthy. ✌️


Featured photo by MIKHAIL VASILYEV.